Refugees

Kazaks painted this in 1917, out of something he had lived through. When the German army pushed into the Baltic in the First World War, hundreds of thousands of Latvians were driven east out of their own country, and Kazaks himself worked in an office supplying these refugees deep inside Russia. Here a peasant family stands frozen on empty ground: a mother, a child, an old figure, gathered by a cart with nowhere left to go. He strips the scene down to heavy, simplified shapes, the bodies blocky and still, closer to modern European painting than to anything traditional. He was only 22 when he made it, and he died of tuberculosis three years later, at 25.