IEU'S FEATURED TOPICS IN UKRAINIAN ART AND ARCHITECTURE

PORTRAITURE. The artistic depiction of one or more particular persons. Although portraiture did not emerge as a separate genre in the Ukrainian art until the 16th century, its existence may be traced back to some icons: the canonical renderings of Saint Anthony of the Caves and Saint Theodosius of the Caves in the Holy Protectress of the Caves icon (ca 1288), where they have been given individualized features. In the late 15th and early 16th centuries the rendering of icon countenances became more realistic as a result of Renaissance influences (eg, the Krasiv Mother of God). In the 17th century, realistic portrayals of patrons were part of the composition of icons, such as the Holy Protectress, with a portrait of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, and the fresco Supplication (1644-6), with Metropolitan Petro Mohyla, in the Transfiguration Church in Berestove in Kyiv. Late 16th- to 18th-century religious and secular portraits at first had some characteristics of the icon, such as flattened forms, static frontal composition, and hieratic figural representation. With time, under the influence of Renaissance painting, they became three-dimensional and were painted with a linear and aerial perspective. Many portraits of patrons of shrines and churches were painted and displayed inside churches. Memorial portraits of members of the upper classes were painted on wood or metal and attached to the lids of their coffins. One of the most sensitive and beautifully modeled was that of V. Lanhysh (1635), found in the Lviv Dormition Brotherhood's portrait collection...

LEVYTSKY, DMYTRO H., b 1735 in Kyiv, d 16 April 1822 in Saint Petersburg. The most prominent portraitist of the classicist era in the Russian Empire. He acquired his basic training from his father, Hryhorii K. Levytsky, and helped him do engravings for the Kyivan Cave Monastery Press. In 1753-6 he helped his father and Aleksii Antropov decorate Saint Andrew's Church in Kyiv. From 1758 to 1761 he worked in Saint Petersburg, where he likely studied with Antropov, L.-J.-F. Lagrene, and G. Valeriani. From 1762, while living in Moscow he was a portraitist in great demand among the Russian aristocracy. He moved to Saint Petersburg in 1769, and he won the highest award at the summer exhibition in 1770 held by the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts and was elected a member of the academy. A teacher of portraiture at the academy (1771-88), he retired to Ukraine in 1788, but in 1795 he returned to Saint Petersburg to become portraitist at the imperial court. Building on the baroque, classicism, and Western European traditions, Levytsky created a school of portrait painting. His portraits reveal his expert knowledge of drawing, composition, color, and the appropriate gesture. He executed over 100 portraits. Many Ukrainian (eg, L. Myrypolsky, S. Maiatsky, L. Kalynovsky) and Russian portraitists studied with Levytsky at the academy, and his works influenced the portraiture of Volodymyr Borovykovsky...

SHEVCHENKO, TARAS, b 9 March 1814 in Moryntsi, Zvenyhorodka county, Kyiv gubernia, d 10 March 1861 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Ukraine's national bard and famous artist. Born a serf, Shevchenko became a houseboy of his owner, P. Engelhardt, who noticed Shevchenko's artistic talent, and in Saint Petersburg apprenticed him to the painter V. Shiriaev. Through his Ukrainian supporters in Saint Petersburg Shevchenko met the famous painter Karl Briullov, who donated his painting as the prize in a lottery whose proceeds were used to buy Shevchenko's freedom. Although Shevchenko is known primarily because of his poetry, he was also an accomplished artist; 835 of his art works are extant, and another 270 of his known works have been lost. Trained as an academic artist, Shevchenko moved beyond stereotypical historical and mythological subjects to realistic depictions on ethnographic themes, often expressing veiled criticism of the absence of personal, social, and national freedom under tsarist domination. His portraits have a broad social range of subjects, from simple peasants and petty officials to prominent Ukrainian and Russian cultural figures, Ukrainian historical figures, and members of the imperial nobility. They are remarkable for the way Shevchenko uses light to achieve sensitive three-dimensional modeling. He painted or sketched over 150 portraits, 43 of them of himself. He also painted and drew numerous landscapes and was very proficient in watercolor, aquatint, and etching. In 1860 the Imperial Academy of Arts recognized his mastery by designating him an academician-engraver...

GE, MYKOLA, (also: Gay, Gue), b 27 February 1831 in Voronezh, d 13 April 1894 at Ivanovskyi khutir (now the village of Shevchenko), Bakhmach county, Chernihiv gubernia. Painter of mixed French and Ukrainian origin. Having grown up on his family estate in Popelukhy near Mohyliv-Podilskyi in Podilia, Ge later studied at Kyiv University (1847) and Saint Petersburg University (1848-9), and at the Saint Petersburg Art Academy (1850-7), where he became a professor in 1863. One of the founders of the Peredvizhniki group of Russian and Ukrainian populist painters, later in his career he abandoned the group's naturalistic style. His realist paintings, including portraits, are characterized by particular psychological depth, while his late cycle of works on Biblical themes foreshadow the emergence of expressionism in European art. Initially, Ge's style of painting was influenced by his teacher Karl Briullov and the principles of academism taught at the Saint Petersburg Art Academy. In 1857 he travelled to Western Europe and in 1860 settled in Italy where he lived, with interruptions, until 1870. Influenced by works of Italian Renaissance masters, Ge continued to paint compositions on Biblical theme, but he also executed numerous landscapes and some portraits. Upon his return to Saint Petersburg in 1870, Ge painted several works on historical subjects and numerous portraits. In 1876 he returned to Ukraine where he settled at his estate in Chernihiv gubernia and remained there until his death. Throughout his life Ge took a keen interest in Ukrainian culture, particularly the works of Taras Shevchenko, whose poetry he greatly admired...

MURASHKO, OLEKSANDER, b 7 September 1875 in Kyiv, d 14 June 1919 in Kyiv. Painter. He studied at the Kyiv Drawing School (1891-4) and later, under Ilia Repin, at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts (1894-1900) where he was awarded the Academy's gold medal in 1900 for his diploma painting Burial of a Kish Otaman. As part of his prize, he was sent to study in Paris (1902-4); later he also studied at the Munich Academy of Arts. He belonged to the New Society of Artists in Saint Petersburg and participated in its annual exhibitions (1904-14). In 1907 he settled in Kyiv, where he taught painting at the Kyiv Art School (1909-12) and at his own studio (1912-17). In 1909 he exhibited his canvases in Paris, Amsterdam, and at the international exhibition in Munich where his painting A Carousel (1906) was awarded the main prize. In 1910 he had one-man exhibitions in Berlin, Koln, and Dusseldorf. From 1911 he exhibited with the Munich Sezession group. In 1916 he joined the Peredvizhniki society and became a founding member of the Kyiv Society of Artists. He was a cofounder of the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts in 1917 and served there as a professor and rector. Murashko's style evolved from the realism of the Peredvizhniki school into a vivid, colorful impressionism. His paintings and portraits have been praised by critics for their psychological depth. Murashko established an international reputation and had a strong influence on the development of Ukrainian portraiture in the 20th century. He was murdered in Kyiv by unknown assailants...

NOVAKIVSKY, OLEKSA, b 14 March 1872 in Slobodo-Obodivka (now Nova Obodivka), Olhopil county, Podilia gubernia, d 29 August 1935 in Lviv. Painter and educator. He studied painting under F. Klymenko in Odesa (1888-92) and at the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts (1892-3, 1895-1900) under J. Unierzyski and Jan Stanislawski. After graduating with a gold medal he lived in Mogila (now Nowa Huta), near Cracow, where he devoted himself to landscape painting. The first solo exhibition of his works was held in Cracow in 1911. Having attracted Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky as his patron, Novakivsky moved to Lviv in 1913 where exhibitions of his works took place in 1920 and 1921. Novakivsky also exhibited at shows of the Society for the Advancement of Ruthenian Art, the Society of Friends of Ukrainian Scholarship, Literature, and Art, the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists, and the Novakivsky Art School which he established in 1923. During his Cracow period Novakivsky painted portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and genre scenes in a naturalistic and impressionist style that resembled that of Polish contemporaries, such as Jan Stanislawski, Jacek Malczewski, and Stanislaw Wyspianski. During his early Lviv period his style evolved under the impact of the First World War to become more symbolist and expressionist. He executed in this style, among others, several masterful portraits. In the 1920s his colors grew more vivid, and his lines more dynamic, and his paintings from that period are fully expressionist in style...

PETRYTSKY, ANATOL, b 31 January 1895 in Kyiv, d 6 March 1964 in Kyiv. Ukrainian painter and stage designer. He studied at the Kyiv Art School (1912-17) and the Advanced Artistic Theatrical Workshop in Moscow (1922-4) and worked as stage designer in the Molodyi Teatr (1916-19), the Shevchenko First Theater of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, and the Franko New Drama Theater. In 1925-41 he continued to design in Ukrainian operatic and drama theaters in Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Odessa, and in 1945-59 (with interruptions) in the Kyiv Theater of Opera and Ballet. Petrytsky's early work, particularly his painting, was influenced by cubism and futurism. As a stage designer he was an adherent of theatrical conventionality and readily employed Ukrainian traditional print and ornamentation. In Les Kurbas's staging of Vertep in Molodyi Teatr, he created stylized costumes for actors who appeared in the puppet show; in Ostap Vyshnia's Vii, staged at the Franko New Drama Theater, he united screens with stylized costumes. From 1930 he specialized mostly in design for opera and ballet. Even under pressure to adhere to norms of socialist realism he preserved a national coloring in his theater and dance work. Petrytsky was also a renowned master of portraiture; among others, he painted a well-known series over 150 portraits of the leading Ukrainian cultural figures in the 1920s and 1930s (most of these works were destroyed by the Soviet authorities). He also excelled in landscape painting and graphic art...

SCULPTURE. A general term in visual art for three-dimensional representations made by carving or modeling in a variety of materials, of which stone and clay are the most widely used. Sculpture encompasses monuments and statues, which are usually large in scale and are meant for public display; decorative or ornamental works; and small forms. Basically it may be divided into works that are freestanding and works that are attached to a background (relief sculpture). In most regions of Ukraine the development of sculpture was hindered by the hostile attitude of the Orthodox church to sculptural images. Sculpture was limited to relief carvings, mostly in stone or wood. They were often limited to architectural decorations and carvings of the iconostases. During Renaissance secular buildings, especially in Galicia, were lavishly decorated with carved reliefs. It is also in Galicia that the best and most numerous examples of three-dimensional sculpture are to be found. There sculpture was incorporated into church and secular architecture and were particularly popular in Roman Catholic churches. The developement of sculpture in Ukraine during classicism was inspired by Greek rather than Roman prototypes and was more geometric and austere. However, classicism coincided with the decline of Ukrainian autonomy and the annexation of eastern and most of central Ukraine by Russia. Thus, most prominent Ukrainian sculptors in Russian-ruled Ukraine were compelled to work within the Imperial Russian context in Saint Petersburg or abroad...

