CHILD DEPRIVED OF FACE: CHILDREN'S PORTRAIT IN RUSSIAN AND EUROPEAN AVANT-GARDE

Among the variety of creative "formulas" proposed by avant-garde artists, the portrait image of a child has turned into an actual form of resetting "past words and images", as well as a search for a new articulation to talk about the main thing: about the future. Avant-garde artists created portrait of a child as a project, which distinguished it from that of Russian and European predecessors. At the same time, its presentation in Russian and German artistic practices, for example, diverged greatly. Children portrait images of European avant-garde borrowed a lot from post-impressionism and fauvism. Alexei von Jawlensky de-individualized portraits turning them into symbols of a spotless childhood. August Macke painted his son Walter, eventually in the form of still lifes representing baby items. Emil Nolde and Oskar Kokoschka, fascinated by children's spontaneity, portrayed them in Archaic style or in the style of the Middle Ages, sometimes these artists even inclined to the childish primitivism. Their images of children are full of life, but lack the features of a real being. They address children in general and attempt to look at the child and the world through his eyes, according to his way of viewing things. There was also another approach. Thus, in the art of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner the images of children became "comprehensive portraits", but with elements of erotica that were previously unthinkable to apply for the genre. It was as if the child was removed by him from the unattainable heights of the children's world, likened to Paradise in romanticism, and reduced to the form of expression of the artist's inner self devoured by passions. Avant-garde artists tried to create in a way that had not previously been accepted and even was recognized as taboo, including the issue of child sexuality. The portraits of that period also reflected that side of childhood, which is associated with illnesses, fears, dreams, and semi-delusional fantasies. And this is a reason behind extraordinary brightness and expressiveness of the images, deconstruction of forms. In the Russian avant-garde, the image of a child had a different meaning and expression. Mentality of Russian artists associated the child's face with the ideal face of the infant Christ and interpreted it according to the national traditions of portraiture. Artists often turned to the icon as a source of inspiration for the formation of imagery and, perhaps because of this, remained in relation to the child model, like their predecessors, restrained and serious, demonstrating an invariably respectful attitude towards it, without any sexual or other overtones. While German artists discovered the baser traits in the child more peculiar to the sinful adult world and perhaps to their own nature, for our painters, even those who were fascinated by radical experiments, the child was a subject strongly associated with ethical meaning. The unprepared, unconfined, plastic in them, which is so characteristic of childishness, was considered by them as a kind of prototype, from which a new person should be molded. The question of such "molding" in the Russian avant-garde sounded sharper than in the European, especially in the light of the cultivation of the idea of a "new person" in the Soviet period.