Departure of the Soldiers or The Kiss, Oil Painting, 1979
A farewell caught in oil — Departure of the Soldiers captures that unbearable pause between love and loss, where romance meets ruin and history holds its breath.
Some paintings you look at. This one you fall into. A winter village at dusk, a column of men moving out toward whatever waits, and at the very centre a woman pressed into one last embrace, her face turned up to his. Around them the goodbyes multiply — another couple, a led horse, a soldier already walking on. Private grief, painted as something everyone in the frame is living at once.
Then there's the red. Her coat burns through the grey and the snow like a struck match, the one warm thing for metres in any direction. It's the trick Spielberg borrowed for the little girl's coat in Schindler's List — a single flare of colour to tell your eye exactly where the heart of the story lives. But this is a Soviet canvas, and here red is never only red. It's the colour of the revolution, of the banner, of the army carrying these men away — and of blood. A woman says goodbye to her love in the exact shade of the thing that's taking him. That's why it aches.
Painted in 1979 by Ukrainian artist Vadim Demyanovich Valigura (1941–1995). Born in Yefremov, trained at the Kyiv Art Institute (class of 1967), a member of the Union of Soviet Artists of Ukraine from 1970, he spent more than two decades working out of the Kyiv Painting and Sculpture Combine — the great state workshop where the era's monumental canvases were made. A painter of portraits and landscapes, with a rare eye for the quiet human moment inside a grand public subject.
And this one is grand: 149 × 180 cm of it, still in its original 1970s wood frame, the surface alive with thick, worked paint you can read from across the room. Wear consistent with its years — beautifully, honestly vintage.
Not decoration. A wound in oil, grandeur and grief in the same breath. We rather love it for that.
Departure of the Soldiers · Vadim Demyanovich Valigura · 1979 · oil on canvas · 149 × 180 cm
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