Kramarenko, Lev

Kramarenko, Lev [Крамаренко, Лев], b 13 January 1888 in Uman, Kyiv gubernia, d 5 March 1942 in Samarkand, Uzbek SSR. Monumentalist painter and pedagogue. A graduate of the Saint Petersburg (1908) and Paris (1911) academies of art, he was a lecturer of the Kyiv State Art Institute (1923–30) and the Kharkiv Art Institute (1931–2). From 1927 he belonged to the Union of Contemporary Artists of Ukraine. He took part in decorating the clubhouse and cafeteria of the Children’s Village in Kyiv (1924), the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences conference hall in Kyiv (1930), the Serp i Molot club in Moscow (1934), and the Kyiv Russian Drama Theater (1936–7). His easel paintings include frescoes such as Working Woman (1927), still lifes such as Still Life with Samovar (1929), and landscapes of the Donets Basin, the Crimea, and Central Asia. L. Lohvynska and O. Malashenko wrote a monograph about Kramarenko in 1975.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).]