Taisia Afonina

Biography

The first three paintings by Afonina were bought in 1943 by the Voroshilov Museum in Luhansk: “The Germans Came”, “Stealing in Germany” and “Meeting”. The city had only just been liberated, and the artist had not yet finished her studies.

She was born on 13 May 1913 (30 April, Old Style) in Nikolaev, the daughter of a master at the Naval shipyard, which after the revolution was named for André Marty. Her mother, Efrosiniya Semyonovna Goncharova, kept house; her father was a well-known blacksmith at the Hartmann locomotive works in Luhansk.

In 1931, after finishing nine-year school, Afonina came to Leningrad. From 1932 to 1936 she attended the evening classes of a workers’ preparatory school (rabfak), then the preparatory classes at the Academy of Arts. In the spring of 1936 she was admitted to the painting department of the Leningrad Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Her teachers were Mikhail Bernshtein, Pavel Naumov and Victor Oreshnikov. She began exhibiting in 1940.

The war found her in her final year, working on her diploma painting, “A Holiday on the Neva”. With her small son and her mother, Afonina was evacuated first to Ostashkov, then to Vyshny Volochyok, then to Luhansk. After the city was liberated in 1943 she took part in its rebuilding and taught drawing and painting at the art school. In the autumn of that year she went with a group of artists to Krasnodon: a club had to be decorated before orders were presented to the parents of the murdered Young Guard members, the underground Komsomol (Communist youth league) group that had fought the Germans in occupied Krasnodon. In the May 1946 issue of the Academy’s newspaper “For Socialist Realism” she wrote of the trip: “I saw the pit where they were dumped, the remnants of their bloody clothes, the prison where they were tortured.” The same piece says that she spoke with the mothers and friends of the dead.

In 1946 Afonina graduated from the institute in the mural painting studio of Igor Grabar. Her diploma work was the painting “Girls of Donbas”. “A Holiday on the Neva”, interrupted by the war, she painted only twenty years later, in 1959–1960, and made a series of studies for it.

From 1947 she was a member of the Union of Artists, which until 1992 was called the Leningrad branch of the Union of Artists of the Russian Federation. After her diploma she worked in Luhansk for several more years and returned to Leningrad only in 1952. In the first postwar years she was drawn to wartime subjects and to the theme of renewal; “Foundry Conveyor” (1947) belongs here. In the 1950s to 1970s she turned more often to portraits and lyrical landscape. She brought back studies from Leningrad, from Ukraine, from the Carpathians, from the Meshchera region and from Staraya Ladoga, where Leningrad artists had a creative retreat.

Among her portraits are those of a woman named Kizilshtein-Mikhailova (1955), a Chinese student (1961), the poet Olga Bergholz (1964), an entomologist named Keleynikova (1975) and the writer Nikolai Tikhonov (1980). The magazine “Iskusstvo” (“Art”) discussed the Bergholz portrait in particular in 1965. Among her landscapes and still lifes are “Windy Day” (1956), “Close to Ryazan” (1958), “At the Old Tuchkov Bridge” (1959), “On the Zhdanovka River” (1960), “Still Life with Pussy-Willows” and “Briar” (both 1964). Her manner is tonal: she was interested in light and air and in fine relations of colour. To my mind this is best seen in “Still Life with Pussy-Willows”, though it is hard to judge from reproductions.

In the 1980s flowers became a particular passion: roses, wild daisies, the first tulips, most often in watercolour. In 1989–1992 her works were shown at exhibitions and auctions of Russian painting titled “L’Ecole de Leningrad” in France. Her paintings are held in museums in Saint Petersburg, Kostroma, Luhansk, Krasnodon and Staraya Ladoga, and in private collections in Russia, the United States and France. Afonina died on 19 April 1994 in Saint Petersburg.