Yablonska, Tetiana

Yablonska, Tetiana [Яблонська, Тетяна; Jablons’ka, Tetjana], b 24 February 1917 in Smolensk, Russia, d 17 June 2005 in Kyiv. (Photo: Tetiana Yablonska.) Ukrainian painter and teacher, of Belarusian descent; full member of the USSR (now Russian) Academy of Arts from 1975. She studied at the Kyiv State Art Institute (1935–41) under Fedir Krychevsky and later taught there (1944–52, 1966–73). Her canvases, most of which are painted in the realist tradition, are often bathed in light and show a highly developed sense of color. They have more in common with impressionism than with socialist realism, even though some have depicted happy farmers at a collective farm (eg, her famous Bread, 1949) and workers (eg, Evening on the Dnieper, 1946). In the 1960s, as a result of her interest in Ukrainian folk art and ethnography, her paintings became more decorative, with simplified forms and flattened space (eg, Young Mother, 1964; Widows, 1964). Ukrainian elements appeared, in works such as Betrothed (1966) and Swans (1966). By 1969 Yablonska was creating canvases that synthesized her two previous styles, a synthesis that culminated in the powerful, symbolic Youth (1969) and Silence (1975). In the 1980s she created portraits and numerous landscapes, including Winter in Old Kyiv (1975), The Source (1983), and Old Apple Tree (1986), peaceful compositions painted in a subdued, pearly gray palette. A monograph about her by E. Korotkevich was published in Moscow in 1980, and a large retrospective of her paintings was held at the Kyiv Museum of Ukrainian Art in 1987.

Daria Zelska-Darewych

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]