The painting Tractor Drivers, painted in 1965 by Sofija Veiverytė, was described by her contemporaries as belonging to a new trend in Soviet painting, the 'Severe Style'. This trend, which dominated the entire 1960s, was a double opposition to earlier ones: the Socialist Realism of the Stalinist period, with its ideological discipline, pomposity and sweeping realism; as well as Post-Stalinist Realism, which embraced the domestic and private spheres, often producing pictures on humorous themes, as well as landscapes and countless still-lifes. A typical example of such genre painting is Vincentas Gečas'At the Market of the Collective Farmshown in this hall. 

The artists of the Severe Style presented yet another reality in their work, which was also unreal, conjuring up a vision of heroic labour in the name of the Soviet motherland. These pictures depict work as a hard and gritty occupation, endless and unvarying, but performed by heroic people.

In Soviet Lithuania, in contrast with the art world in Moscow, the Severe Style was not very popular, andTractor Driversby Sofija Veiverytė is one of the most spectacular Lithuanian examples of it. The artist employed sparse artistic means in order to romanticise working people, and show everyday life as being full of drama; she used an ascetic colour scheme and a monumental fragmentary composition, bringing the depicted heroes closer to the viewer. The humanistic mindset and the bold distortion and painterly expressiveness characteristic of the work are comparable to the overall style and spirt of postwar European figurative art.