The Harlequinade (Carnival). Sergey Sudeikin (Vyatka Art Museum)

For many artists at the turn of the 19th-20th century, courteous carnival scenes were a way to soar above reality, to escape from modernity. Harlequinade is a story about the very theatricality of life, about a man in a mask, about flight into another reality.
The image of Harlequin attracted many artists and poets who not only identified themselves with him, but also often portrayed themselves and each other in this role.
Artist Sergey Sudeikin was no exception. He compared his life - full of incredible twists and turns of fate and surprises - to the commedia del arte. Harlequinade is a favorite theme in Sudeikin’s work.
Educated at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and at the Imperial Art Academy, Sudeikin became one of the organizers of the Blue Rose exhibition and founding members of the revived World of Art society.
In the work of Sergey Sudeikin, the aesthetics of the Art Nouveau era and the techniques of later avant-garde trends in art are manifested. His work is always distinguished by theatricality.
In the 1910s, Sudeikin was most renowned as an easel and theater artist. Theater was an opportunity to embody the idea of “synthesis of arts” and attracted many artists of the “World of Art” association. It was the theatrical action - when literature, music, choreography and painting are combined on stage in a single stream - that corresponded most closely to the ideas of synthetic art. Such ideas were especially attractive for Sudeikin, who actively collaborated with various theaters, considering the stage decor to be an important part of the performance. “I am a painter in the theater, first of all a painter, and then, if necessary, a decorator, ” the artist emphasized. Sudeikin created sets for Meyerhold”s productions, the Hermitage Theater, the Maly Drama Theater, the Russian Drama Theater, the Komissarzhevskaya Theater in St. Petersburg, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
The work “Harlequinade (Carnival)” depicts the characters of the Commedia dell’Arte theater in the bosom of nature.
The composition of the work was constructed by Sudeikin in his traditional form: the space of the painting is likened to the scene from which the characters-actors look at us, turning the audience into an object of observation. The landscape of the canvas is deliberately theatrical: the image of trees is conditional, the crowns form the wings. The spirit of masquerade, play, improvisation in Sudeikin’s paintings makes the world of his images deceptive and illusory.
Creation period 1912
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