Lytvynenko, Serhii

Lytvynenko, Serhii [Литвиненко, Сергій], b 5 October 1899 in Pyriatyn, Poltava gubernia, d 20 June 1964 in New York, New York State, USA. Sculptor. An interwar émigré from 1920, he studied at the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts (1924–9) and in Paris (1930), where he exhibited at the Salon des Tuileries. From 1930 he lived in Lviv, where he was an active portrait sculptor; executed many memorial monuments, including those to Ivan Franko, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, Vasyl Pachovsky, and soldiers who died in battle for the liberty of Ukraine; and ran a pottery studio. Until 1941 he took part in the exhibitions of the Society of Friends of Ukrainian Art and the Labor Association of Ukrainian Pictorial Artists. He was a postwar refugee and displaced person in Germany, and from 1949 he lived in New York, where he cofounded and first headed the Ukrainian Artists' Association in the USA (1952–7) and chaired the Ukrainian Literature and Art Club (1949–59). He participated in Ukrainian group exhibitions in New York (1953–62), Toronto (1953), and Syracuse (1956) and at the Carnegie Foundation in New York (1956) and the Wayne State University Art Museum in Detroit (1960), and sent his works to be exhibited in Paris at the Salon des Indépendants (1956, 1958, 1961). Three solo exhibitions of his work were held in New York (1957, 1961), and one in Philadelphia. Lytvynenko created many compositions and monuments, and over 100 bronze, plaster, or terra-cotta portraits, mainly of Galician and émigré cultural and political figures (eg, Vasyl Barvinsky, Mykola Bentsal, Mykola Kolessa, Ilarion Svientsitsky, Katria Hrynevycheva, Edvard Kozak, O. Harkavenko, Ostap Hrytsai, Ivan Mazepa, Osyp Boidunyk, Liubomyr Makarushka, Fedir Dudko, Bohdan Kravtsiv, Roman Kupchynsky, Ivan S. Kernytsky, Yevhen Malaniuk, Vadym Lesych, Emma Andiievska, Mykola Ponedilok, Mykola Shlemkevych, Volodymyr Kubijovyč, Ivan A. Rakovsky, Liubomyr Kuzma, Volodymyr Lasovsky, Mykhailo Moroz, Liudmyla Morozova, Ivan Pryima, Gen Oleksander Zahrodsky, V. Hrytsyn, Ivan E. Zhukovsky, Volodymyr Blavatsky, Mykola Fomenko). An impressionist of the post-Rodin school, he did not copy his models but tried to capture their emotional traits. A catalog of his works was published in New York in 1963.

Sviatoslav Hordynsky

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]