Artist Aleksandra Beļcova Medium oil on canvas | Year 1925 (1925) | |
Dimensions 100 cm × 120 cm (39 in × 47 in) Location Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga | ||
The White and the black (Latvian: Baltā un melnā) is a painting by Latvian artist Aleksandra Beļcova from 1925.
The picture is from the early period of the artist and is among her most famous paintings.
The picture was painted with oil paints and is sized 100x120 cm. The picture is part of the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga.
Analysis
It shows two women - a black girl in the foreground and white woman on a sofa, wearing a tunic and a fan in the right hand side. The woman on couch is Biruta Ozolina, wife of the Italian diplomat in Thailand Amadori. Together with his son, he often visited Latvia. The painting depicts a nanny and son of Ozolina in a room. The painting was created at a time when European art is at the crossroads of New Realism, Art Deco, and Neorealism. The picture presents a visual reality and realistic forms of representation that followed Cubism and abstract experiments of the early 20th century. Realistic trends are typical throughout Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.