(b Zvenyachi, Vitebsk Region, Belarusian SSR [now Belarus’], 18 Feb 1922). Belarusian painter. He fought on the Sevastopol’ front in 1941 and from 1941 to 1945 he was a prisoner in the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. He finished his studies at the Surikov Institute in Moscow in 1957, where he was a student of Dmitry Mochal’sky (b 1908) and Fyodor Modorov (1890–1967). The monumentality and heroic pathos of Savitsky’s mature pictures are related to the Severe style (Rus. Surovvy stil’) of Soviet painting in the 1960s, with its search for a heightened plastic expression of form. Among the artist’s most important painted cycles are those portraying the partisan battle in Belorussia during World War II. In this series a special role is played by the image of woman as mother (recalling medieval sacred motifs) as an embodiment of the Motherland, for example The Partisan Madonna (1967; Moscow, Tret’yakov Mus.). The picture cycle Figures on the Heart (1974–80; Minsk, Belarus’ Mus. Hist. Gt Patriot. War) is animated by tragic memories of the war years; the Nazi concentration camp is presented as a battlefield between good and evil, between savage inhumanity and moral nobility.