Vasily Nikolaevich Basov’s artistic career spans around 20 years. In 1934 he entered the Moscow State Academic Art School of 1905 Year Memory and later continued his education at the Surikov Art Academic Institute in Moscow (1938-1948). Since 1943 the artist started to participate in exhibitions. At the time Vasily Basov created a few works dedicated to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, thanks to them he got the official recognition. From the 1950s Basov appealed to the images of the Russian village and started to work on paintings about the Virgin Lands Campaign. In 1951 Basov was awarded with the State Stalin Prize of the II grade in the visual art sphere. The artist’s works in genre painting, landscapes and portraits were created in the traditions of Russian Realism.
The artist’s distinctiveness manifested itself to the full extent in his work on the new subject which appeared thanks to the technical progress. On 12 April 1961 Yuri Gagarin’s journey into outer space at spacecraft ‘Vostok’ took place. This event had a huge significance for the whole humanity. It brought closer the dreams of space journeys, discovering new spaces and possibilities, exploring earlier unknown. Yuri Gagarin’s journey inspired many artists. The writers, painters and movie directors started to create new works of art and literature with the characters acting on a scale of endless universe. Basov approached this subject differently. Instead of exploring the unknown worlds he depicted the moment of the first cosmonaut’s landing to his home ground.
The painting reconstructs Gagarin’s landing circumstances almost documentarily. At the same time Basov managed to create an artistic image, having contrasted the event’s scale and the individual participant’s emotions. The spaceman’s figure is shown at such aspect that it looks huge and majestic. In such a way a painter underlined important historic significance of that person. He depicted Earth as a wide, seemingly boundless ploughed land. The canvas reflects the atmosphere of a human’s victory over the new environment. The first spaceman’s minutes after his return to the Earth are full with the joy of achieving the cherished goal and pride of his country, having become the space-faring nation.
The artist’s distinctiveness manifested itself to the full extent in his work on the new subject which appeared thanks to the technical progress. On 12 April 1961 Yuri Gagarin’s journey into outer space at spacecraft ‘Vostok’ took place. This event had a huge significance for the whole humanity. It brought closer the dreams of space journeys, discovering new spaces and possibilities, exploring earlier unknown. Yuri Gagarin’s journey inspired many artists. The writers, painters and movie directors started to create new works of art and literature with the characters acting on a scale of endless universe. Basov approached this subject differently. Instead of exploring the unknown worlds he depicted the moment of the first cosmonaut’s landing to his home ground.
The painting reconstructs Gagarin’s landing circumstances almost documentarily. At the same time Basov managed to create an artistic image, having contrasted the event’s scale and the individual participant’s emotions. The spaceman’s figure is shown at such aspect that it looks huge and majestic. In such a way a painter underlined important historic significance of that person. He depicted Earth as a wide, seemingly boundless ploughed land. The canvas reflects the atmosphere of a human’s victory over the new environment. The first spaceman’s minutes after his return to the Earth are full with the joy of achieving the cherished goal and pride of his country, having become the space-faring nation.
