2 3
Insight into Aleksandra Beļcova’s Creativity of the 1930s While new realism that dominated European and Latvian art in the 1920s was based on a balanced combination of modernism and the classical tradition, the importance of neoclassicism in the 1930s grew. The creativity of Aleksandra Beļcova in the 1930s experienced an identical process: depiction became even more realistic and stylization elements disappeared. Clear forms and pronounced linearity were replaced by amplified paintwork. The creative experiments of the cubism period had ceased to be topical, but the creativity of the French school continued to play an important role in Beļcova’s works. This tendency is especially noteworthy in the general context of the development of Latvian painting. From the 1920s, namely, after 1927, after the exhibition of Belgian painting in Riga, many artists of the Riga group and also other young artists fell under the influence of Belgian art. Their art was characterised by heavy earth-colour tones, distinct and thick brushwork and expressive painting. As for Aleksandra Beļcova, her paintings of the period had totally different qualities - lightness of colour scheme, toned-down palette, dominating cool colours and smooth surface of painting. Many 1930s works by Beļcova demonstrate the influence of the French school of painting but, in difference from the previous cubism period, she operates even more freely with the visual material and borrowings become even more indirect than before. For example, several portraits - “Tania with a Spade” (1931, SBM), “Mirdza” (1934, LNMM), “Marija Leiko” (1931, SBM) - are characterised by a toned-down colour scheme, and the peculiar vibration of the brushwork reminds of Jules Pascin’s (Julius Mordecai Pincas, 1885–1930) works where women are equally attractive, sensual and gentle, like his delicate and radiant painting. In Marija Leiko’s portrait Beļcova portrays the model in a similar radiance of light-nuanced tones. Pascin’s influence can be traced also in the 1930s portrait “Mirdza” by Beļcova, where the brushwork vibration is even more distinct than in Leiko’s portrait.The impression of the young woman’s physical and spiritual fragility is underlined by the vertically extended format of the picture. Another meaningful detail is the woman’s lowered eyes; in most of Beļcova’s portraits of the 1930s models do not look at the spectator, they are looking at something in the distance or they seem to have sunk into reverie. To a certain extent such manner of portraying is similar to Valdemārs Tone’s paradigm of women’s portraits. Pascin’s nudes, in which naked or partly dressed women would often sit on couches or chairs in the so-called open poses, with their legs up, seem to have inspired Aleksandra Beļcova to portray one of her models in a similar attitude (“Nude”, 1932, SBM). The influence can be traced also in the manner of painting; however, Beļcova differs fromPascin’s in the fact that the French artist’s women are usually embodiments of sensuality and eroticism, while in the nude by Beļcova the woman’s nakedness and her relaxed pose is perceived as a demonstration of certain inner freedom. A pearly-grey, greenish colour scheme with some ochreish accents dominates the artist’s self portrait (1930, LNMM). When referring to this work in his “History of Latvian Art” , Jānis Siliņš points to a similarity between this portrait and the 1790 self-portrait (Uffizi, Florence) of the well-known French artist Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun (1755-1842). He claims that in this way Beļcova