French painter. He was born in Paris, the son of Russian political refugees who had left after the abortive 1905 revolution. A political militant, in 1933 he joined the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists and in 1935 the French Communist Party. He responded to the demands of the Communist writer Louis *Aragon for a ‘revolutionary romanticism’ in his painting The Strikes of May 1936 (1936, Tate), which celebrated the strikes which followed the election of the Popular Front government. Christopher Green has stated that such paintings contributed to the ‘folklore’ around the mass industrial action of that time. In November 1941 Taslitzky was arrested and later was sent to the concentration camp at Buchenwald, where he made clandestine drawings.