Tahir Salahov

Who is Tahir Salahov?

Tahir Salahov is an Azerbaijani painter and draughtsman.

His father Teymur Salahov had been a victim of Stalin's repressions, having been arrested in 1937 and executed shortly after. His mother Sona was left to bring up four children on her own but the family didn't learn of their father's death until 1956 after Stalin's death.

Tahir Salahov studied at the Azimzade Art College in Baku in 1945–1950 and the Surikov Moscow Art Institute in 1951–1957. Salahov won an early recognition: his diploma work, The Shift is Over, was exhibited in 1957 at the Moscow All-Union Art Exhibition and received public and critical acclaim. He became one of the leading representatives of the so-called "severe style", a trend in Soviet art of the 1960s that aimed to set off a hard, publicist, realist view against the ceremonial "polished reality" of the Joseph Stalin era. Salahov’s compositions on the life and work of the Baku oil-workers and portraits, e.g., of Azerbaijani composer Kara Karayev, and Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich, are characterized by a forcefulness and lack of idealization. Salahov chose a sparing palette of contrasting red, black, light- and dark-grey tones and gave colored plains a decorative function.