The painting Danae (Version 1) was painted by Anatoly Kalashnikov. The painter was born in 1947, he graduated from the Sverdlovsk Art School. He is a prominent representative of the Sverdlovsk art. In the art world Kalashnikov was famous as a muralist. The features defining the mural art, such as the decorative and flat manner, were used by him in his paintings. In many of his works Anatoly Kalashnikov’s depicted the antique and mythological plots, such as the Argonauts, Herakles, Danae, Samson and Delilah, Bathsheba, The Rape of the Sabine women. The art of such modernists and postmodernists as Modigliani, Gaugin, and Picasso influenced the creative search of many Soviet artists in the mid-to-late 20th century.

The stylization became ingrained in the arsenal of artistic means of the contemporary art. Having escaped from the usual forms and the classic composition, the artists were trying to analyze the world through the feelings of objects and their colours. Therefore, they could express their creativity brighter and to the full extent as well as widen their technical side without limiting themselves to the tradition artistic methods.

The classic story of Danae interpreted by Anatoly Kalashnikov illustrates such approach. The antique myth describes Zeus’s appearance to Danae, who was incarcerated in the tower, as a golden rain. The girl was locked in the tower by her father due to the oracle’s prophesy.

In Kalashnikov’s painting Danae is thought of as an ecstatic bacchante hunger for feelings. She distinctly accepts Zeus as a rain made of gold coins, her maid with her huge hand reminds of a procuress. Looking at the painting one automatically recollects Pablo Picasso’s creative language.

There are painters whose manner, once it’s seen, can’t be forgotten. Kim Britov is one of them. “I am a landscape painter by vocation, all my best paintings are about nature, ” he said about himself. It”s hard to argue with this statement. During the 60 years of his creative career he made around 3000 paintings with most of them being the village and city landscapes.

Looking at this work, the first thing an eye sees is colour. All-encompassing, bright, and powerful, it creates an impression of form, air, and mood. The artist’s daughter Natalya Britova noted that autumn, especially mellow autumn, was her father’s favourite season. Kim Britov lived in Vladimir, that’s why nature of his motherland was especially loved and appreciated by him. He also made a series of trips around the country and worked in Karelia, Mordovia, Ural. In the 1960s and the 1970s such creative assignments were popular among the painters. Kim Britov can naturally be called the founder of Vladimir school of painting. Lacking political and social context, his art is distinctive with its expressiveness, decorativeness of colour and form, wide brushstrokes and flat depiction. However, in spite of the bright and festive image, almost all his works are deeply lyrical and touched with the author’s love for nature.

In this work the artist used the bright, almost local dark blue, orange, blue colours to the full extent. A work with the same subject depicting Gorokhovets (Winder in Gorokhovets, 1983) is now in the collection of the State Vladimir Suzdal Museum Reserve. There the artist used the identical composition depicting the winter’s mood and state.