Zuka
Zenaida Gourievna Booyakovitch (1924 – 18 December 2016), known as Zuka, was an American artist of Russian descent who lived and worked in Paris. She was awarded "Chevalier" of "L'ordre des Arts et des Lettres" of France in 1990. Biography. Zuka was born in 1924 in San Francisco to a family of Russian immigrants who came to the United States in 1920s. Her father was an officer in White Russian Army. Zuka received a bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from the University of Southern California. In 1948 she went to Paris using the money she received from California gallery  grant. Two years later, in 1950, she married political cartoonist Louis Mitelberg and they lived in Paris ever since. They had two sons, Roland and François. Work. Zuka started with portrait painting in the Los Angeles area when she was a student of the University of Southern California. When she moved to Paris in 1948 first she painted artists and writers in frozen poses, but then she moved to figures from history combining painting and collage in narrative works. Influenced by her husband she became interested in historical imagery and did her first series on the American Revolution in 1970s . More prominent are Zuka's depictions of the French Revolution presented in the exhibition "The French Revolution through American Eyes," 1988. It was a result of her six years' research of the French literature for period portraits and other appropriate images to reconstruct people and events. Zuka's paintings of the French Revolution are of great significance as they position women as active participants of these historical events. The most recent subjects of Zuka's paintings were birds, cows and nature. She became familiar with these subjects at her country house in Burgundy and now Zuka's cows exist in  many formats ranging from large-scale oil paintings to postcards. Zuka died on December 18, 2016. External links.