Michael Nesterov wrote in 1940 in the preface to the memoirs: "I avoided to represent strong passions, preferring them our silent landscape, the person, leading an internal life. And in portraits my, written last years, those people which way was reflexion of thoughts, feelings, their acts" attracted me to themselves.
Two types of portraits co-exist in Nesterov's creativity. One - analytical, in many respects similar to a portrait etude. In it the artist peers at the person of the person, tries to solve essence of its character. Such portrait is under construction traditionally: the person and a model figure are turned to the spectator.
Other type of a portrait is a portrait-generalisation, a portrait-biography, sometimes - a portrait-symbol. Often he dares the artist as a picture, with inclusion нестеровского a landscape-mood or an interior filled with "speaking" things, promoting comprehension of an image.
In the portraits-generalisations Nesterov often resorted to receptions of new style: to selection and утрировке the certain lines of model revealing its essence, expressiveness of a silhouette or the typicalness of gesture reaching a grotesque sharpness, decorative stylisation, the is musical-rhythmic organisation of the cloth, to the spiritualised colour.
Problems of transfer of similarity or purely art problems did not become self-sufficing for Nesterov, they are subordinated to expression of the poetic world of the hero.
Ivan Ilyin's named the author "Thinker" the portrait became one of portraits-generalisations.
Ilyin, Ivan Alexandrovich (1882-1954) idealistic philosopher, lawyer, professor of the Moscow University, author of more than 30 books and hundreds of articles. He actively opposed the Bolsheviks, and was arrested many times. In 1922, he was exiled from Russia; worked in the Russian Scientific Institute in Berlin since 1923, in 1934 was fired by the Nazis; after 1938, lived in Switzerland.
