Kugach

Return by Yuri Petrovich Kugach (1969)

Judging by the small amount I could find on the internet, Yuri Kugach’s (1917-2013) work presents a romantic look at life in the Soviet Union. His work is simple, peaceful, and charming. Most seem to celebrate the rural landscape, lifestyle, and customs. Only a few touched on heavier subjects. Two were about war specifically, one about its violence and destruction. Return is about coming home.

In Return, a young soldier stands at the very front of a boat looking at a village in the distance. His back is to the viewer. Kugach’s composition is very simple. He breaks the image into basic geometric shapes: quadrangles and triangles, simple line: verticals, horizontals, and an arc, and three main colors: blue, green, and white. But behind this simplicity is a deeply thoughtful work of art.

A soldier stands in the bottom center of the canvas looking into the distance. His uniform is worn, and his gear lies in a pile at his feet. He’s not standing at attention as if he was still on duty. His shoulders are slightly hunched, and his arms hang heavily to the side. To me, he looks tired, like he just let go of a huge, heavy weight — the gear, sure, but in a larger sense what the gear represents… he has laid aside the burden of the war.

Notice how we see the soldier from behind. Many times in art, a figure like this could be read as meditative, melancholy, or experiencing speechless awe or wonder. The Nineteenth Century German artist Caspar David Friedrich was a master at this. In his Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (c. 1817) for example, a lone man stands on a mountaintop overlooking a vast landscape. There is a sense of mystery and awe in this work. The figure was hiking through the mountains when his view stopped him in his tracks. He just looks around, experiencing something indescribable. I think something similar is happening to Kugach’s soldier. When he finally catches sight of home he drops everything and just looks, taking it all in.

I like what Kugach did with the sky. It takes up over half the canvas. The clouds are huge and puffy. In the distant background, the clouds are almost storm-like, but in the area over the village, the clouds thin out, letting in the sunlight that just so happens to light up the houses and fields. It’s an old metaphor: the storm clouds part and the light shines through.

Notice what Kugach did with the village. It sits on a thin strip of land just below the horizontal center of the painting. Look at how the houses are arranged, and how the trees and bushes on the left and the ridge line of the hill on the right creates an arc. The arc bends around the soldier’s head, almost like an aura or halo. The light shining through the clouds lights up the village and reflects off the water. This light surrounds the soldier, adding to that aura effect. There’s a holiness or purity about a soldier’s homecoming.

Color helps support this mood. The water is a crisp, cool blue that sparkles in the sunlight. The thick storm clouds are also blue, not gray or black. The sunlight is a warm, radiant white. How green is used is interesting. It’s in the soldier’s uniform — although it’s a dirty, dingy green — and the fields. Kugach seems to be linking the two, perhaps signaling the man’s transition from soldier to farmer? Notice how the gear is gray and blends into the deck of the boat. The war is cast aside and already forgotten. The focus now is home and peaceful work.

In some ways, this painting reminds me of works by Piet Mondrian and Marc Rothko. The large rectangle of the sky and the two squares of the sea, separated by the thin rectangle of land have that same strict geometric feel seen in Mondrian’s de Stijl era. Meanwhile, like Rothko’s work, the hazy blue-white of those same areas create large fields of color that envelop the viewer much like how the soldier is enveloped here. It’s interesting to me how this severely naturalistic painting can suggest modernist art.

What I see in Return is a range of emotions. This soldier has seen the brutality of war and now stands on the frontmost point of the ship and soaks in the view — the bright white light; puffy clouds; the tiny, idyllic village; and lush, green fields. This is probably the point at which he finally understands that the war is truly over. No more fear. No more deprivation. No more horror. He’s finally home. There’s no words for that kind of feeling.

The caretaker of this painting is unknown as of this writing.