PINZEL, JOHANN GEORG, b ? d ca 1761. Eighteenth-century sculptor; the leading representative of the so-called 'Lviv school' of the late-baroque and rococo sculpture. Almost nothing is known of Pinzel's origins and personal life. In the mid 1740s he appeared in Buchach at the court of the starosta of Kaniv, Mikolaj Bazyli Potocki, and from that time he worked in Galicia, often in cooperation with the architect Bernard Meretyn. The most famous of his surviving works are the rococo stone statues of Saint Louis, Saint Athanasius, and Saint George on the facade of Saint George's Cathedral in Lviv (1759-61), the monuments of Saint John of Nepomuk and Saint Anna in Buchach, and the wood statues of the side altars in the Roman Catholic churches in Horodenka (1750s) and Monastyryska (1761). The stone carvings on the facade of the Buchach town hall, the figures and bas-reliefs in the Buchach Holy Protectress Church, and the sculpted church decorations in the Trinitarian Church in Lviv are attributed to him. He carved several crucifixions, the most interesting of which was in Saint Martin's Roman Catholic Church in Lviv. His work had a powerful influence on many eighteenth-century Galician sculptors and contributed to the establishment of the Galician tradition of rococo sculpture. The Pinzel Museum, a branch of the Lviv Art Gallery housing Pinzel's sculptures, was opened in Lviv in 1996 in the former church of the Clarissines. In 2012 a large exhibition of Pinzel's work took place at the Louvre Museum in Paris...

MARTOS, IVAN, b ca 1752-4 in Ichnia, Pryluky regiment, d 17 April 1835 in Saint Petersburg. Sculptor; father of Oleksander Martos. Born into a Cossack starshyna family of the Poltava region, Martos studied at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts (1764-73) and in Rome (1774-9), where he became a proponent of Classicist style of sculpture. He taught at the Saint Petersburg Academy (1779-1835) and served as its rector (1814-35). Martos created numerous sculptures in Russia and Ukraine, including the burial monuments of Hetman Kyrylo Rozumovsky in Baturyn (1803-5) and Count Petr Rumiantsev at the Kyivan Cave Monastery (1797-1805) and statues of Count Armand-Emmanuel du Plessis duc de Richelieu in Odesa (1823-8), Emperor Alexander I in Tahanrih (1828-31), and Prince Grigorii Potemkin in Kherson (1829-36). His works are noted for their monumental, but restrained and lucid classicist form that conform to the Classical ideal of beauty and idealize the virtues of courage, patriotism, and civic duty. His work had a considerable influence on many sculptors in the Russian Empire in the first half of the 19th century...

BALAVENSKY, FEDIR, b 31 December 1864 in Liubotyn near Kharkiv, d 8 November 1943 in the village of Lianozovo, Moscow oblast. Sculptor and pedagogue. He graduated from the Kyiv Drawing School in 1896 and the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts in 1903. Balavensky lectured at art schools in Kyiv (1907-22) and at the Ceramic Technical School in Myrhorod (1922-30). Among his works are busts of Taras Shevchenko, Mykola Lysenko, Ivan Kotliarevsky, and Panteleimon Kulish; the Shevchenko monuments in Kyiv (which won second prize in a 1911 international contest and was demolished by Anton Denikin's troops in 1919), Lubny, Zolotonosha, and Myrhorod (1924-6); and the bronze gravestone bust of Marko Kropyvnytsky in Kharkiv (1914). In Kyiv Balavensky executed a number of allegorical statues on the Red Cross building (1913), co-sculpted the bas-relief Triumph of Phryne on the Iserlis building (1909), and designed the hippodrome (1916). In his sculptures Balavensky combined classicism with Ukrainian folk elements. A study of Balavensky by H. Bohdanovych was published in Kyiv in 1963...

ARCHIPENKO, ALEXANDER (ARKHYPENKO, OLEKSANDER), b 30 May 1887 in Kyiv, d 25 February 1964 in New York. Modernist sculptor, painter, and pedagogue. Archipenko studied art at the Kyiv Art School in 1902-5, in Moscow in 1906-8, and then briefly at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His first one-man show took place in 1906 in Ukraine. He moved to Paris in 1909. From 1910 he exhibited his works with a group of Cubists and in 1912 he joined a new artistic group--La Section d'Or, which numbered among its members Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Also in 1912 he opened his own school of sculpture in Paris. In the early 1910s Archipenko became the most prominent cubist sculptor of his generation, who utilized interdependent geometrical lines and introduced new concepts and methods into sculpture. In 1912 he created the first modern sculpture made of various polychromed materials (wood, glass, and metal fiber). At this time he created the first so-called sculpto-peintures (carved and painted plaster reliefs) and the first modern sculpture composed of concave forms contrasted with convex ones and incorporating elements of color and the void. From 1919 to 1921 Archipenko's works were exhibited in many cities throughout Europe. In 1920 he was given a separate pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In 1923 he moved to the United States. He established a school in New York, and in the following year, he moved it to Woodstock, New Jersey...

KAVALERIDZE, IVAN, b 26 April 1887 at Ladanskyi khutir near Romny, Kharkiv gubernia, d 3 December 1978 in Kyiv. Sculptor, film director, dramatist, and screenwriter. He studied art at the Kyiv Art School (1907-9), the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts (1909-10), and with N. Aronson in Paris (1910-11). His sculptures include busts of famous people such as F. Chaliapin (1909), and over 100 monuments in various cities of Ukraine: eg, the monument to Princess Olha in Kyiv (1911), which was destroyed in 1934; the Taras Shevchenko monuments in Kyiv (1918), Romny (1918), Poltava (1925), and Sumy (1926); and the Hryhorii Skovoroda monuments in Lokhvytsia (1922) and Kyiv (1977). In the 1920s his work was influenced by cubism, as exemplified by his monument to Artem in Artemivsk, Donetsk oblast. His group compositions, such as Bohdan Khmelnytsky Sends the Kobza Players into the Villages (1954), Amvrosii Buchma in the Role of M. Zadorozhny (1954), and Prometheus (1962)--are somewhat stylized. In 1928 he became interested in filmmaking. He scripted and directed a number of innovative historical films marked by stylization and monumentalism. A retrospective exhibit of his sculptures was held in 1962...

KRUK, HRYHORII, b 30 October 1911 in Bratyshiv, Tovmach county, Galicia, d 5 December 1988 in Munich. Sculptor. A graduate of the Lviv School of Decorative Art (1934), the Cracow Academy of Arts (1937), and the Berlin Academy of Arts (1940), he settled in Munich at the end of the Second World War and devoted himself to sculpture. By 1960 he had produced up to 200 sculptures and had established a Europe-wide reputation. His works were displayed at one-man shows: in Munich (1952, 1963, 1969), Paris (S. Badinier Gallery, 1954), London (1954), Edinburgh (1954), Bonn (1955), Rome (1957), New York and Philadelphia (1961), Vienna (1962), Toronto (1964, 1981), and Geneva (1971). Kruk was a thoroughly modern artist, who attempted to go beyond the traditional norms in search of the immediate, instinctive impression evoked by an expressive, suitably deformed form. He remained true to his peasant origins: his strong bond with the earth was expressed through the massiveness, heaviness, and brutal vitality of his figures. He sculpted many portraits, including those of Pope Paul VI and Cardinal Yosyf Slipy, and figures of peasants, monks, Cossacks, bandurists, rabbis, working women, and dancers. Kruk's sculptures have been presented in three albums. His drawings, which have been published in a special album (1980), are distinguished also by immediacy and spontaneity...

MASTER ILLIA, b and d ? A 17th-century wood engraver. A monk at Saint Onuphrius's Monastery, in the 1630s he worked as an engraver in Lviv. From 1640 to about 1680 he worked at the Kyivan Cave Monastery Press. During his career he produced about 600 woodcuts for illustrations, title pages, headpieces, and prints. His work decorated such books as the Euchologion of Petro Mohyla (Kyiv 1646), one of the finest examples of Ukrainian book design of the time; the Nomocanon (Lviv 1646); the Kyivan Cave Patericon (Kyiv 1661, 1678); and Lazar Baranovych's Mech dukhovnyi (The Spiritual Sword, 1666) and Antin Radyvylovsky's Ohorodok Marii Bohorodytsi (The Garden of Mary, the Mother of God, 1676). Two albums of his woodcuts were published in Kyiv in the 1640s, and a collection of 132 of his biblical illustrations appeared at the end of the 17th century. Illia was a master of the thematic woodcut. His illustrations depict daily life, landscapes, buildings, and famous monks of the Kyivan Cave Monastery...

TARASEVYCH, OLEKSANDER, b ca 1640, probably in Transcarpathia, d ca 1727 in Kyiv. Engraver and church figure; founder of the Ukrainian school of metal engraving. He and his brother, Leontii Tarasevych, learned engraving in Augsburg. Oleksander lived and worked in Hlusk, Belarus, and in Vilnius before returning to Ukraine in 1688 to take monastic vows at the Kyivan Cave Monastery and direct the engraving workshop at the Kyivan Cave Monastery Press. Later he served as acting archimandrite of the Svensk Monastery, near Briansk, and the Kyivan Cave Monastery. Tarasevych masterfully executed copper engravings depicting scenes from the New Testament, heraldic compositions, and portraits of Catholic and Orthodox saints and contemporary Ukrainian and Belarusian hierarchs, Cossack colonels, and Polish and Lithuanian monarchs and nobles. In Vilnius and Kyiv he trained many professional engravers. Books and albums from his personal library were used as instructional materials in the workshops of the Kyivan Cave Monastery in the 18th and 19th centuries...

TARASEVYCH, LEONTII, b ca 1650, probably in Transcarpathia, d 1710 in Kyiv. Master engraver. He and his brother, Oleksander Tarasevych, learned engraving in Augsburg at the workshop of B. and P. Kilian. In 1680-8 he worked in Vilnius, where he engraved illustrations for the Basilian, Franciscan, and Jesuit presses there. From 1688 he worked in Ukraine, first in Chernihiv and then in Kyiv at the Kyivan Cave Monastery Press under the patronage of Metropolitan Varlaam Yasynsky. Tarasevych engraved portraits of prominent Ukrainians, Poles, and Russians, including Hetman Ivan Mazepa; portrayals of the Catholic and Orthodox saints; heraldic and corporation crests; theses of scholarly disputes at the Vilnius Academy and Kyivan Mohyla Academy, decorated with many symbols, allegories, and saints; and book illustrations, notably 45 engravings for the Kyivan Cave Patericon printed by the Kyivan Cave Monastery Press in 1702. Tarasevych helped establish the art of copper engraving in Ukraine and created some of the best works in Ukrainian baroque graphic art...

