At the Blast Furnace (1930) by Lev KramarenkoCFC Big Ideas in association with the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy
The work, "Near the Blast Furnace," in its plastic language, is significantly different from the famous landscapes and still-lifes of Levko Kramarenko, an artist whose painting style was shaped in many ways by the influence of his French colleagues, including post-impressionists.
Painted in 1930, a year before the artist's departure to Moscow, the canvas more significantly portrays the author as a monumentalist painter.
The composition looks stylistically closer to his well-known "textbook" works on the labor theme of the "Moscow period." However, it is difficult to place it in the same line with them.
Here, there is more freedom of expression and a complete rejection of the passive, naturalistic reflection of labor reality, in favor of the artistic originality of the work.
This is evidenced by the total superiority of the color principle, the conventionality of the form, its decorative generalization (the flatness of the image, the absolute absence of individual features of the figures), and
the stylization of workers' motifs at the expense of the rhythm itself, in its simultaneous expressiveness and certain softness, as in an industrial theme.
Olga Shcherbyna, leading researcher of the museum
From the collection of the Dnipropetrovsk Art Museum
