Portrait of Yazmurad Orazsakhatov, 1961, Izzat Klychev

Description of the picture:

   People’s Artist of the USSR Izzat Klychev – One of the leading masters of Soviet painting. He seeks to create works of civilian sound that can convey the significance of our era, the greatness of the man of labor.

   The cycle of portraits of Turkmen workers created by the artist arose on the basis of a deep study of life. Klychev visited the builders of the Karakum Canal, the livestock farmers of Turkmenistan. “Without studying reality,” the artist writes, “without communicating with the glorious workers of villages and cities, it is impossible to produce works of truthful, illuminated by thought, imbued with great feeling, works of civil sound.”

   So, having spent almost a month in the team of the famous cotton grower Yazmurad Orazsakhatov, Klychev captured the image of a person who is tightly connected with the process of labor itself, with his native land. He portrayed Orazsakhatov right in the field, at the scales. The sunny landscape of Turkmenistan, the figures of people working far away give spontaneity to the portrait.

   In Soviet painting at the turn of the 1950s-1960s, artists sought to show life without embellishment, to depict everyday work (hence the emphasized rigor and simplicity of composition, sharpness of the picture, restraint of color). At the same time, avoiding small issues, everyday life, they embark on the path of searching for monumentality, the significance of the image, which sometimes gives rise to emphasized enlarged forms (a person is depicted on canvas in sizes significantly exceeding natural ones). All these features can be noted in the portraits of Klychev.

   A student of the Leningrad Art Institute. I.E. Repina, an artist who knows and deeply respects Russian art, Izzat Klychev has strong ties to the national Turkmen culture. He lives and works in Ashgabat, conducts a lot of teaching work. The work of the Turkmen artist organically entered the multinational Soviet art. The works created by Klychev took pride of place in the collections of the country’s largest museums."

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