Colour — red

To mark the 95th anniversary of the birth of People’s Artist of Belarus Mai Dantsig

“Realism — in the best sense — is life itself,” believed Mai Dantsig, and never once in his long life did he deviate from this principle. From his very childhood, when he was only learning to draw his first pictures, he depicted what he saw in the window, and he could gaze out of the window for hours...

Mai Dantsig was born on April 27th, 1930 in Minsk, in Maisels’ old house, which, after the revolution, was given the address: Myasnikova Street, 11. There, in apartment number 4, lived a man well-known in the city — physical education teacher Wolf Dantsig, one of the first educators of the young Soviet republic in this field, with his family. Mai Dantsig, as a child from a respectable family, studied not only at a regular school, but also at a music school under the conservatoire. He was inseparable from his violin until the war. In addition to his talent for music, the boy had another passion — drawing. He drew, by his own admission, for as long as he could remember.
In 1941, the Great Patriotic War broke out, and within days the enemy approached Minsk. “The war burst into our lives unexpectedly and terribly: the first days were marked by bombing raids, the city was burning, I saw the first corpses. Our family left Minsk on June 27th, the day before the occupation. We abandoned everything: household utensils, clothes, accumulated supplies...” the artist later recalled.

  











Partisan Wedding. 1968                                                                                                  My City — Ancient, Young. 1972

“A month later, we finally reached Ulyanovsk, where we lived in evacuation for four fearful years. The hunger was dreadful. I remember going to the market every day, where women were selling sunflower seeds. I would take a handful from each and immediately put it in my pocket, just in case. I lived on sunflower seeds alone day by day,” the artist would recount years later.
When news arrived of the liberation of Minsk, the family rushed back to their homeland. Another miracle happened: their house turned out to be one of the few buildings still standing in the devastated city. In a room, on the wall, they discovered a youthful drawing by his father, an amateur artist, which had survived the hardships of war — Mai Dantsig cherished it for the rest of his life…
In 1947, Dantsig enrolled in the newly founded Minsk Art School, and upon graduation, he went to study in Moscow, at the Surikov Institute. His diploma work, Towards Life, depicting happy, strolling graduates, was acquired for the collections of the BSSR Art Museum by Yelena Aladova, who had a unique nose for talent. Having returned from Moscow, Dantsig became an assistant to his former teacher, artist Vitaly Tsvirko, ultimately dedicating over half a century to teaching at the Academy of Arts. 
Dantsig immersed himself headfirst in the life of his native Minsk — he loved his city like no other. He remembered it before the war, saw it in the fires of 1941 and in the ruins of 1944, and gazed with delight as the Belarusian capital was reborn like a phoenix from the ashes, as multi-storey buildings sprang up, streets widened, and young trees reached for the sky… Dantsig painted, painted, painted, creating Minsk landscapes one after another, repeatedly declaring his boundless love for it.
Urban and industrial landscapes, strong, robust working people — this is what attracted Dantsig throughout his life. He liked people who were sturdy, hard-working, dedicated to their craft, full of energy and drive, not daunted by life — it was precisely these people he gladly welcomed into the space of his canvases, depicting them in rich, vibrant colours.

Mai Dantsig was completely in tune with the 20th century at its peak, when the country, having survived a monstrous war, aspired to the stars, and young people, strumming guitars, rushed to Komsomol construction sites. The red colour, loved by the artist throughout his life, was perfectly fitting in his works imbued with strength of spirit, sunshine and air, a sense of happiness and the fullness of existence. 

“I don’t like dead tones, although they can be very subtle, very elegant and very sophisticated,” Dantsig admitted. “I like full-blooded painting.”
By the late 1960s, he turned to the subject of the Great Patriotic War — time was needed to understand and comprehend the events of his childhood, to see them not as his own personal drama, but as a confrontation between an entire people and unparalleled evil. This theme stayed with Dantsig forever. In 1967, the Belarus — Mother of Partisans painting appeared, a work that brought the author nationwide fame. A surviving stove in a house burnt down by the fascists, a machine gun covered by a bright, patterned village rug — all that remained of peaceful life, and people, young and old, going into forests to fight the enemy. In 1968, a new work followed — equally epic and monumental — Partisan Wedding. A year later — Partisan Ballad, inspired by Rubens’ Roman Charity: this one was not understood and accepted straight away. In the image of a woman breastfeeding a wounded soldier, the artist saw the Motherland, nursing her defenders, while short-sighted critics saw almost eroticism...
The war theme also resonates in such an unexpected genre as still life. Dantsig, who could not abide the pointless, in his opinion, depiction of objects and things, filled his Still Life about the Great Patriotic War with meaning and drama. Red bunches of autumn rowan, an opened packet of cigarettes and an ashtray full of cigarette butts, a typewriter (which he once found in the post-war ruins of Minsk) with a sheet of paper inserted illustrated a break in the work of a front-line writer, painfully choosing the words that should spill onto the paper and tell the difficult story of the war years. 
Dantsig was known for drawing on the classics — he made no secret of his affinity for Michelangelo, admired the Spanish school, and himself seemed to have stepped out of an El Greco painting. One of his most famous works — the monumental canvas And the Saved World Remembers measuring three and a half by seven metres — is built around the image of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna.

“This figure of the Madonna with the baby is the semantic centre of my work,” Mai Dantsig said. “She is the meaning behind the fact that Soviet soldiers liberated the world, saving life itself and the culture of humanity from fascism. The painting also depicts soldiers celebrating victory, victims of the last battles, a father-soldier with his slain son, and German prisoners...” 

This painting was one of the central works at the artist’s personal exhibition in Moscow in 1988, for which the Sovietskii Khudozhnik [Soviet Artist] Publishing House timed the release of a complete album of Mai Dantsig’s paintings. In 2015, this monumental canvas opened the exhibition Legacy of the Second World War in Russian Art in London, at the world-famous Saatchi Gallery.
“Art is a manifestation of the creativity of the people, their spirit,” the artist believed. “A living brushstroke, passed through the soul of the artist and transferred to the canvas, will never lose its significance.”
In 1995, Mai Dantsig received the People’s Artist of Belarus title. His works are held in leading museums around the world. The memory of him lives on in the hearts of his students...

On the Boulevard. 1957

BELOVED CITY

Mai Dantsig painted many landscapes of Minsk, creating a true chronicle of the city’s life: March 1944, On the Boulevard, New Neighbourhoods are Growing, Old and New Minsk, Minsk Awakens, Upper Town, My Minsk, My City — Ancient, Young. The artist said, “The daily life of my native home attracts with its extraordinary beauty. Here you feel the growth and bubbling life of the country with particular intensity.”

By Irina Ovsepyan