Sensations
Textures are crucial to Ladyzhensky’s compositions, and the people themselves often become textural elements. In Recess, the crowd of children in dark clothes becomes a textured mass breaking up the red, blue, and white shapes of the interior space. In Flea Market, the textured mass of people begins to form its own shapes: a diamond of whitish flesh takes shape above a person holding up a pair of mended pants. The real textures of the roads and other surfaces are treated with care: in both Hot Maize and Early Morning, the stonework on the street is differentiated from the stonework of the sidewalk. The color of the light in each painting is treated with great specificity; although this is the same type of stonework represented in each, Early Morning has a yellowish glow, evoking early morning light. Do these paintings evoke a particular temperature, smell, or sound? Which paintings are noisy, and which are quiet?
Yefim Ladyzhensky
Flea Market
Date unknown
Collection of Yevgeny and Svetlana Kalinsky
Yefim Ladyzhensky
Recess
Date unknown
Collection of David and Kathryn Birnbaum
Yefim Ladyzhensky
Hot Maize
Date unknown
Collection of the artist’s family
Yefim Ladyzhensky
Firewood for Winter
Date unknown
Collection of David and Kathryn Birnbaum
Yefim Ladyzhensky
Playing Rings
Date unknown
Collection of Yevgeny and Svetlana Kalinsky
Yefim Ladyzhensky
Early Morning
1974
Collection of the artist’s family
The banner at the top of the painting advertises a popular silent film from 1923: “Announcement: the movie theater, The Mirror of Life will show Red Devils.” Ladyzhensky painted watermelons many times, praising the fruit’s “defiant gorgeousness,” and its “stunning effect with its contrasting outside and inside, with its vivid dark green, then light green, and its intricately striped, light and dark, bright open red inside, and finally its black pips.”
Yefim Ladyzhensky
Koltmachter the Barber
Collection of Mark Kelner and Margarita Litvak-Kelner
Date unknown
“When some barber cut my hair and shaved me, he would always propose to ‘freshen me up.’ Without waiting for me to agree, he’d use his rubber-bulb syringe to spray my face with the contents of a bottle labeled ‘White Lilac,’ much to my annoyance…That bottled lilac was attempting to drain my memory of color, depriving it of the beauty I so valued.”
Yefim Ladyzhensky
Discounted Goods for Sale
Date unknown
Collection of Yevgeny and Svetlana Kalinsky
Portable stoves, top hats, and chamber pots on the seller’s red blanket each recall objects from specific manufacturers, which Ladyzhensky remembers from his youth.
