Maria E. Kotliarevska

«Reading the Newspaper», watercolour on paper, 27 × 20 cm.

An intimate yet profoundly human scene: a woman immersed in reading, entirely absorbed and detached from the outside world. Her bare feet and headscarf evoke a simple life, while the newspaper suggests a connection with the realities of the country. Although the subject is an everyday one, Kotliarevska's mastery has transformed the scene into a work rich in inner life, meaning and luminosity.

The work is reproduced in the volume «The Last Boychukist: The Artistic Life of Marija Kotliarevska».

The work is signed with the artist's monogram «MK» at lower left.

Marija Evhenivna Kotliarevska (1902-1984) was a Ukrainian graphic artist of the Soviet era and one of the earliest masters of linocut in Ukraine. Born in Horlivka, she graduated from the Kharkiv Art Institute in 1929. From 1939 she was a member of the Union of Artists of Ukraine and worked in easel graphics and book illustration, producing more than fifty illustrations for works by Pushkin, Shevchenko and Heine during the 1930s. In 1946 she fell victim to Soviet repression and spent six years in prison. Following her rehabilitation, she resumed her artistic career, and solo exhibitions of her work were held in Dnipropetrovs'k in 1962, 1977 and 1982.