Description of the picture:
Expanse – Alexander Alexandrovich Deineka. Canvas, oil. Two hundred four x three hundred cm
Deineka, a well-known and internationally recognized Soviet artist, painter, sculptor, monumentalist, photographer, illustrator.
Topics dedicated to the builders of socialist labor pass through his entire career. As a bright representative of socialist realism, Deineka portrays his heroes as ideological, highly spiritual and at the same time courageous, strong, healthy, athletic people.
The theme of спорт has always occupied the artist; he has been enthusiastically and has been working in it a lot since his youth. So, his famous painting “Expanse”, Deineka began to paint in the pre-war years, but finished it in 1944.
In this work, the author successfully combines landscape and the genre of спорт. The general impression is as if a “freeze-frame” is captured, the moment when a group of girls, running from the bottom from the shore, runs past the author and disappears on the right with a cheerful noisy flock.
They are beautiful, slender, with athletic figures that loom under their wet clothes after bathing.
The whole picture is filled with dynamics and young enthusiasm. The feeling of spaciousness creates a magnificent Central Russian landscape with its birches and firs, water surface and clouds, haystacks and sandy shores.
Given that the painting was painted in the military year of 1944, we can only assume how much the artist brought to it his memories of that pre-war, peaceful, bright life, how much desire for an early victory, that the work turned out to be memorable, sunny, bright, filling every cell of the soul with happiness .
It is not surprising that such a life-affirming work as “Expanse” was repeatedly presented at exhibitions in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kursk, Riga, and also at international exhibitions in Vienna, Prague, Manchester, and China over the years."