Family at the Table
1918-1919
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Location in museum
The Mikhailovsky Palace
Open the panorama of the hall in the virtual tour
Room 19. Solomatkin, Maximov, Myasoedov, Zhuravlev - Period Early 20th century
- CategoryGenre Painting
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Like many of her contemporaries, Vera Pestel paid tribute to cubism and cubo-futurism, working and exhibiting with Marc Chagall, Vladimir Tatlin, Lyubov Popova, and Nadezhda Udaltsova. The Makovets group (the Art Is Life Union of Artists and Poets) was one of the first groups of the time to focus on the spiritual nature of art, to portray the harmony of the human soul and the spirituality of the world order. Intimate themes and subjects, the contemplation and concentration on man’s inner world, and the poetisation of a subject’s “quiet life” all reflect these concerns. In the paintings Interior. Family at the Table and Aunt Pasha, the flatness of canvas, the large, generalised shapes of the objects, and the muted palette formed by large masses of colour lend monumentality to everyday scenes. Echoes of a terrible epoch define the hidden inner tension and emotional structure of these works. Drama and gloom are combined with the laconic characteristics of people absorbed in their sad thoughts.