Haymaking (Arkady Plastov)

Haymaking is a painting by Russian Soviet artist Arkady Plastov. It was created in 1945 in the village of Prislonikha, Ulyanovsk region. The models were fellow villagers of the artist.

The canvas was first presented to a wide audience in 1946 at the I All-Union Art Exhibition. Together with Plastov's painting Harvest, it was awarded the Stalin Prize of the I degree for 1945. The canvas has at various times attracted the attention of leading Soviet and contemporary Russian art historians and historians.

It was analyzed by Valery Kuznetsov, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Alexander Morozov and Vladimir Lenyashin, Candidate of Art History Lev Mochalov, Vladimir Sysoev, and other researchers. Valery Kuznetsov called the painting a masterpiece to which it is difficult to add anything and impossible to surpass. The painting embodied the artist's hope for a better future, for the arrival of a peaceful life.

An everyday episode depicted in the painting Haymaking acquires a sublime meaning thanks to the monumentality of the canvas. At the same time, the canvas is filled with lyricism and the pictures are poetry. The war forced the artist to move away from the fixation on external events and turn to the depiction of the inner world of man.

According to Valery Kuznetsov, by painting a man, Plastov portrayed the people — courageous and hardworking. The painting Haymaking is in the collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery. Plastov's paintings of the mid-1940s are, as before, full of dynamism, but at this time, he began to turn less frequently to multi-figure compositions.

According to a number of art historians, Haymaking is one of the highlights of the artist's work, his milestone.