Tatyana Yablonskaya

Tatyana Yablonskaya was born in Smolensk, Russia in 1917. She studied at the Kyiv Art Institute (1935-41) at the studio of Fedir Krychevsky and in such pictures as Bread (1949; Moscow, Tret'yakov Gallery) she treated genre motifs in the monumental tradition established by Krychevsky. In the mid- to late 1960s she painted a cycle of canvases based on subjects drawn from Ukrainian countryside in a style derived from national artistic traditions. From the end of the 1960s she painted canvases embodying her reflections on human destiny and the meaning of life. On the whole Yablonska's work is marked by an attempt to overcome Socialist-Realist dogma by turning to the 'eternal themes' of human life; hence her neo-Symbolism and her return to the artistic experiments of the beginning of the century and the era of Art Nouveau. In her works of the 1970s and 1980s impressionistic elements became more noticeable and her palette grew richer and more varied.