Children's images in the works of Pyotr Dik

Abstract

Pyotr Dik's graphics are well known in the professional community and are kept in the collections of leading Russian museums, but it is difficult to consider Dik's works fully studied. Compositions containing figurative images that can be interpreted as children's images are common among the artist works of the mature period. However, no separate works have been found on the theme of childhood in the master's work. The purpose of this article is to study children's images from a formal and meaningful point of view. This work uses elements of formal stylistic, iconological, and cultural-historical analyses as methods of studying the topic. The specificity of Dick's artistic method was that the artist did not set itself the task of a detailed study of nature and the reflection of its unique properties on the sheet, but used visual impressions to build his own plastic system, characterized by a recognizable language of conditional geometrized figures. Pyotr Dik addressed children's images in the framework of single-figure, two-figure and group compositions. Single-figure compositions have a meaningful connection with the problem of childhood loneliness, although in some cases they can be a visual metaphor for childhood as a special spiritual state. One of the characteristic motifs of two-figure compositions is the motif of interaction between a child and an adult (especially interesting in this type of composition with images of elderly people). Group compositions containing children's images, in some cases, are associated with the theme of teaching in the broad sense of the word. The artist may have tried to operate with complex categories of a philosophical order, as well as to explore the problem of kinship and alienation through his own system of figurative motives.