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violet—colors that Pregel would use in her other abstract paintings, for example, “Dark Sun”)—have a certain calming effect and suggest the eventual hope for finding inner balance and, perhaps eventually, peace.

The ideas of the painting, “Burning City,” (above) bear some similarities with “Departure,” although “Burning City” is painted in the style of Precisionism, one of the unofficial variations of Cubism and Futurism, characterized by the representation of the rectangular buildings, especially sky-scrapers, an industrial landscape, and the absence of people. “Burning City” is an Apocalyptic work. It depicts a burning and sinking city with no remaining living creatures. The colors of the fire and the fire itself emphasize the Apocalyptic effect of the end of the world. In contrast, the surprisingly peaceful water, a symbol of eventual equilibrium, reflects only the burning fire and its colors, and separates the burning city from the sinking one. Water accentuates the effect of a new beginning, coming after the all-consuming Apocalyptic end.

In “Departure,” the stress is on a lonely individual, the only survivor, and his solitude; whereas in “Burning City,” the stress is on the global destruction of the world, on the dramatic phenomenon of the end. For an artist who lost her own past in a world, destroyed by revolution and war, and whose personal as well as the collective future of her generation were unknown, this Apocalyptical view of the world is a powerful message, a symbol of the state of the soul of her generation. In her modern interpretation of “Pieta”, in the image of the mourning women over a dead man, a universal image of loss, Pregel reflects on the motif of war, and on the pain associated with the losses of those loved.

The still water in “Burning City,” reflecting the fire, also acts as a mirror, the symbol, inherited by Pregel from her classical training and the study of the Renaissance in the studio of Shukhaev, “Still Life With Mirror”). Renaissance artists extensively used that image to convey their view of art and life. A mirror does not only reflect the true reality (veritas), the image of the earthly world, but it may also distort it, since the mirror itself is two dimensional and its ability to reflect a three dimensional reality is questionable.