Bathing the Red Horse. 1912 Kuzma Sergeevich Petrov-Vodkin (1878-1939)

Description of Kuzma Petrov Vodkin’s painting Bathing the Red Horse

Petrov-Vodkin’s artwork entitled Bathing the Red Horse stands out among his other paintings at the very least because it was known to everyone in Soviet times. And this during the absolute triumph of socialist realism!

This painting is impressive in its scope and brightness of colors. The color choice is built around the contrast of red and blue. Also noticeable is the flattening of forms, typical of symbolism, along with the filling of most of the canvas with the same tone.

The process of bathing a horse is a commonplace situation in Russian daily life at that time, and therefore a fairly common subject in the paintings of the time. The horse is often associated with Russia and its history - suffice it to recall Gogol’s famous "bird-troika" or Alexander Blok’s "steppe mare".

The viewer understands the crimson horse in this painting in exactly the same way, as an allegory of Russia being torn from the hands of a young rider who can barely manage the reins. It is worth adding that the color of the horse is by no means a reference to the Bolsheviks who won in 1917.

In fact, this color is a symbol of aggression and danger. In addition, "red" is an archaic form of the word "beautiful. The fact is that the artist often used in painting techniques and colors typical of Russian iconography.

The narrative, color and composition center of the painting is undoubtedly the horse. He is so huge that he is not even visible in full-length, he simply does not fit on the canvas as a whole. He literally radiates power. The fiery red, blood-red horse in this painting makes it completely unreal. It is as if he deliberately allows the rider to hold on to him. Its pupil, directed toward the viewer, creates an unusual feeling, as if the animal is thinking about something inconceivably important, as if it knows something very significant, but we humans are unable to hear it.

The young unclothed guy sitting on horseback emphasizes the color of the horse even more and barely restrains its free impulse. This willfulness of the animal is reinforced by the concentric circles in the background of his hoof, while the rest of the water is in a state of calm.

There are two more horses on the canvas, an orange and a white one, also with riders, but it is the red one that is drawn extremely clearly and in detail, while the face of the rider is depicted rather sketchily. There is nothing to say about the coastline: curved in an inconceivable arc, it rather resembles an abstraction.