SCHYRSKY, IVAN, b ca 1650, most likely in the Chernihiv region, d 1714 in Liubech, Chernihiv regiment. Baroque engraver. He studied engraving under Oleksander Tarasevych at the Vilnius Academy Press (1677-80) and theology and literature at the academy. He worked as a master engraver in Vilnius and then in Chernihiv and Kyiv, where he also taught poetics at the Kyivan Mohyla College. In 1686 he took monastic vows at the Kyivan Cave Monastery, and soon afterward he cofounded the Saint Anthony of the Caves Monastery in Liubech. Shchyrsky created over 100 masterful copper engravings. Those from his Vilnius period included copies of the Czestochowa and other miraculous icons, coats of arms (eg, for Adam Kysil), and pictures of various saints. During his time in Ukraine he created many fine, detailed engravings: illustrations for religious and panegyrical books, coats of arms, the famous engraving Labarum triumphale (1698) for the poetic thesis honoring the rector of the Kyivan Mohyla College; a portrait of Metropolitan Varlaam Yasynsky (1707), and others...

ZUBRYTSKY, NYKODYM, b 1688 in the Lviv region, d 1724. Engraver. He worked for the presses in the Krekhiv Monastery, Lviv (1691-1702), and the Pochaiv Monastery (1704) before being invited by Hetman Ivan Mazepa to Kyiv to work in the Kyivan Cave Monastery Press (1705-12). He later moved to Chernihiv and worked for the Chernihiv Press (1712-24). Almost 400 of his engravings have been preserved, including 67 illustrations and ornaments etched in copper for the illustrated philosophical-moralistic book Ifika iieropolitika (1712), some illustrations and ornaments for an edition of the New Testament (1717), and the famous print Turkish Siege of Pochaiv (1704). The themes of his genre prints were often taken from folk stories and legends...

LEVYTSKY, HRYHORII K., b ca 1697 in Maiachka, Poltava regiment, d 19 May 1769 in Maiachka. Baroque master engraver and painter. Levytsky studied engraving in Wroclaw (until 1735). From ca 1738-41 he was an Orthodox priest in Maiachka and continued to do engravings for the Kyivan Cave Monastery Press. Over 40 of his engravings illustrate the press's Gospel (1737), Psalter (1737), and Apostolos (1737-8 and 1752), the title pages and ornamentation of Kyivan Mohyla Academy students' theses in verse. He also prepared four engraved boards for Mykhail Kozachynsky's collection of theses on Aristotle's philosophy (Lviv 1745), containing portraits, coats of arms, cartouches, allegories, symbols, views of Kyiv's architectural monuments, genre scenes, and Oleksii Rozumovsky's family tree. In 1753-6, together with his son, (later famous portraitist) Dmytro H. Levytsky, and Aleksei Antropov, Levytsky painted rococo murals inside Saint Andrew's Church in Kyiv...

LOSENKO, ANTIN, b 10 August 1737 in Hlukhiv, Nizhyn regiment, d 4 December 1773 in Saint Petersburg. Painter; a leading exponent of historical painting in the classicist style. He studied in the Hlukhiv Singing School and was brought to Saint Petersburg to sing in the imperial court choir in the late 1740s. After his voice changed, he was sent to study art under Ivan Argunov (1753-8) and at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts (1758-60). Recognized for his exceptional talent, Losenko was promised a bursary to study in Paris where he arrived in 1760 and studied under Jean II Restout. In Paris Losenko painted his first masterpiece The Miraculous Draught of Fishes (1762). In 1766-9 Losenko studied in Rome where he became particularly interested in Rafael's paintings. After he was awarded several medals from the Paris Academy of Arts, Losenko's achievements were recognized in Saint Petersburg. He became a member of and professor at the Saint Petersburg Academy in 1770, served as its director (1772-3), and wrote its textbook on human proportions (1772). Losenko's oeuvre includes paintings on biblical and mythological themes; paintings on historical themes, such as The Holy Apostle Andrew (1769) and Grand Prince Volodymyr and Rohnida (1770); portraits of prominent personalities; a self-portrait; and approximately 200 drawings. Losenko introduced to the art of the Russian Empire the classicist pompier style of painting and was the first painter to depict in this style, in addition to the traditional mythological and biblical motifs, also themes from the history of Kyivan Rus' (in his painting of Grand Prince Volodymyr the Great and Rohinda)...

USTYIANOVYCH, KORNYLO, b 1839 in Vovkiv, Lviv district, Galicia, d 22 July 1903 in Dovhe, Stryi county, Galicia. Painter, writer, and journalist; founding member of the Shevchenko Society (1873). After studying at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts (1858-63) he worked in Vienna and throughout Galicia and Bukovyna, where he painted icons for over 50 churches, 15 iconostases, 11 church murals, and 7 religious canvases. Among his 40 portraits are ones of Mykola Ustyianovych, Stepan Kachala, Yuliian Lavrivsky, and Anatol Vakhnianyn. He also did paintings on historical themes, such as Prince Vasylko of Terebovlia (1866), Shevchenko in Exile (1880), Nestor the Chronicler (1901), Yaroslavna's Lament, Cossack Battle (1890), and Hetman Ivan Mazepa at a Dnipro Crossing (1903); ethnographic paintings, such as Boiko Couple and Hutsul; and a few landscapes. His portrait drawings of Galician princes were printed in the journal Pryiatel' ditei (1881-3). Ustyianovych's works conform to the principles of academism but reveal a romantic bent. Ustyianovych's first poems were written in yazychiie and published in 1861. During his studies in Vienna he evolved from a Pan-Slavist into a Ukrainian populist. From 1872 he contributed articles, humorous feuilletons, accounts of his travels, and several stories in the Ukrainian vernacular to Galician periodicals. He worked as a scenery designer for the Ruska Besida Theater in Lviv, and his tragedies Iaropolk Sviatoslavych (1877) and Oleh Sviatoslavych (1876) were performed there (1878, 1883)...

REPIN, ILIA, b 5 August 1844 in Chuhuiv, Zmiiv county, Kharkiv gubernia, d 29 September 1930 in Kuokkala, Finland. Painter; full member of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts from 1893. He studied in Saint Petersburg under Ivan Kramskoi (1863-4) and then at the Academy of Arts (1864-71), which granted him a scholarship to study in Italy and France (1873-6). For many years he lived in Saint Petersburg and served as a professor (1894-1907) at and the rector (1898-9) of the Academy of Arts, where his students included the Ukrainian painters Mykola Pymonenko, Oleksander Murashko, Fotii Krasytsky, and Semen Prokhorov. From 1900 Repin lived in Kuokkala in Finland. A good part of his work consists of genre paintings. Some of the works show his attachment to Ukraine, its people, and its history, among them the famous painting The Zaporozhian Cossacks Write a Letter to the Turkish Sultan (1880-91), Evening Party (1881), Haidamakas (1898-1917), Black Sea Freebooters (1908), and Hopak (1926-30, unfinished). He painted many portraits of Russian and Ukrainian cultural figures, including Mykola I. Murashko, Arkhyp Kuindzhi, Mykola Kostomarov, Ivan Kramskoi, Vasyl V. Tarnovsky, Taras Shevchenko, and Dmytro Bahalii; did illustrations for editions of the works of Nikolai Gogol (Mykola Hohol) and for his friend Dmytro Yavornytsky's book on Zaporozhian Sich; and painted and sketched many Ukrainian landscapes and inhabitants. Although Repin was a realist, his rich colors and restless lines often produce an almost expressionistic effect. Some of his paintings show the influence of impressionism and symbolism...

VASYLKIVSKY, SERHII, b 19 October 1854 in Izium, Kharkiv gubernia, d 7 October 1917 in Kharkiv. Painter and art scholar. He studied at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts (1876-85) and in France (1886-8). He also painted in Italy, Spain, northern Africa, and Britain. After settling in Kharkiv in 1888, he was active in Ukrainian artistic circles and headed the architectural and art society there. He produced over 3,000 realist and impressionist works, but many of them perished in museum fires during the Second World War. They include a few portraits; historical paintings, such as Zaporozhian Skirmish with Tatars (1892), Cossacks in the Steppe (1915), and Cossack Campaign (1917); genre paintings, and many landscapes, such as Cossack Meadow (1893), Dnipro Floodplains (1896), and Along the Donets (1901). In 1901-8 Vasylkivsky painted murals and ornamental wall panels for the Poltava Zemstvo Building, which perished in the Second World War; they included The Chumak Romodan Route, The Cossack Holota, and The Election of Colonel Martyn Pushkar. He copublished, with Mykola Samokysh, an album of Ukrainian folk ornamental motifs (1912), for which he painted over 100 designs, and an album on Ukrainian antiquity (1900, text by Dmytro Yavornytsky), for which he did 27 historical portraits...

SLASTION, OPANAS, b 14 January 1855 in Berdiansk, Tavriia gubernia, d 24 September 1933 in Myrhorod, Poltava okruha. Painter, illustrator, architect, art scholar, ethnographer, and kobzar. After graduating from the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts (1882) he worked as an artist for the Ministry of Defense in Saint Petersburg (1887-1900), where he was able to study materials on the Ukrainian Cossacks, and presided over the Ukrainian Club in the capital (1897-1900). In 1883-5 he did 55 pen drawings for the 1886 Saint Petersburg edition of Taras Shevchenko's epic poem 'Haidamaky.' His painted genre scenes, landscapes, and historical paintings. From 1900 to 1928 he taught at the Myrhorod Arts and Crafts School and created illustrations for more of Shevchenko's poems. For many years Slastion wandered about Ukraine, painting landscapes, drawing architectural monuments, collecting folklore and folk art, and writing down the folk songs and historic songs performed by kobzars. He became a skilled performer of Cossack dumas on the bandura. His gallery of kobzars in Left-Bank Ukraine, drawn from 1875 to 1928, was not published until 1961. From the ethnographic materials Slastion collected he prepared albums on Ukrainian and Zaporozhian antiquities, folk dress, folk ornaments, embroidery, wood carvings, ceramics, and architecture. In 1910–13 he designed dozens of village public buildings in the Ukrainian 'folk style' of architecture...

