Vaks Boris

Biography

Boris (Bentsion) Iosifovich Vaks (1912-1989). Painter, Honored artist of Ukrainian SSR. He was born in Zhitomir. He graduated from the Kiev Art School (1929-1933). He was a participant of the Great Patriotic War from 1941 to 1944. From 1944 to 1948 he studied in Kharkov State Institute of Art, his teachers were: S.M. Prokhorov, A.A. Kokel, M.G. Deregus. From 1950 he was a member of the Union of Artists of the USSR. From 1950 to 1958 he was a participant of all the Regional, Republic and All-Union exhibitions. His works were also exhibited at group exhibitions of the Ukrainian artists abroad: in Poland, France, Italy, Japan. His solo exhibitions took place in Kharkov (1972), Kiev (1973), Kharkov (1989) (postmortem), Moscow (1996) (postmortem). The major genre of the painter is easel painting; he also worked in the field of monumental decorative art (he was the Head of Kharkov section of the Union of Artists of the USSR). His best-known works are: “Battlefield Spring (The Cranes)” (1957), “On Virgin Lands” (1961), “Bread-corn” triptych (1971), “War” (1984). He was a recognized master of still-life and landscape paintings. The self-portrait of the artist belongs to the funds of the State Tretyakov Gallery, most of the works are exhibited at the museums of Kharkov, Donetsk, Simferopol, Samara and other art museums of the Ukraine and Russia, and also kept in private collections in Russia and abroad (in the USA, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates and Brazil).