Electrician

Aleksandr Deyneka’s festive colors could also give way, even in children’s books, to the severity of everyday labor. What gives these books their energy is Deyneka’s admiration for difficult physical work. It is no coincidence that the hero of two of his books from 1930 became the electrician: a figure often visible to children in city streets, unafraid of dangerous electricity, confidently climbing poles toward the wires stretched overhead. In one striking spread from Boris Uralsky’s Electrician, workers balance high above the ground like circus acrobats among iron frameworks, one of the artist’s recurring symbols of the strict world of technology, and crossing electrical wires. Chains of white porcelain insulators form a distinctly modern industrial ornament across the page.

The tools from the electrician’s work bag — spare insulators, screwdrivers, pliers — are placed heavily and prominently onto the page. The precise, almost technical drawing style of these illustrations, at times clearly created with the help of rulers and compasses, also reflects the world of machinery and engineering. As is often the case with Deyneka, the compositions avoid traditional rules of perspective, scale, and single-point viewpoint. The artist uses montage-like techniques, overlaying enlarged electric light bulbs onto distant city landscapes.

Yury Gerchuk, Aleksandr Deyneka: Graphic Artist