Ione Saldanha was a visual artist. Ione Saldanha was born in 1921 and died in 2001. Also born in 1921 and of this same generation are Armando Palamaro, Eric Leaper, Hans Georg Lenzen, Kyohei Fujita, and Roy Moyer. Born in 1921, Ione Saldanha's creative work was predominantly inspired by the 1930s. The period of the 1930s is characterised by the clashing of many political ideologies, including Marxist Socialism, Capitalist Democracy, and the Totalitarianism of both Communism and Fascism. Surrealism continued to dominate in Europe, and had influence internationally. Artists such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Riviera in Mexico, worked to integrate the ideas posed by Surrealism into their revolutionary political philosophies, developing a new kind of magic realism. In the Soviet Union, Stalin’s government needed urgent funds to implement the rapid industrialisation demanded by the first Five Year Plan. It initiated a secret strategy to sell off treasures from the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad (St. Petersburg), including a preliminary list of two hundred and fifty priceless paintings by the Old Masters, many which found their way to the collection of Andrew Mellon via the New York based art dealing company, Knoedler. Artistic output in the United States was heavily impacted at the time by the Great Depression, and a number of artists took to focusing on ideas of humbleness and the ordinary man. For the first time in US history, artists began to explore into political subjects and endeavoured to use their art to impact society. Topics such as poverty, lack of affordable housing, anti-lynching, anti-fascism, and workers' strikes were prevalent in many artists’ work.