Time by David Burliuk - 1918-1919 Dnipropetrovsk Art Museum Time by David Burliuk - 1918-1919 Dnipropetrovsk Art Museum

Time

Collage, oil on canvas •
  • David Burliuk - 1882 - 1967 David Burliuk 1918-1919

This picture was created during the hard times of the Civil War in the territory of the collapsed Russian Empire.  It clearly conveys the feeling of inevitably and rapidly approaching chaos. The woman’s face is dragging all the other objects in the picture: helpless human figures, houses, rails, poles, and wheels. As the author himself wrote, she is a passenger of a train that went off the rails, and she is the personification of a country that is rolling into the abyss. The woman’s face is surprisingly calm, even indifferent, she is hypnotized by the impending catastrophe. Her right eye is the dark center of the whirlpool, bordered by alarming and bright colors scattering into shards. The movement of the train breaks the static forms into deformed fragments. (According to the principles of Kinetic Art, in the future, motionless and imperfect painting will be replaced by dynamic and perfect movie cameras.)

The author included in this work a fragment of Vremya (Time), a real newspaper, which gave the name to the whole picture.

David Burliuk had experienced the hardships of traveling to the unknown in the face of a catastrophe. In the Winter of 1918, miraculously escaping death in Moscow, he crossed the whole of Siberia by train to the Far East.

- Tatiana Adamenko

P.S. World War I changed the world and also had an impact on art. Read more about it here.