Irina Ivanovna Vitman was born June 30, 1916 in Moscow, Taganka region. Her grandmother introduced her to the arts - in particular to the Russian avant garde.

Vitman lived in Paris during the 1920s. In 1937, she began studying at the Repin Art Institute in Leningrad. During the Great Patriotic War Vitman enlisted as a firefighter in the besieged Leningrad, volunteering to keep rooftop watch for incendiary bombs. In 1942, together with the Repin Institute’s students and professors, Vitman was evacuated to the city of Samarkand, Uzbekistan.

After the end of the war Vitman entered the Surikov Institute in Moscow, where she graduated in 1948. She began exhibiting in 1950. Important shows include "All-Union Art Exhibition" Moscow in 1955.

During the 1950s the motif of domestication of the wilderness, fresh starts and putting down roots was seen in the iconography of artists sent to monumentalize the Virgin Lands campaign. The fertility of nature was paired with human nurturing and maternal care in paintings and sketches of mothers breast feeding, bathing and caring for children.

Irina Vitman wrote “In the Steppe” of her experience with the Virgin Lands campaign:

“We go from the railway station by car into the depths of the virgin land. The steppe is everywhere as far as you can cast a glance round. There is not a single bush or a tree, or any stake anywhere. The odometer shows 50-100-150 kilometers, and all around as far as the eye can reach you see one and the same view - it is only plough land and virgin land that seems to exist here. Admittedly, a steppe bird, from time to time, took wing or a gopher (a ground squirrel), now and then runs across the road.

We have lived on the virgin land for a few days, and we see for ourselves that to these wild, uninhabited parts has come the Soviet man armed with powerful equipment and machinery. We make sure that on the barren soil, as if it were a wonderful fairytale, there is in full swing an ebullient and cheerful activity of man, as a result, some roads have been laid, wells have appeared and new settlements have come into existence. The tractor’s rumble begins to drown the noise of the wind, the child’s laughter echos the song of the lark.

Of course around the central buildings of the Russko-Polyansky state farm in the Omsk region, where we live, stretches the same infinite expanse of the flat steppe; on the horizon line, however, incessantly grow some small dots that soon turn out to be lorries on which food stuffs, fuel, and building materials are delivered to the farm. No, we do not see a desert round our farm. We see an immense, rich country of socialism, the country that “shares her full life” with this tiny white tented settlement in the steppe,

When we leave the state farm, we see a huge field of wheat, swaying in the wind and, thus resembling the rough sea. We see streams of lorries moving towards the new crop. We rejoice over the victories of Soviet people who have managed to conquer this wild and hard yielding land.”

In the 1970s Vitman traveled to Paris and produced a series of classical impressionistic images of the city, using her personal, colorful technique. Her works are not typical of the socialist realism of the period.

Irina Ivanovna Vitman died in 2012.

Irina Vitman

Drovyanoy Lane at Taganka