Our Lady- Tenderness of Cruel Hearts

Kozma Petrov-Vodkin (Russian, 1878-1939)
Our Lady- Tenderness of Cruel Hearts
1914-15
Oil on canvas 98 x 109 cm
Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

In the 1910s the creative search of Petrov-Vodkin was very wide. Beside monumental-decorative works, there are works devoted to the First World War, and works devoted to motherhood

In the late 1910s he developed and wrote about a new theory concerning the depiction of space. His so-called ‘spherical perspective’ differs from the traditional ‘Italian’ perspective.

The artist creates different spaces on the canvas, connected by gravity; bent axes of bodies make up a ‘fan’, which is opening from within the picture. Paintings with such compositional structure should be viewed by a moving spectator from different points,

The work of Petrov-Vodkin did not fit with the Soviet ideology of the Stalin's period and after his death in 1939 the painter was quickly ‘forgotten’, happily not for long.