KONSTANTIN IVANOVICH ROZHDESTVENSKY | GIRL WITHOUT A PASSPORT

In the 1930s Rozhdestvensky, along with other avant-garde artists such as Anna Leporskaya and Nikolai Suetin, frequently turned to semi-abstract geometric compositions influenced by Malevich’s Post-suprematist works from the late 1920s and early 1930s. It was a time of stylistic exploration as these artists attempted to adapt their Suprematist methods and find a new artistic language suitable to describe the new Soviet reality. Despite the influence of Malevich, Rozhdestvensky was, nevertheless, in search of his own new compositional resolutions and colour schemes. The intense yellow, orange and blue tones, typical of Rozhdestvensky’s work from this period, were used to enhance the emotional and psychological atmosphere of his paintings. According to the artist himself, his new palette was inspired by the beauty of the Siberian landscape and its people, which he had a chance to explore during his many trips to the region: ‘It is the grandiose and luminous Siberian sunsets; it is the red-haired Siberian peasants… It is the golden domes of churches against the background of dense Siberian forests’ – he recalled.