Biruta Baumane (1922–2017) was a Latvian figurative painter and one of the leading artists of her generation, which developed the so-called "harsh style", a variety of Socialist realism that dominated Latvian art in the late 1950s and the 1960s. She is best known for figure scenes, still lifes, portraits and female nudes.
Born Biruta Frīdberga to a family of teachers, she first studied with Romans Suta and then at the Art Academy of Latvia, graduating in 1948 with a thesis piece titled Examinations under professor Jānis Liepiņš. Her other professors included Valdemārs Tone, Vilhelms Purvītis and Ģederts Eliass. She also enrolled at the University of Latvia in philosophy and later philology, but did not pass her final examinations. From 1949 to 1958 she taught drawing at a school in Riga.
Her public profile grew in 1956, when her generation first presented the harsh style at the First Exhibition of Young Artists of the Latvian SSR. Her first solo show opened at the Artists' House in Riga in 1966, and since 1956 she has held more than nineteen solo exhibitions in Latvia, Moscow, Kaunas, Ottawa, Algiers and France. Her paintings are held by the Latvian National Museum of Art and the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, among other collections.
She received the title People's Artist of the Latvian SSR in 1986 and was elected honorary member of the Latvian Academy of Sciences in 1994. She died in Riga in 2017, aged 94.