The featured work was created by an avant-garde painter, stage and poster designer Nikolai Petrovich Prusakov. It is important to note that this is a special work of art, an art object created on the borderline between the sculptural and pictorial forms. Such experiments were popular among the young artists soon after the Russian revolution. They were trying to overstep the mark of regularity, to ‘throw Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin off the steam boat of modernity’, to find the new languages of art. Nikolai Prusakov expressed himself primarily as an author of cinema posters in the 1920-1930s, he created agitation posters for ‘ROSTA windows’. Later he worked as a stage designer in the Moscow theatres. However, Prusakov started his career as an avant-garde artist.

The creation of the work featured at the Tver Art Gallery collection refers to that time. For shaping the image the artist used combination of painting, sculpture and poster art. In the lower part of the installation a motto is placed. It is formed as a wordplay with syllables composing the last name of the Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin. The rough text presentation is underlined with the neat geometric figures, strict vertical of the wooden bolt. Cut-out was one of Prusakov’s favourite techniques. It was irreplaceable in poster art, and in this work the influence of views’ overlapping is seen.

The work’s destiny before its transference to the collection of the Tver Art Gallery was rather tragic. In the USSR attitude towards avant-garde changed from the art of the “new epoch” to its full ban. For a few decades such artworks weren’t bought by museums, and the previously acquired ones weren’t on display. Prusakov’s ‘Object’ was kept in ‘ROSIZO’ fund, where it was discovered in the mid-1990s. The work was in a horrible state, the colour layer partially peeled off and was covered with a thick layer of dirt which covered the letters as well. Only after the painting’s clearing during its restoration it was possible to estimate its artistic merits.