Mikhail Savitsky

Biography

On 29 April 1945 American troops entered the Dachau concentration camp. Among those liberated was a twenty-three-year-old from the Vitebsk region, Mikhail Savitsky; before Dachau he had been through camps in Düsseldorf and Buchenwald. He had no training in art.

He began to study painting only after demobilisation, at the age of twenty-five.

He was born on 18 February 1922 in the village of Zvenyachi in Orsha district, Vitebsk province; today it is part of the Tolochin district of the Vitebsk region. When the war began he was nineteen. He served in the anti-aircraft artillery and in the 345th Rifle Division, fought at Sevastopol at the age of twenty and was taken prisoner; accounts differ as to when.

From 1947 to 1951 Savitsky studied at the Minsk Art College under V. K. Tsvirko and V. V. Volkov, then spent six years at the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow under D. K. Mochalsky. He graduated in 1957, joined the Union of Artists of the USSR the same year and painted “Song”.

The war became his main subject and remained so for half a century. Many of his early works have not survived. “Partisans” appeared in 1963, and in 1967 the cycle “Heroic Belorussia”, with the paintings “Partisan Madonna”, “The Vitebsk Gate” and “In the Field”. The “Partisan Madonna” shows a peasant mother, and viewers saw in her a symbol of Belarusian resistance; the USSR Academy of Arts awarded the picture a silver medal. For the Museum of the Great Patriotic War in Minsk he made the mural “The Great Patriotic War. 1944”, and for it, together with the cycle, he received the USSR State Prize in 1973. He worked on the cycle “Partisan Belarus” from the 1960s to the 1980s; among his pictures of those years are “The Legend of Batka Minai” and “Children of War”. In one of the later works, from 1980, a mother lets her daughter go off into the night to join a partisan unit, knowing she may never see her again. The girl’s face shows fear and sadness.

The cycle “Figures on the Heart”, begun in 1974, stands apart: it rests on the artist’s own memories of the cruelty of the German concentration camps. To my mind, it is hard to read the rest of Savitsky without this cycle. The partisan pictures were painted by a man who had spent the war behind barbed wire himself.

From the late 1980s his painting changes. In 1988 he painted “Requiem”, in 1988–1989 the cycle “Black Byl”, in the 1990s “The Beatitudes”, and in the 1990s and 2000s the large cycle “The 20th Century”. Kirill Melnik, who has written about his work, observed that Christian motifs appeared in Savitsky quite early and in the late works sounded at full strength.

From 1980 he headed the creative studio of the USSR Academy of Arts in Minsk; in 1991 it became a state institution, the Creative Academic Studios of Painting, Graphics and Sculpture, under the Ministry of Culture. He was elected a corresponding member of the Academy in 1973 and a full member in 1983. In 1975 he became an honorary member of the Academy of Arts of the GDR, in 1995 a member of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, and he belonged to the International Slavic Academy. Savitsky was never a member of the Communist Party, yet from 1975 to 1990 he was a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Belorussian SSR, and in 1989–1991 a People’s Deputy of the USSR from the Culture Fund. In 1988 he sat on the state commission that investigated the crimes at Kurapaty.

He was made a People’s Artist of the Belorussian SSR in 1972 and a People’s Artist of the USSR in 1978. By a decree of 18 February 1997, his seventy-fifth birthday, Savitsky became the first recipient of the Order of Francysk Skaryna, and on 1 March 2006 he was given the title Hero of Belarus.

He died on 8 November 2010 in Minsk and was buried in the Eastern Cemetery. An art gallery, Minsk secondary school No. 147 and a street in the new Minsk-Mir district, named in 2020, bear his name; his personal belongings are kept in the Tolochin Museum of History and Local Lore. In 2022, for the artist’s centenary, the National Bank of Belarus issued commemorative coins devoted to the cycles “Black Byl” and “Partisan Belarus”.