Portrait of Kliment Voroshilov in his Office

Isaak Brodsky started his education at the municipal school in Berdyansk and had further training at the Odessa Art College of the Academy of Fine Arts, where his mentors were Luigi Iorini , Kiriak Kostandi and Gennady Ladyzhensky.
This "Portrait of Kliment Voroshilov in his office" – the Soviet People’s Commissar, one of the first marshals of the Soviet Union – is a much later work, dating from 1929. As a result it shows an entirely different stage of Brodsky’s art. Soviet art historians record Brodsky as a realist painter who put his talents at the service of the revolution and loyally recreated the events of the new society and produced images of the leaders of the Soviet state. This portrait is very accurate. Brodsky has shown Voroshilov in his office, the People's Commissar is attentively listening to an unseen visitor. This work presents a lively and accessible image of a "national leader", which continues the tradition of the democratic portrait genre, so beloved of the Peredvizhniki (itinerant artists) in the 19th century.
This portrait is linked with the history of the group portrait "Meeting of the Revolutionary Military Council", which, in turn, directs the viewer to the traditions of grand group images by Dutch painters like Hals and Rembrandt.