Cafe Gurzuf
painting by Alexander Nikolayevich Samokhvalov
Cafe Gurzuf (Russian: Кафе Гурзуф) is a painting by Alexander Nikolayevich Samokhvalov (Russian: Алекса́ндр Никола́евич Самохва́лов; 1894–1971), Russian artist, regarded as one of the founders and brightest representative of the Socialist Realism style. The painting depicts a view of a summer cafe in Gurzuf, Crimea, in the middle of the 1950s.
History
Samokhvalov is known in Soviet art for his portraits of typical young Soviet people of the 1930s ("Girl in a T-shirt", 1932, "Metrostroevka with a drill", 1937) as well as a monumental compositions ("Militarized Komsomol", 1933; "Sergei Kirov takes parade athletes", 1935; the monumental panel "Soviet Sport", 1936). They embodied the typical image of contemporary youth. The picture Cafe Gurzuf continues this theme.
Samokhvalov painted the present work in the mid-1950s at the zenith of his career. Not long beforehand, he had married his young wife Maria Alekseevna Kleschar (1915–2000), who became his muse and faithful assistant. Captivated by her beauty and youthfulness, Samokhvalov found her to be a source of true inspiration. The present work conveys the artist’s fascination with beauty and youth, as depicted by the central seated figure, for which Samokhvalov’s wife served as a model for the central female figure (a young woman at a table in a pink blouse, studying a menu). The graceful inclination of her head and the curve of her shoulders evince her delicate beauty.
“Cafe Gurzuf” enters the record as painting by Alexander Nikolayevich Samokhvalov. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Cafe, Gurzuf and painting can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Cafe Gurzuf” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Cafe, Gurzuf and painting provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q619287. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1894, 1971, 1932 and 1937.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cafe Gurzuf” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.