IVASIUK, MYKOLA, b 28 April 1865 in Zastavna, Bukovyna, d 25 November 1937 in Kyiv. Realist painter. A student of the Vienna (1884-9) and Munich (1890-6) art academies, he organized the first Ukrainian art school in Chernivtsi (1899-1908), then worked in Lviv, Vienna, and Prague. His most important works deal with historical themes: Khmelnytsky at Zboriv (1893), The Battle of Khotyn (1903), Khmelnytsky's Entry into Kyiv (1912), and Bohun at Berestechko (1919). His painting Khmelnytsky's Entry into Kyiv became particularly popular in Western Ukraine and thousands of color reproductions of it were printed. He also painted a large number of genre scenes and portraits (of Olha Kobylianska, Yurii Fedkovych, Ivan Franko, Taras Shevchenko, Oleksander Myshuha, and self-portraits). Ivasiuk is a representative of the academic style of the Vienna-Munich school at the end of the 19th century. Themes from the Ukrainian Cossack period, which is prominent in Ivasiuk's work, was popular at the time in Polish and Russian painting. In 1925 he accepted an invitation to teach at the Kyiv State Art Institute and moved to Soviet Ukraine. After working for several years in Kyiv, he was arrested in November 1937 by the NKVD on the wave of the Yezhov terror and executed...

BOICHUK, MYKHAILO, b 30 October 1882 in Romanivka, Ternopil county, d 13 July 1937 in Kyiv. Influential Ukrainian modernist painter, graphic artist, and teacher. Boichuk studied at Yuliian Pankevych's art studio in Lviv (1898), a private art school in Vienna (1899), and the Cracow Academy of Arts (1899-1905). He continued his studies in Munich, Vienna, and Paris. In 1909 he founded his own studio-school in Paris, at which his future wife Sofiia Nalepinska, Mykola Kasperovych, and other painters studied. After the Revolution of 1917 Boichuk lived in Kyiv. There he became a founding professor of the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts, taught monumental art at the academy, and was briefly its rector. In 1925 he was one of the founders of the Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine. Boichuk formed a school of monumental painting, which continued to develop in Ukraine into the 1930s. Arrested by the NKVD in November 1936 on the charge of being an 'agent of the Vatican,' he was executed together with his students Ivan Padalka and Vasyl Sedliar...

SEDLIAR, VASYL, b 12 April 1899 in Zhorzhivka, Poltava gubernia, d 13 July 1937 in Kyiv. Painter and graphic artist. Sedliar studied at the Kyiv Art School (1915-19) and then at the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts under Mykhailo Boichuk. He worked on large-scale murals, illustrated books, designed packaging, and produced ceramic works. Together with Oksana Pavlenko and other painters, he executed murals on the walls of auditoriums of the Kyiv Institute of Plastic Arts (1924) and at the Mezhyhiria Ceramics Tekhnikum (1924). Sedliar was the director of the Mezhyhiria Art and Ceramics Tekhnikum (1923-30). He was one of the founders of the Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine. As art critic, Sedliar opposed the official Soviet theory that argued the crucial influence of Russian realist painting on the development of Ukrainian art. He was arrested by the NKVD in November 1936, charged with terrorist activity and later executed together with Boichuk and Ivan Padalka. The majority of his works, including thousands of paintings, were destroyed...

PADALKA, IVAN, b 27 October 1894 in Zhornoklovy, Zolotonosha county, Poltava gubernia, d 13 July 1937 in Kyiv. Painter, muralist, and graphic artist. He studied at the Kyiv Art School (1913-17) and under Mykhailo Boichuk and Vasyl H. Krychevsky at the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts (1917-20). A member of the Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine in the 1920s, he taught at the Myrhorod (1920-1) and Mezhyhiria (1921-5) ceramics tekhnikums, the Kharkiv Art Institute (1925-34), and the Kyiv State Art Institute (1934-6). Under M. Boichuk's direction, in 1919, he took part in creating the 14 murals at the Lutsk regimental army barracks in Kyiv and, in 1933-5, the fresco 'Rest' at the Kharkiv Chervonozavodskyi Ukrainian Drama Theater. He also did woodcuts, portraits of Petro Panch and Oksana Pavlenko, and numerous genre paintings. His paintings and prints were influenced by the icon and lubok pictures traditions. One of the leading representatives of Boichukism, Padalka was arrested by the NKVD in September 1936 and later executed...

BOICHUK, TYMOFII, b 27 September 1896 in Romanivka, Ternopil county, d 1922 in Kyiv. Modernist painter and graphic designer. In 1914 he left his village to live with his much older and more famous brother, Mykhailo Boichuk, and to work with him and Mykola Kasperovych on the restoration of the iconostasis in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Lemeshi, Chernihiv region. After the February Revolution of 1917 the two brothers lived in Kyiv. There Tymofii studied at the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts and his brother's monumental-painting workshop (1917-22), and participated in the painting of frescoes in the Lutsk regimental army barracks in Kyiv (1919). Under his brother's supervision he created large-scale paintings in the Kyiv Theatre of Opera and Ballet for the First Congress of Regional Executive Committees (1919). His other paintings include Two Women Selling Seeds (1916), and, in 1919-20, Planting Potatoes, In the Pasture (now at the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow), and In the Cobbler's Shop. Boichuk died of tuberculosis...

PAVLENKO, OKSANA, b 12 February 1895 in Valiava, Cherkasy county, Kyiv gubernia, d 21 April 1991 in Moscow. Painter. In 1914 she began her studies at the Kyiv Art School under Fotii Krasytsky and Fedir Krychevsky. In 1917 she enrolled in the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts and studied under Mykhailo Boichuk. She continued her studies in Boichuk's Workshop of Monumental Painting at the Kyiv Institute of Plastic Arts (1918-22). In 1919 she was part of Boichuk's team that decorated the Lutsk regimental army barracks in Kyiv (destroyed in 1922). She also took part in the experimental fresco painting on the walls of auditoriums of the Kyiv Institute of Plastic Arts (these frescos were destroyed in 1934). While teaching painting, drawing, and ceramics at the Mezhyhiria Tekhnikum (1923-9) she painted frescoes there. In 1929 she moved to Moscow where she taught in the ceramics faculty of the Moscow Higher State Artistic and Technical Institute (1929-31) and, later, in several other schools. Her memoirs about Mykhailo Boichuk were published in 1987...

SAHAIDACHNY, YEVHEN, b 22 June 1886 in Kherson, d 21 August 1961 in Kosiv, Ivano-Frankivsk oblast. Painter, scenery designer, and teacher. He was educated in Saint Petersburg where he belonged to several avant-garde art goups. In 1911 he traveled to Lviv to work with Mykhailo Boichuk who had a powerful influence on Sahaidachny's development as an artist. Upon his return to Russia in 1912, Sahaidachny exhibited his paintings with the group of leftists avant-garde painters and worked as a designer for Saint Petersburg theaters. He continued to work on stage design in Kyiv after moving to the city in 1917. In 1917 he became a member of the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts, and from 1922 he lectured at the Kyiv State Art Institute, the Mezhyhiria Ceramics Tekhnikum, and several other institutions. He was a member of the Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine. After the Second World War Sahaidachny moved to Chernivtsi and, in 1947, to Kosiv where he taught at the Kosiv School of Applied Art...

EKSTER, ALEXANDRA (also Exter; nee Grigorovich), b 6 January 1882 in Bialystok, Hrodna gubernia, d 17 March 1949 in Fontenay-aux-Roses near Paris, France. Avant-garde painter and theatrical set designer and costume designer working within the currents of cubism, cubo-futurism, suprematism, and constructivism. In 1906 she graduated from Kiev Art School where she studied under Mykola Pymonenko together with, among others, Oleksander Bohomazov and Alexander Archipenko. From 1908 to 1924 she intermittently lived in Kyiv, Saint Petersburg, Odesa, Paris, Rome, and Moscow, but she played a particularly important role on the Kyiv art scene. Her painting studio grouped Kyiv's artistic and intellectual elite. In Paris, Ekster was a personal friend of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Gertrude Stein. In 1914, she participated in the Salon des Independants exhibitions together with Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Archipenko, Vadym Meller, Sonia Delaunay-Terk and other artists. Exter's early paintings featured elements of cubism, futurism (cubo-futurism), and the Art Deco movement. Later her set designs featured elements of constructivism. In general, her art absorbed influences from a variety of sources and cultures. She was particularly fascinated, however, with the Ukrainian folk art and in 1915-6 she organized the peasant craft cooperatives in the villages Skoptsi and Verbivka which produced, among others, kilims based on Kazimir Malevich's suprematist designs. Ekster brought the colourful palette of the Ukrainian folk art into thus far monochromatic cubist paintings. Proclaiming a close affinity between the avant-garde and folk art, Ekster exhibited her works together with a Ukrainian naive artist Hanna Sobachko-Shostak and other folk painters...

BOHOMAZOV, OLEKSANDER, b 7 April 1880 in Yampil, Kharkiv gubernia, d 3 June 1930 in Kyiv. Painter. Having completed a zemstvo agricultural school in Kherson, Bohomazov entered the Kyiv Art School, where he studied under Oleksander Murashko and graduated in 1911. Among his classmates were such prominent figures as Alexander Archipenko, Alexandra Ekster, and Abram Manevich. Having begun painting under the influence of symbolism and art moderne, in 1908, together with Ekster, Davyd Burliuk, and other artists, Bohomazov took part in the exhibition Zveno (Link). In 1914 he co-organized an avant-garde artistic group Kiltse (Circle) in Kyiv and exhibited 88 of his paintings at the group's exhibition that year. His work attracted particular attention of art critics and he earned for himself the name of 'a Ukrainian Picasso.' Most notable were his works in the new style of cubo-futurism (such as The Tram, 1914), which combined the carefully structured architectonics of cubism with the dynamic chaos of futurism that undermined any attempt at traditional composition. In 1914 Bohomazov also wrote an unpublished avant-garde treatise, 'Painting and the Elements,' in which he anticipated many ideas later expressed by the abstractionists Vasilii Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich. During the late 1910s, together with Alexandra Ekster, Bohomazov organized avant-garde street paintings and performances. In the 1920s he was a member of the Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine and worked as an instructor at the Kyiv State Art Institute from 1922 to 1930. In the late 1920s, Bohomazov painted scenes of people's everyday life and work, executed in brilliant vivid colors (eg, Sawyers, 1927)...

