Description:
Visual Description: This horizontal oil painting is a scene of a railway yard. In the foreground, five men push three nearly human-sized red wheels with metal spokes and silver hubs mounted on axles. The wheels rest on dark metal railroad tracks that run across the lower portion of the canvas. The men’s bodies are leaning forward, hands gripping the wheel rims and axles.
The workers are wearing different uniforms. Two men, one pushing the central wheel and the other one pushing a similar-looking wheel in front of him on the right side of the painting, have green and brown military jackets, caps with flat tops, and black boots. The man holding a stick shift that extends above the central wheel is wearing a striped marine shirt and a black beret. He has his arms extended and has his body oriented towards the other men, who are facing forward. The man pushing the central wheel, behind the worker in the green jacket, has a wool hat with earpieces and a red star at the center. The laborer walking behind the crew pushing the central wheel is fully bent over, so that his head is covered, and we can only see the white flat top of his hat and the brown jacket.
A rust-red boxcar, marked with Cyrillic letters and the numbers “718-449” in white paint, dominates the background, its flat surface filling most of the central area. On the right of the boxcar are white posters, partially cut off by the edge of the painting, depicting the lower portion of the male body near an anvil. The upper left corner, behind the boxcar, depicts a scene outside of train station buildings painted red and black with a marching military troop, and a red flag on a pole. (Text and voice: Alexandra Kukulina '26)
Label Text:
Painting occupied a privileged position in the Soviet art hierarchy and was considered an especially effective ideological tool. Large-scale works were seen as more accessible and therefore more likely to be selected for exhibition. To expand the size of compositions without committing extra time, artists often united in brigades. This also showed their commitment to collective labor, which was at the foundation of Soviet society. Some artist couples, like Vira Vladislavleva and Petro Skriabin, chose to work collaboratively. Their painting represents the first mass subbotnik—a Saturday designated for unpaid communal labor—held in 1919 at a Moscow railway depot on the initiative of local Bolsheviks.
MT, 2025
Tags:
painting; men; working; movement; labor Subjects:
Men; Painting; Labor; Work; Canvas Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=AC+2020.11 |
