UNIT 6
Partisan Madonna
Mikhail Savitsky is a Belarusian painter. Born in 1922, he served in the Great Patriotic War in from 1941, but was captured and wasn't released until the end of the war. Some of the paintings Savitsky did were the 1967 "The Partisan Madonna" and the picture cycle "Figures on the Heart." For his work in the arts, he was awarded the title Hero of Belarus in 2006. Savitsky’s goal is to portray the time he lives in – even that period which people recall with disasters.
At the Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War in Minsk there is his series “Figures on the Heart” – thirteen paintings about Buchenwald and Dachau where he himself was a prisoner of war.
Savitsky’s principal themes are: war, work, bread and motherhood. He gives his characters the features he treasures best: kindness, honesty, a sense of justice and duty, industriousness.
His central hero is time and its crucial dramatic moments.
The artist likes to quote Hemingway’s words that a work of art is like an iceberg whose visible part makes one think of what is hidden. Savitsky’s paintings produce the same impression. His “Partisan Madonna” is on display at Moscow Tretyakov Gallery. Critics say its composition reminds them of classical madonnas of old, and that the portraits and figures are reminiscent of old Russian icons and paintings by Petrov-Vodkin. In this canvas, devoid of surface dynamics, there is such inner tension, so many thoughts and struggles of the artist, that the apparently traditional subject acquires tremendous new meaning. It is a challenge to war, and of course, a symbol of the greatest love – the love of a mother from which everything begins, says Savitsky
The peculiarities of his style are: the accentuated expressive lines, the rhythmic silhouettes, the precise composition (radiating from the centre). Space, especially in his murals, is one-dimensional, and this lends his work additional symbolism and solemnity.