BURLIUK, DAVYD, b 22 July 1882 in Semyrotivka, Kharkiv gubernia, d 15 January 1967 in Long Island, NY. Painter and poet, founder of futurism in the Russian Empire. He studied at the Odesa and Kazan Art Schools, Munich Royal Academy of Arts (1902-3), and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He began painting in 1904. Between 1907 and 1913 he lived in Chornianka near Kherson where his father supervised an estate which was visited by many noted artists and writers, such as W. Kandinsky, V. Maiakovsky, V. Kamensky, V. Izdebsky, A. Lentulov, M. Larionov, B. Livshitz, A. Kruchenykh, and V. Khlebnikov. It was here that an avant-garde group coalesced, first calling themselves Hylaea (after the Greek name for Scythian lands at the mouth of the Dnieper River) and then futurists. Burliuk was involved in planning and organizing all of their early exhibitions. Together with Alexandra Ekster and Oleksander Bohomazov, he organized the Link exhibition in Kyiv in 1908, and then several avant-garde exhibitions in Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Odesa, and Mykolaiv that announced the arrival of avant-garde art within the Russian Empire. During the Revolution of 1917 and civil war he traveled through Siberia, lived in Vladivostok and Japan, then moved to the United States, where he lived in New York (1922-41) and Hampton Bays (1941-67). As a painter he experimented with a number of styles, but his cult of energy and vitality, and his connection to nature remained constant. Burliuk, who was descended from a family of Zaporozhian Cossacks, began by mythologizing his steppe homeland as the source of a 'primitivism' which he admired and which drew him to the forceful, 'wild,' and direct in art. He took inspiration from Scythian artifacts collected during archeological digs, ancient sculptures called stone baby, and Cossack history...

MALEVICH, KAZIMIR, b 23 February 1878 in Kyiv, d 15 May 1935 in Leningrad. Painter, designer, and theorist. He studied at the Kyiv Drawing School (1895-7), the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (1904-5), and F. Rerberg's studio in Moscow (1905-10). Influenced at first by the Impressionists and Fauvists, he participated in avant-garde exhibitions in Moscow, at which he displayed paintings in a neoprimitivist style, cubo-futurist works, and paintings, such as An Englishman in Moscow (1914), which show the influence of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque's synthetic cubism. In 1915 Malevich launched the artistic movement of suprematism in Petrograd. He was the first modern painter to work in a purely geometric, cerebral, nonfigurative manner. In 1916 he published the journal Supremus. In the 1920s he began working in a constructivist style, in which he produced urban architectural models and furniture, textile, and china designs. He was a prolific writer and produced various theoretical works, developed new educational methods, and established original theoretical frameworks for the analysis of paintings. His works and theories influenced a number of Soviet avant-garde artists and later European avant-garde in general. In the late 1920s Malevich returned to Kyiv and taught at the Kyiv State Art Institute (1927-9), but was removed from there because of the growing opposition on the part of the central Soviet government to the avant-garde. In that time he was able to publish only 13 articles of his theories in the Kharkiv journal Nova generatsiia (1928-9). Forced out of the Kyiv State Art Institute, Malevich died in Leningrad in poverty and oblivion...

TATLIN, VLADIMIR, b 28 December 1885 in Moscow, d 31 May 1953 in Moscow. Painter, designer, and cofounder of constructivism. He grew up in Kharkiv and worked as a merchant marine. He studied art in Penza (1905-10) and at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (1909-10) and private studios in Moscow. There he took part in avant-garde exhibitions. Around 1914 he shared his studio with Oleksa Hryshchenko and began working on painterly reliefs and 'counterreliefs' inspired at first by Pablo Picasso's relief sculptures. His constructions were entirely abstract combinations of materials (wood, metals, and glass). While heading the Moscow branch of the Division of Visual Arts of the Commissariat of Education (1918-19) and chairing the Department of Material Culture at the Moscow Higher State Artistic and Technical Workshops (1919-29) he worked on his famous model of the Monument to the Third International. He then chaired the Department of Material Culture at the Academy of Arts (1920-2) and the Museum of Artistic Culture (1922-5) in Petrograd. In 1925-7 he chaired the theater, film, and photography department of the Kyiv State Art Institute. While in Kyiv he designed the cover for Mykhailo Semenko, Geo Shkurupii, and Mykola Bazhan's poetry collection (1927) and established ties with the Nova Generatsiia futurist group in Kharkiv, and these ties he maintained after his return to Moscow. He was a major exponent of avant-garde art and design of the 1910s and 1920s. His intuitive constructivism is similar to that of Vasyl Yermilov and of the set designs of Anatol Petrytsky and Vadym Meller...

YERMILOV, VASYL, b 22 March 1894 in Kharkiv, d 4 December 1967 in Kharkiv. Painter and graphic designer. He studied art in Kharkiv Art School and Moscow. In 1918 he joined the avant-garde Union of Seven group in Kharkiv. Under Soviet rule Yermilov designed posters, 'agit-trains,' street decorations, billboards, the interiors of public buildings (eg, the murals in the foyer of the Kharkiv Circus and the Red Army Club in Kharkiv), theatrical sets, displays, packaging, and journal and book covers; he also directed the art department of the All-Ukrainian Bureau of the Russian Telegraph Agency (1920-1) and taught at the Kharkiv Art Institute (1922-35). He received several international prizes for his graphic designs, including a gold medal at the 1922 Leipzig International Graphics Exhibition and an award at the 1928 Köln International Press Exhibition. While a member of the Avanhard (Avant-garde) group (1926-9) he was graphic designer of its newspaper and journal and, with Valeriian Polishchuk, the three issues of Biuleten' Avanhardu. From 1927 he was also a member of the Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine. Yermilov's synthesis of formalist esthetics, folk designs, and traditional painting methods (including egg tempera) was an important contribution to the development of Ukrainian design of the 1920s. His distinctive style of constructivist collage and typographic design, called constructive-dynamism or spiralism, developed distinctly and in parallel with Russian constructivism. Because of his formalist interests Yermilov was forced out of the Soviet art arena in the late 1930s...

TRUSH, IVAN, b 17 January 1869 in Vysotske, Brody county, Galicia, d 22 March 1941 in Lviv. Painter, community figure, and art and literary critic. After studying at the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts (1891-7) under Leon Wyczolkowski and Jan Stanislawski, he lived in Lviv where he was active in Ukrainian artistic circles and community life. A friend of Ivan Franko, he organized the Society for the Advancement of Ruthenian Art and the Society of Friends of Ukrainian Scholarship, Literature, and Art and their exhibitions; copublished the first Ukrainian art magazine, Artystychnyi vistnyk; painted many portraits for the Shevchenko Scientific Society; lectured on art and literature; and contributed articles to Ukrainian literary and art journals. Trush was an outstanding Ukrainian impressionist, noted for his original use of color. A major part of his large legacy (over 6,000 paintings) consists of landscapes, including landscapes of Crimea, Rome, Venice, Egypt, and Palestine. His many genre paintings are noted for their simplicity of composition. His gallery of 350 portraits includes ones of Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, Ivan Franko, Vasyl Stefanyk, Lesia Ukrainka, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Mykola Lysenko, and many others. The first solo show of Trush's works took place in Lviv in 1899, and a large retrospective exhibition was held posthumously there in 1941. Major collections of his work are at the National Museum and the memorial museum in his former residence in Lviv...

NOVAKIVSKY, OLEKSA, b 14 March 1872 in Slobodo-Obodivka (now Nova Obodivka), Olhopil county, Podilia gubernia, d 29 August 1935 in Lviv. Painter and educator. He studied painting under F. Klymenko in Odesa (1888-92) and at the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts (1892-3, 1895-1900) under J. Unierzyski and Jan Stanislawski. After graduating with a gold medal he lived in Mogila (now Nowa Huta), near Cracow, where he devoted himself to landscape painting. The first solo exhibition of his works was held in Cracow in 1911. Having attracted Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky as his patron, Novakivsky moved to Lviv in 1913 where exhibitions of his works took place in 1920 and 1921. In 1923 he established the Novakivsky Art School in Lviv which played a very important role in the development of Ukrainian art in Western Ukraine. During his Cracow period Novakivsky painted portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and genre scenes in a naturalistic and impressionist style that resembled that of his Polish contemporaries, such as Jan Stanislawski, Jacek Malczewski, and Stanislaw Wyspianski. During his early Lviv period his style evolved under the impact of the First World War to become more symbolist and expressionist. In the 1920s his colors grew more vivid, and his lines more dynamic, and many of his paintings from that time are fully expressionist in style. Novakivsky's oeuvre consists of over 500 oils, many of them unfinished. A memorial museum dedicated to him and his works was opened in Lviv in 1972...

KHOLODNY, PETRO, b 18 December 1876 in Pereiaslav, Poltava gubernia, d 7 June 1930 in Warsaw. Distinguished painter, by profession a chemist. A graduate of the Kyiv Drawing School, he began to exhibit his early symbolist paintings in 1910. During the Ukrainian struggle for independence (1917-20), Kholodny worked in the Ukrainian National Republic's Ministry of Education. Leaving Ukraine with the UNR government in 1920, he settled in Lviv in 1921. The subsequent period proved to be the most productive one in Kholodny's artistic career. In 1922 he helped found the Circle of Promoters of Ukrainian Art and took part in its exhibitions. He began to paint icons and churches and to design stained-glass windows. His principal works of this period are the icons and stained-glass windows of the Dormition Church in Lviv, the iconostasis and murals of the Chapel of the Greek Catholic Theological Seminary in Lviv, numerous icons of parish churches, and the stained-glass windows of the church in Mraznytsia. The basic features of his work, rooted in Ukrainian artistic traditions that grew out of the synthesis of Byzantine iconography with folk art, were compositional unity, the primacy of the line, and harmonious, warm colors. In his stained-glass windows, Kholodny juxtaposed elements of pure colored glass to achieve lightness and transparency. He also painted many portraits and some historical compositions. Kholodny's style can be described as a mature impressionism of a Ukrainian variety that is profoundly lyrical. His neo-Byzantine works, which rivaled those of Mykhailo Boichuk, revealed new potentialities of the ancient style, free of schematism or archaism. After the Soviets occupied Lviv, many of Kholodny's works were destroyed for their allegedly 'nationalist' spirit and his church murals were painted over...

