Mai Dantsig

The military theme occupies a special place in the art of the Belarusian painter Mai Danzig (1930-2017), as it does in the life of every citizen of Belarus, a country that lost a third of its population to WW2, and where partisan resistance against the Nazis during the occupation was tireless and nationwide.

Partisan Ballad is a take on the exemplary Roman story of a woman Pero who breastfeeds her father Cimon after he was incarcerated and sentenced to death by starvation. Like Pero, Dantsig’s female partisan rescues a wounded warrior abandoned on the battlefield and doomed to die. In the USSR of 1969, against the backdrop of the dogmas of socialist realism, Partisan Ballad appeared as an outright provocation. The painting was harshly criticized and rejected. ‘The critics did not even bother to understand the origin of the subject’, recalled Dantsig later.

Indeed, it was Peter Paul Rubens who inspired the artist to paint his Ballad. While admiring Roman Charity on display in the Hermitage Museum, Dantsig saw semantic parallels with the events of WW2, when the Belarusian Mother Earth became the fosterer for Soviet partisans. In the painting by Mai Danzig, the baroque plot became a symbol of the feat and self-sacrifice of Belarus during the years of the fascist occupation in 1941-1944.