Sosenko, Modest

Sosenko, Modest [Сосенко, Модест], b 23 April 1875 in Porohy, Stanyslaviv county, Galicia, d 4 February 1920 in Lviv. Painter. Supported financially by Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, Sosenko studied at the Cracow Academy of Arts (1896–1900), the Munich Academy of Arts (1901–2), and the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1902–5). From 1906 he lived in Lviv but traveled often, to Italy (1908–13), Russian-ruled Ukraine (1913), and Egypt and Palestine (1914). He painted portraits, such as Portrait of a Girl (1913), Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, and Self-Portrait (1915); Hutsul genre scenes, such as Boys on a Fence (1912), Trembita Players (1914), Dance (1915), and Musicians; landscapes of Paris, the Carpathian Mountains, and southern Dalmatia; and large-scale murals, in the Lysenko Higher Institute of Music in Lviv (1915), the Dormition Church in Lviv, and the Galician village churches of Pidbereztsi, Pechenizhyn, Rykiv, Bilche Zolote, Zolochiv, Tovmach, Slavsko, Puzhnyky, Deviatnyky, and Yabloniv. Together with Yu. Makarevych he painted the iconostases in the church in Zolochiv and the cathedral in Stanyslaviv. In his icons and church paintings he combined the traditions of Byzantine art with modern artistic approaches, being one of the pioneers of the style of Neo-Byzantinism. He compiled a book of ornaments in 16th- and 17th-century Galician manuscripts from the Stauropegion Museum (see Stauropegion Institute) (1923). A catalog of his memorial exhibition was published in 1960.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]