Description of the picture:
The meeting of the Council of Artists – Teachers of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture – Leonid Osipovich Pasternak. 1902. Pastel on paper. Sixty five x eighty seven cm
This genre picture depicts the scene of a stormy meeting of the Council of Artists, which resolves some very important issue. It clearly causes diametrically different feelings and attitudes among the participants in the process, so everyone reacts differently.
The most interesting thing in this canvas is that the main character of the canvas – the host of this meeting – is outside the picture, we see only those people who communicate with him. This is evidenced by the views and position of people, clearly directed towards the character located at the other end of the table.
The figure of the person serving the meeting is equally interestingly depicted – we see only his hands and a tray with glasses, while the character himself is outside the scope. This extraordinary technique gives the canvas an unusual liveliness and dynamism, which is further emphasized by the active gestures and poses of most of the characters.
It is interesting to note that each of the characters in the picture can serve as an illustration of the types of characters: a gentleman with a cigarette calmly keeps some notes, a young man sitting behind him with a small beard and a mustache looks melancholy into space, leaning back in his chair, clearly tired of the noise. Next to him, a man with a cigarette in his hands, it seems, does not agree with the speaker and is going to object to him. The remaining characters are actively involved in the conversation, each of them is in an interesting, expressive and very lively pose.
Particularly attractive to the picture is light. This is a saturated, but local lighting from low hanging lamps, which, like some characters, are not visible or only partially visible. The light is dense, yellow, it creates deep blurry shadows and makes the space very voluminous. In general, the picture gives the impression of photography – a fragment of real life, taken out of context and preserved for centuries."