KOVZHUN, PAVLO, b 3 October 1896 in Kostiushky, Ovruch county, Volhynia gubernia, d 15 May 1939 in Lviv. Noted graphic artist, painter, and art scholar. His graphic works began to appear in Kyiv journals while he was still a student at the Kyiv Art School. By 1914 his work began to attract wide attention. Sent to the front of the First World War in 1915, at the outbreak of the Revolution of 1917 he joined the Ukrainian movement in the armed forces and edited Ukrainian military newspapers. During the Ukrainian National Republic period he helped to set up the Grunt publishing house, served as secretary of Universal'nyi zhurnal, and belonged to the Muzahet artistic and literary alliance in Kyiv. Finding refuge in Poland with the remnants of the UNR Army, in 1922 Kovzhun settled in Lviv, where he became a leading figure in the artistic community. With Volodymyr Sichynsky, Petro Kholodny, Serhii Tymoshenko, and Mykola Holubets, he founded the Circle of Promoters of Ukrainian Art, and in 1931 helped organize the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists, whose journal, Mystetstvo, he edited (1932-6). His graphic art was displayed at exhibitions in Lviv, Warsaw, Prague, Brussels, Berlin, Rome, and Naples, and had a major impact on book graphics in Western Ukraine. Kovzhun ranks with Heorhii Narbut as the leading Ukrainian graphic artist of the 20th century. He was thoroughly modern and yet closely bound to Ukrainian artistic traditions. His early work was influenced by symbolism, futurism, and to some extent by Narbut, but after 1924 he developed his own style, which was at first expressionist and then constructivist. Kovzhun was also a noted muralist and painted a number of churches in a modernized neo-Byzantine style...

SELSKY, ROMAN, b 21 May 1903 in Sokal, Galicia, d 4 February 1990 in Lviv. Painter, graphic artist, and teacher; husband of Margit Selska. He studied under Oleksa Novakivsky in Lviv, graduated from the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts (1927), and made several trips to Paris, where he studied with Fernand Leger. Upon his return to Lviv in 1929, he was instrumental in establishing Artes (1929-36), an association of experimental artists, and was its first president. He taught at the Lviv Applied Arts High School (1935-47) and the Lviv Institute of Applied and Decorative Art (1947-72). Surrealist influences are apparent in his early works, such as Seashore in Hel (1932). After the Second World War, under the Soviet rule, Selsky was initially forced to paint in the style resembling socialist realism. He painted some realist landscapes and paintings depicting peasants at work. However, he abandoned that style in the late 1950s. In the late 1960s Selsky returned to painting the seashore, in works such as At the Seashore (1969), which show some influence of Leger, but especially that of the postimpressionist Pierre Bonnard. Selsky painted numerous landscapes, particularly of the Carpathian Mountains. The Carpathian environment is also reflected in his still lifes and compositions of interiors; many of them include views through windows and open doors. Except for a few realistic landscapes and somber still-life compositions from the 1940s and early 1950s, Selsky managed to avoid the narrow confines of socialist realism. His sensitive and vibrant palette and organization of flattened forms and space are in the Western European art tradition...

SELSKA, MARGIT, (also Mariia, nee Reich), b 23 June 1903 in Kolomyia, Galicia, d 3 February 1980 in Lviv. Painter; wife of Roman Selsky. She studied at the Cracow Academy of Arts (1924-5), the Vienna Academy of Arts (1926-7), and the Academie moderne in Paris (1928-30) under Fernand Leger. In the 1930s she was one of the key members of Artes (1929-36), an association of experimental artists in Lviv, as well as a member of the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists. Selska's works executed before the Second World War showed influences of constructivism (akin to Fernand Leger), cubism (especially that of Alexander Archipenko), and, to some extent, surrealism. However, most of her prewar paintings were lost during the Holocaust when her entire family was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. Her relatives perished, but Selska was saved thanks to an escape organized by the Ukrainian underground. Under the Soviet rule after the war, Selska and her husband were initially forced to paint in the style resembling socialist realism. She painted realist landscapes and paintings depicting workers and peasants at work. However, in the late 1950s she abandoned that style and painted landscapes (such as Akkerman [1959] or Crimea [1961]), portraits (such as Violinist [1960s] or A Child by the Table [1960s]), and still lifes that are grounded in the modernist esthetics, in particular that of constructivism and cubism...

PRINTMAKING. The process and art of imprinting or stamping an engraved image onto paper, cloth, or leather. Unlike engravings or lithographs, prints are not necessarily made to be printed in books but are works of art that exist independently of textual material. Early Ukrainian wood engravings of the 16th century are not prints in the strict sense of the word, because they were all printed in books. They could, however, function as prints (eg, the picture of the Evangelist Luke in the Apostolos printed in Lviv in 1574). The first prints executed on individual sheets of paper were the early-17th-century portrayals of the four Evangelists printed by Pamva Berynda at the Striatyn Press. Professional printmaking of the 17th and 18th centuries holds a special place in Ukrainian art. At that time it was developed more fully than painting, sculpture, or graphic art. Not only religious but also secular printmaking of portraits, landscapes, and still lives developed fully. The greatest printmakers of the Cossack period were Master Illia, Master Prokopii, Dionisii Sinkevych, Nykodym Zubrytsky, Oleksander Tarasevych, Leontii Tarasevych, Ivan Shchyrsky, Averkii Kozachkivsky, Ivan Myhura, and Hryhorii K. Levytsky. Ukrainian printmaking declined during the 19th century. Only Taras Shevchenko can be included among those artists who raised the level of printmaking, in both subject matter and technique. Howerver, the printmaking was reborn in the 20th century in the works of original graphic artists, such as Heorhii Narbut, Olena Kulchytska, Volodymyr Zauze, Mykhailo Zhuk, Leopold Levytsky, Vasyl Kasiian, Mykhailo Derehus, and such emigre graphic artists as Jacques Hnizdovsky...

NARBUT, HEORHII, b 9 March 1886 in Narbutivka, Hlukhiv county, Chernihiv gubernia, d 23 May 1920 in Kyiv. Painter and graphic artist. From 1906 he lived in Saint Petersburg. After studying art in Munich for several months in 1909, he returned to Saint Petersburg and became part of the Mir Iskusstva circle and gained prominence through his book covers and book illustrations (eg, for I. Krylov's fables [1912] and several stories by Hans Christian Andersen) and his neoclassical and symbolist watercolors. Having developed a keen interest in heraldry and the silhouette he illustrated and designed Russian-language editions of V. Lukomsky and V. Modzalevsky's book on 'Little Russian' heraldry (1914), the coats of arms of the Cossack hetmans (1915), Georgii Lukomsky's book on ancient Galician architecture (1915), and a book on the old estates of Kharkiv gubernia (1917). After the February Revolution of 1917 Narbut returned to Ukraine. In September 1917 he was appointed a professor at the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts in Kyiv, and in February 1918 he became its rector. There he laid the foundations for advanced art education and fostered a pleiad of graphic artists, including Oleksander Lozovsky, Pavlo Kovzhun, and Robert Lisovsky. Through his covers and graphics for postrevolutionary books and journals; his graphic designs for Ukrainian National Republic currency, postage stamps, seals, and charters; and his bookplates and series of drawings and initials illustrating the Ukrainian alphabet (1917, 1919) with Cossack, Ukrainian baroque, and folk motifs, he initiated, with Mykhailo Boichuk and Vasyl H. Krychevsky, the rebirth of the national style of Ukrainian art. Narbut died prematurely from typhus...

KULCHYTSKA, OLENA, b 15 September 1877 in Berezhany, Galicia, d 8 March 1967 in Lviv. Painter, graphic artist, master of applied arts, and pedagogue. Completing her art studies in Lviv (1901-3) and Vienna (1903-8), she taught at a gymnasium in Peremyshl (1910-38). In 1939 she joined the ethnographic department of the Museum of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Lviv. After the Second World War she taught book graphics at the Lviv Polygraphic Institute (1945-51). Most of Kulchytska's artistic work consists of oil paintings, watercolors, and illustrations, particularly of children's books. As a graphic artist she used various techniques and produced woodcuts, linocuts, copper engravings, and etchings. Among her chief oil paintings are Children in a Meadow (1908), Harvest (1913), and Children with Candles (1913). Her mastery of the woodcut and linocut techniques is evident in such print series as 'Ukrainian Writers' (1920), 'Folk Architecture' (1931), 'The Hutsul Region' (1935), and 'Dovbush' (1940). Her etchings, such as The Moloch of War (1915) or Vengeance (1917), are a powerful condemnation of the exploitation of Ukrainian peasants and of war. She has illustrated numerous books. Her skillful blending of modernist Viennese trends with Ukrainian folk art made her art extremely popular. From 1908 Kulchytska took part in numerous exhibitions in Lviv, Cracow, Warsaw, Poznan, Kyiv (1911, 1913), Poltava, Vienna, Berlin, Kharkiv, and Prague. In 1950 she donated her own collection consisting of over 3,000 of her works (paintings, prints, and kilims) to the Lviv Museum of Ukrainian Art...

KASIIAN, VASYL, b 1 January 1896 in Mykulyntsi, Stanyslaviv county, Galicia, d 26 June 1976 in Kyiv. Graphic artist of the realist school; from 1947 full member of the USSR Academy of Arts and the Academy of Architecture of the Ukrainian SSR. A graduate of the Prague Academy of Arts (1926), he assumed Soviet citizenship and in 1927 immigrated to the Ukrainian SSR. A prolific and versatile artist, he excelled in all the graphic art techniques--woodcut, copper engraving, linocut, and lithography--as well as pen drawing and watercolors. During his Prague period Kasiian dealt with social themes, depicting the poverty and hard life of the lower classes in Europe. Coming to Ukraine, he created several series of propaganda woodcuts and copper engravings in the socialist-realist style about collective farms, the building of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station, mining in the Donbas, and the building of the Kyiv Metro. He also devoted a series of engravings to Vladimir Lenin and to Joseph Stalin (almost 50 works). Following Nikita Khrushchev's condemnation of the personality cult, Kasiian destroyed whole portfolios of his engravings of Stalin. The most valuable part of his rich, technically flawless legacy consists of the works on industrial themes, which document the economic transformation of Ukraine, and the illustrations to works by Taras Shevchenko, Lesia Ukrainka, Ivan Franko, Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Vasyl Stefanyk, and Olha Kobylianska. Socialist realism, which Kasiian defended in his articles, led him to adopt elements of naturalism and had a detrimental effect on his later work..

