Martin Saks was an artist during the Soviet era. Art exhibitions of 1935–1960 disprove the claims that artistic life of the Soviet period was suppressed by the ideology and artists submitted entirely to what was then called ‘social order’. 

In the post-war period between the mid-1950s and 1960s, the Leningrad school was approaching its apex. Artists who had graduated from the Academy (Repin Institute of Arts) in the 1930s–50s were in their prime. They were quick to present their art, they strived for experiments and were eager to appropriate a lot and to learn even more. Their time and contemporaries, with all its images, ideas and dispositions found it full expression in portraits by Lev Russov, Victor Oreshnikov, Boris Korneev, Semion Rotnitsky, Vladimir Gorb, Engels Kozlov, landscapes by Nikolai Timkov, Vladimir Ovchinnikov, Sergei Osipov, Alexander Semionov, Arseny Semionov, Nikolai Galakhov, genre paintings by Nikolai Pozdneev, Yuri Neprintsev, Yevsey Moiseenko, Andrey Milnikov. Art of this period showed extraordinary taste for life and creative work.