1919. Alarm 1934

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin made this oil on canvas work, *1919. Alarm*, sometime in 1919. The painting is heavy with flat planes of color. In the foreground, a bright red skirt meets a pale blue dress, a jolt to the eye. Look at the texture – it’s not about hiding the work; you can see the brushstrokes building up the forms, a real sense of the artist wrestling with the paint. Notice how the scene is lit? Not natural at all, but flattened and heightened to a degree. The cool blues and reds mix strangely with warm tans and oranges, building a scene that looks more like a stage set than a lived in home. I love how the painting’s surface almost vibrates with all these color relationships, a real testament to the messy and difficult nature of family life. This tension is amplified by the alarm in the title; perhaps the artist is telling us that art, like life, is a constant state of alert. There’s a clear relationship to the bold and angular shapes of the Russian avant-garde. Like Malevich, Petrov-Vodkin embraced ambiguity, leaving room for multiple interpretations rather than fixed meanings.