HNIZDOVSKY, JACQUES, b 27 January 1915 in Pylypche, Borshchiv county, Galicia, d 8 November 1985 in New York. Painter, graphic artist, and book designer. Having studied at the academies of art in Warsaw and Zagreb, he settled in the United States in 1949. In his paintings and prints he reduced objects to their primeval structure of lines and forms, and called this style 'simplified realism.' Among his oil paintings are multifigural compositions such as The Homeless (1947), also known as Displaced Persons, portraits, landscapes, numerous still lifes, and entire series on the Paris metro, New York skyscrapers, and the Bronx brownstones. The same precision and devotion to detail is displayed in his woodcuts, which number close to 250. They include some extremely intricate works, eg, Field (1962) or Sunflower (1965). Starting with a style close to Durer's, he absorbed elements of old Ukrainian baroque engravings, Chinese and Japanese woodcuts, and various modern tendencies, and molded them into a personal style that brought him international recognition. Hnizdovsky illustrated many books, including The Tale of Ihor's Campaign (1950) and Marie Bloch's Ukrainian Folk Tales (1964). He also designed several hundred book covers and a large number of bookplates. One-man exhibitions of his work have been held at leading galleries in New York, New Orleans, Paris, and London. His works are included in the permanent collections of art museums (Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia), museums, galleries (Winnipeg, Addison), universities (Duke, Delaware), and libraries (New York Public Library, Library of Congress), and in numerous private collections...

YAKUTOVYCH, HEORHII, b 14 February 1930 in Kyiv, d 5 September 2000 in Kyiv. Graphic artist; corresponding member of the USSR (now Russian) Academy of Arts from 1983. He studied at the Kyiv State Art Institute (1948-54) under Vasyl Kasiian and Ilarion Pleshchynsky and taught there in 1954-7 and 1961-2. A representative of the shistdesiatnyky generation, Yakutovych was a master of different graphic techniques from woodcut to metal engraving. He blended realism with formal experimentation to create a thoroughly modernist impression. The influence of Hutsul folk art is evident in his use of geometric forms. Yakutovych illustrated editions of Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky's novels Fata morgana (1957) and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1966), Ivan Kocherha's plays Yaroslav the Wise and Svichka's Wedding (1962), Ivan Franko's novel Zakhar Berkut (1972), the epic The Tale of Ihor's Campaign (1977), Vasyl Stefanyk's story collection The Maple Leaves (1978), the epic The Tale of Bygone Years (1981), and Nikolai Gogol's Vii (1985). Many of his prints have been widely reproduced. They include the series 'Ancient Ukrainian Music' (1957), 'Ivan Vyshensky' (1959), 'Oleh Horyslavych' (1959), and 'Arkan' (1960) and two series of postcards on folk-song themes (1960, 1963). Yakutovych served as artistic consultant for the films Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965; director, Serhii Paradzhanov) and Zakhar Berkut (1971; director, Leonid Osyka)...

PRIMITIVE (NAIVE) ART. Pictures by artists without professional training who work in a way that differs from the traditional or avant-garde with respect to manner of depiction and techniques of paint application. Such pictures show an idiosyncratic naivete in the treatment and depiction of the subject matter and the use of the medium. Icons on glass popular from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries in Western Ukraine are charming examples of primitive art, as are folk icons on panels created by artists who took inspiration from professionally painted models. The best known Ukrainian primitive artist is Nykyfor, who rendered churches, other buildings, saints, and people in captivating compositions. Others whose work was influenced by Ukrainian folk art and ornamentation include Kateryna Bilokur, who painted flower fantasies, and Mariia Pryimachenko and Hanna Sobachko-Shostak, both of whom portrayed fantastic creatures and plant motifs in vivid colors. Of the Ukrainian primitive artists working outside their homeland, Dmytro Stryjek in Canada has received the greatest recognition...

SOBACHKO-SHOSTAK, HANNA, b 15 December 1883 in Skoptsi (now Veselynivka), Pereiaslav county, Poltava gubernia, d 3 December 1965 in Cherkizovo, Moscow oblast. Master of primitive art and folk decorative painting. In 1910 she began painting embroidery and kilim patterns in A. Semigradova and Ye. Prybylska's folk-art workshop in Skoptsi. From 1932 she lived in exile in Cherkizovo and designed embroidery patterns for the local cloth factory. Her decorative paintings, with floral and faunal motifs, are distinguished by their dynamic composition, asymmetry, and use of intense colors. Sobachko's work was exhibited in Kyiv (1913, 1919, 1963, 1965), Saint Petersburg (1913), Moscow (1915, 1927, 1936), Paris (1913, 1937), Berlin (1914, 1922), and New York (1939). A book about her by H. Miestiechkin was published in Kyiv in 1965...

NYKYFOR [real name: Drovniak, Epifanii], b 21 May 1895 in Krynytsia (Krynica), Nowy Sacz county, Galicia, d 10 October 1968 in Krynytsia. Lemko naive painter. A deaf son of a beggar woman, he supported himself from his teens by begging for food or a few coins in exchange for his small drawings and watercolors. He was discovered by Ukrainian and Polish artistic circles in the 1930s. With the help of Roman Turyn, one of his earliest discoverers, his works were exhibited in Paris in 1932. Over 100 of his works were included in an exhibition of self-taught artists held by the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists in Lviv in 1938. Like other Lemkos, he was deported to northern Poland by the Polish authorities during Operation Wisla after the Second World War. He returned illegally twice to Krynytsia before he was allowed to stay. In the 1950s and 1960s his works were exhibited in London, Rome, Belgrade, Amsterdam, Paris, Brussels, Florence, Liege, Haifa, Vienna, Frankfurt, Chicago, Basel, Rotterdam, Lviv, Kyiv, and New York. In his lifetime Nykyfor produced over 30,000 small color drawings or watercolors depicting existing and imaginary Lemko buildings, churches, landscapes, saints, and individuals (often himself). In style some of his works belong to the Lemko tradition of folk icon painting on glass; others are typical of naive art in general...

BILOKUR, KATERYNA, b 7 December 1900 in the village of Bohdanivka, Kyiv gubernia, d 10 June 1961 in Bohdanivka. Self-taught master of primitive art and decorative folk painting. Bilokur painted flowers and fruits in gardens, orchards, and fields; still lifes; and several portraits and self-portraits. Her paintings display originality, vivid coloring, and great attention to detail. In 1954 three paintings by Bilokur were exhibited at an international exhibition in Paris where, among others, they were highly praised by Pablo Picasso. Her work is preserved at the Kyiv Museum of Ukrainian Decorative Folk Art. Albums of her paintings were published in Kyiv in 1959, 1975, and 2010...

PRYIMACHENKO, MARIA, b 30 December 1908 in Bolotnia, Radomyshl county, Kyiv gubernia, d 18 August 1997 in Bolotnia, Ivankiv raion, Kyiv oblast. Famous folk naive painter. She has lived in Bolotnia (now in the Chornobyl nuclear accident zone) throughout her life and has done over 500 primitive paintings, murals, illustrations to verses and children's stories, and ceramic decorations. Distinguished by their vivid colors, they include the painting series 'Bolotnia's Animals' (1935–41), 'For People's Enjoyment' (1960–6), and the more recent 'Chornobyl Cycle'; murals, such as Peahen (1936), Cossack Grave (1962), and Bears in the Apiary (1965); and illustrations to several children's poetry books by Mykhailo Stelmakh. Her works have been displayed at Soviet and international exhibitions. Albums of her paintings were published in 1971 and 1985...

STRYJEK, DMYTRO, b 5 November 1899 in Lanivtsi, Borshchiv county, Galicia, d 7 March 1991 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Naive painter; one of the most prominent primitive artists in Canada. A resident of Canada since 1923, he began painting seriously after his retirement in 1965. After moving to Saskatoon in 1967, he began exhibiting and attracted the attention of curators and art historians. His subjects include landscapes, flowers, birds, and religious and historical events, often those remembered from his youth in Ukraine. His portraits include some famous Ukrainians, such as Taras Shevchenko, Lesia Ukrainka, Hetman Ivan Mazepa, Symon Petliura, and Cardinal Yosyf Slipy, and world leaders, such as Queen Elizabeth II, Indira Ghandi, John Diefenbaker, and Pierre Trudeau. Although Stryjek lived most of his life in Canada, his vision is deeply rooted in his Ukrainian environment and the Ukrainian community in Saskatoon. His paintings are astonishingly inventive and hauntingly lyrical (eg, the series 'Hill of Flowers'). A brilliant colorist, Stryjek achieves a freshness that seems inexhaustible, and challenges accepted ideas of untutored painting as separate from mainstream art. A monograph about him by Peter Millard was published in 1988 in conjunction with a cross-Canada traveling exhibition of Stryjek's paintings...

SOCIALIST REALISM. The only officially sanctioned so-called 'creative method' in Soviet art and literature from the early 1930s. The term socialist realism and its theoretical underpinnings were officially adopted by the First Congress of Writers of the USSR in August 1934, when the Soviet Writers' Union was established. Those active in other fields (theater, painting, sculpture, cinema, music) were also organized into single artistic unions, and also adopted socialist realism as the basic creative method. According to the resolution of the first Writers' Union congress: 'socialist realism demands a true, historical, and concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development. The realism and historical concreteness of the artistic rendering of reality must be tied to the ideological re-education and training of workers in the spirit of socialism.' As applied, however, those principles had a very narrow meaning. The 'true depiction of reality in its revolutionary development' meant that art and literature were to serve as glorifying illustrations of the policies of the Communist Party, and to portray what was hoped for in such a way that it seemed real. Deviations into truly realistic portrayals of Soviet reality and its deficiencies were attacked as 'slavishness to facts' or 'anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.' Socialist realism's need to hide falsity of content gave rise to certain characteristics of style in all Soviet art and literature. In painting it resulted in excessive pathos, photographism (with gestures and motion depicted as if frozen by photographs), and the tendency to dwell on luxurious uniforms and interiors...

UNION OF ARTISTS OF UKRAINE. The only official organization of artists and art scholars that existed in Soviet Ukraine after the Party banned all other artistic organizations in 1932 and set up an organizational committee. In 1938 the union was officially founded at its first congress. Subsequent congresses were held every five or six years from 1956. The union was divided into sections (painting, sculpture, poster design, graphic art, large-scale decorative art, applied art, artistic design, stage design) and commissions (art criticism and art scholarship). The Art Fund of the Ukrainian SSR was administered by it. The union was divided into 20 oblast organizations. In 1983 their combined membership was 2,200. The union's official organs have been Maliarstvo i skul'ptura, later Obrazotvorche mystetstvo (1935-41), and then Obrazotvorche mystetstvo (1970-). Its presidents have been I. Boichenko (1938-41), Oleksandr S. Pashchenko (1941-4), Vasyl Kasiian (1944-9), Oleksii Shovkunenko (1949-51), M. Khmelko (1951-5), Mykhailo Derehus (1955-62), Vasyl Borodai (1968-82), Oleksander Skoblykov (1982-3), Oleksandr Lopukhov (1983-89), and Volodymyr Chepelyk (elected in 1990). In the late 1980s the union freed itself of Party control, and it no longer propagates socialist realism as the only artistic approach. Many of Ukraine's talented artists have never been members of the union. In 1998 the union was granted the status of a national union and changed its name to the National Union of Artists of Ukraine...

