Staraya Ruza or "Old Ruza" is a painting of a street in Russia. Robert Falk was an avant-garde Russian artist who joined the Jack of Diamonds group, the first of the avant-garde committees. He was also inspired by artists such as Rembrandt and Cezanne. He painted in Cubism, Impressionism and experimented with Expressionism. Pushkarev, the director of the Russian museum at the time, was the first to buy this painting from Robert Falk's widow during the time of the Soviet Union. This was 15 years after Falk's death and the director had to smuggle the artworks for cheap prices. This was because the Soviet government at the time deemed Falk's works "formalist", unconventional and undesirable.
The painting shows a street in Russia in a Cubo-Impressionist form. The artist has focussed on the shapes and forms of the buildings and experimented with placing the same shapes in different perspectives in order to create an interesting composition. The shapes are broken up by the presence of electric poles, human figures and a figure of a horse-drawn cart. This generates further complexity in the piece made up of simple forms. The colour palette shifts from vibrant red walls and green roofs to pastel blues and greens for the houses far away to create depth.This also creates the illusion of a winding street and a town that expands far beyond our view.
This painting by Robert Falk expresses a somber and down-to-earth mood rather than that of a geometrical composition. The artist has transformed the dull, provincial street of old Ruza, a Russian town, into a deep, psychological space, full of ambivalence. The tilted, interlocking rooftops of the houses, the wooden poles of the telegraph, all give an earthy honesty to the composition in addition to the dense brick reds and mineral greens. All in all, it's a brilliant depiction of an everyday Russian reality.
