Postcard RU-8922060

Konstantin Yuon's painting "New Planet" is a by-product of the artist's work on the curtain for the Bolshoi Theater. For the curtain of the main theater of the country, such an image was recognized as somewhat ... unsuitable, and Yuon made an easel painting based on sketches. Soviet art criticism interpreted it as a monumental image of the birth of a new country, equated with the creation of a new planet. However, if you look almost a hundred years later, it may seem like an image of a cosmic catastrophe, and not a glorification of a new planet. In any case, we are talking about a cataclysm of universal scale.

Yuon symbolically depicted the October Revolution. Scarlet (bloody?) the planet seems to heat up even the audience. And how the participants have to! On the right we see figures aiming for the red planet (delighted? in fear? who is delighted, and who is horrified ...), some of them are depicted as fallen (dead?), someone rushed in the opposite direction, runs away. The group on the left seems to be trying to defend itself from the flaming ball and reach the "old" planet. All the characters are shown naked or in skins, which probably should give the picture the grandeur of a myth, a sense of primordial creation. On the left, looking closely, you can distinguish two armed men who, grabbing a naked man by the arms, are pulling him somewhere. It's time to recall another strange work for Yuon – "People", on which the contours of the Solovetsky special purpose camp are quite recognizable. Surely not there?

In the "New Planet" you can see a lot and interpret it in different ways. Most likely, Yuon himself did not fully realize what he saw the Soviet reality as a whole and specifically the role of the October Revolution. But I understood that these were grandiose metamorphoses on a large scale and, as time has shown, of a very long duration.

Alyona Esaulova.

https://artchive.ru/artists/2042~Konstantin_Fedorovich_Juon/works/251647~Novaja_planeta