TROKHYMENKO, KARPO, b 25 October 1885 in Sushchany, Vasylkiv county, Kyiv gubernia, d 1 October 1979 in Kyiv. Painter. He studied at the Kyiv Art School (1902-10), the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (1906-7), and under Mykola Samokysh at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts (1910-16). He worked in Kyiv as an instructor for the Commission for the Protection of Historical and Artistic Monuments (1918-20) and taught at the Kyiv Art School (1918-19), the Kyiv Artistic-Industrial Professional School and Kyiv Art Tekhnikum (1926-33), and the Kyiv State Art Institute (1933-74). He belonged to the Association of Artists of Red Ukraine (1926-32) and became vice-chairman of the Arts Council of the Ministry of Education of the Ukrainian SSR. Trokhymenko worked in watercolors, oils, and pencil. He painted murals in the church at the Swedish Grave in Poltava; realistic historical scenes, such as Cossacks' Supper at Their Battle Posts (1917); and landscapes such as The Dnipro from Ivanova Mountain (1926). He also created Soviet genre paintings in the style of socialist realism. Taras Shevchenko and his works inspired such of his canvases as Shevchenko on Chernecha Mountain (1954). Books about Trokhymenko have been written by P. Musiienko (1946) and Ivan Vrona (1957), and an album of his works was published in 1969...

SHOVKUNENKO, OLEKSII, b 21 March 1884 in Kherson, d 12 March 1974 in Kyiv. Painter and educator; full member of the USSR Academy of Arts from 1947. A graduate of the Odesa Art School (1908) and the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts (1917), he took part in the exhibitions of the Society of South Russian Artists (1913-19) and was a member of the Kostandi Society of Artists (1924-9). He taught at the Odesa Art Polytechnic (1926-9) and Odesa Art Institute (1929-35) and at the Kyiv State Art Institute (1936-63). He painted portraits, including ones of prominent Ukrainian cultural figures, such as Yurii Yanovsky, Pavlo Tychyna (1949), Maksym Rylsky (1945), Ivan Le (1943), Leonid Pervomaisky (1943), Mariia Lytvynenko-Volgemut, Volodymyr Zabolotny, Nataliia Uzhvii (1947), Mykhailo Lysenko (1947), and Oleksader Bohomolets (1945), and many natural, urban, and industrial landscapes of Ukraine (such as Flood in Koncha Zaspa, 1954), Caucasia, Moscow, the Urals, Moldavia, and Bashkiria, including series (painted in the style of socialist realism) depicting the Odesa shipyard (1925-35) and the construction of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station (1930-2) (such as The Construction of the Dniprohes, 1931). For the latter series he was awarded the grand prize at the Art and Technology in Contemporary Life Exhibition in Paris (1937). A volume of recollections about Shovkunenko was published in 1980, and Leonid Vladych's books about him appeared in 1960 and 1983...

KASIIAN, VASYL, b 1 January 1896 in Mykulyntsi, Stanyslaviv county, Galicia, d 26 June 1976 in Kyiv. Graphic artist of the realist school; from 1947 full member of the USSR Academy of Arts and the Academy of Architecture of the Ukrainian SSR. A graduate of the Prague Academy of Arts (1926), he assumed Soviet citizenship and in 1927 immigrated to the Ukrainian SSR. A prolific and versatile artist, he excelled in all the graphic art techniques--woodcut, copper engraving, linocut, and lithography--as well as pen drawing and watercolors. During his Prague period Kasiian dealt with social themes, depicting the poverty and hard life of the lower classes in Europe. Coming to Ukraine, he created several series of propaganda woodcuts and copper engravings in the socialist-realist style about collective farms, the building of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station, mining in the Donbas, and the building of the Kyiv Metro. He also devoted a series of engravings to Vladimir Lenin and to Joseph Stalin (almost 50 works). Following Nikita Khrushchev's condemnation of the personality cult, Kasiian destroyed whole portfolios of his engravings of Stalin. The most valuable part of his rich, technically flawless legacy consists of the works on industrial themes, which document the economic transformation of Ukraine, and the illustrations to works by Taras Shevchenko, Lesia Ukrainka, Ivan Franko, Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Vasyl Stefanyk, and Olha Kobylianska. Socialist realism, which Kasiian defended in his articles, led him to adopt elements of naturalism and had a detrimental effect on his later work...

BORODAI, VASYL, b 18 August 1917 in Katerynoslav (present-day Dnipro), d 19 April 2010 in Kyiv. Sculptor. Borodai studied at the Kyiv State Art Institute (1947-53). In 1966 he became lecturer, and in 1971 professor, at the institute. He was a full member of the Academy of Arts of the USSR from 1973 and was chairman of the Union of Artists of Ukraine from 1968 to 1973. Among his sculptures are the following compositions: Youth (1951), Ivan Bohun (1954), Lesia Ukrainka (1957), and Bandura Player (1960). He also sculpted portraits of Petro Panch (1960), Pavlo Tychyna (1963), Lev Revutsky (1963), and Tetiana Yablonska (1974), as well as the series Through Egypt (1961-4) and some monuments--busts of Juliusz Slowacki in Kremianets (1969) and of Taras Shevchenko in Arrow Park, New York State (1970), and Lesia Ukrainka's monument in Kyiv. Borodai's works usually meet the demands of socialist realism; a good example of that is his giant monument Motherland (1981) in Kyiv. His monument depicting the legendary founders of Kyiv, Kyi, Shchek, Khoryv, and Lybid, has become one of the symbols of Kyiv. Borodai's perhaps most interesting sculptures are adaptations of the ancient Egyptian style (eg, Silence). Monographs on Borodai by B. Lobanovsky (Kyiv 1964) and Z. Fogel (Moscow 1968) have been published...

YABLONSKA, TETIANA, b 24 February 1917 in Smolensk, Russia, d 17 June 2005 in Kyiv. Ukrainian painter and teacher, of Belarusian descent; full member of the USSR (now Russian) Academy of Arts from 1975. She studied at the Kyiv State Art Institute (1935-41) under Fedir Krychevsky and later taught there (1944-52, 1966-73). Her canvases, most of which are painted in the realist tradition, are often bathed in light and show a highly developed sense of color. They have more in common with impressionism than with socialist realism, even though some have depicted happy farmers at a collective farm (eg, her famous Bread, 1949) and workers (eg, Evening on the Dnieper, 1946). In the 1960s, as a result of her interest in Ukrainian folk art and ethnography, her paintings became more decorative, with simplified forms and flattened space (eg, Young Mother, 1964; Widows, 1964). Ukrainian elements appeared, in works such as Betrothed (1966) and Swans (1966). By 1969 Yablonska was creating canvases that synthesized her two previous styles, a synthesis that culminated in the powerful, symbolic Youth (1969) and Silence (1975). In the 1980s she created portraits and numerous landscapes, including Winter in Old Kyiv (1975), The Source (1983), and Old Apple Tree (1986), peaceful compositions painted in a subdued, pearly gray palette. A large retrospective of her paintings was held at the Kyiv Museum of Ukrainian Art in 1987...

ZARETSKY, VIKTOR, b 8 February 1925 in Bilopillia, Sumy okruha, d 23 August 1990 in Kyiv. Painter. A graduate of the Kyiv State Art Institute (1953), he taught there and worked as a graphic artist. He painted realistic genre canvases in the Donbas and in Chornobyl raion, such as Flax Gathering (1960) and Girls (1962). He collaborated with his late wife, Alla Horska, and other artists in creating large mosaics and mixed-media murals, such as Prometheus, Earth, and Fire, in Secondary School No. 47 in Donetsk, The Tree of Life and Dream-Bird, in the Ukraina restaurant in Mariupol, and The Flag of Victory in the Young Guard Museum in Krasnodon. For signing a public letter protesting against the political trials of Ukrainian artists and intellectuals in 1965-6 he was reprimanded by the Communist Party and ostracized by the Union of Artists of Ukraine. In the 1970s he abandoned socialist realism in favor of an art nouveau style. His favorite themes became women and nature. The threat of ecological disaster is expressed sharply in his paintings Beauty Abandons the Earth, Sign of Calamity, Ozone Hole, and Atomic Winter. His late works include Klimtesque paintings, such as Angels (1988) and Portrait of Liudmyla Kozachenko (1987). A catalog of his works was published in 1991...

HORSKA, ALLA, b 18 September 1929 in Yalta in the Crimea, d 28 November 1970 in Vasylkiv, Kyiv oblast. Monumentalist painter, graduate of the Kyiv State Art Institute, and wife of Viktor Zaretsky. She was a co-founder and active member of the Club of Creative Youth (est 1962) in Kyiv, which played an important role in the cultural movement of the 1960s. She designed the stage sets for Mykola Kulish's Otak zahynuv Huska (Thus Huska Perished), whose premiere at the Lviv Ukrainian Drama Theater was banned. In 1964 she collaborated with Halyna Sevruk and Liudmyla Semykina on a stained-glass panel designed by Opanas Zalyvakha for Kyiv University. Because of its unconventional style and patriotic message, the panel, which depicted an angry Taras Shevchenko, was destroyed by the authorities, and Horska was expelled from the Union of Artists of Ukraine. To find work she had to leave Kyiv, but she continued to defy the authorities by protesting against their repressive measures. She was murdered in 1970. Although the crime remains officially unsolved, circumstantial evidence points to the KGB's involvement. Horska's main works are monumental internal and external paintings and mosaics decorating schools, museums, and restaurants, done in collaboration with other artists. A collection of Horska's letters and essays as well as reminiscences about her was published in Kyiv in 1996...

SEVRUK, HALYNA, b 18 May 1929 in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Ceramist, painter, and graphic artist. After graduating from the Kyiv State Art Institute (1959) she worked for the Art Fund as a decorator of buildings; she created mosaics and large-scale ceramic panels (eg, for the Khmilnyk Sanatorium, the Chorne More Hotel in Odesa, the Kyiv Hotel in Kyiv, the Hradetskyi Hotel in Chernihiv, and School 204 in Kyiv). In 1964 she collaborated with Alla Horska and Liudmyla Semykina on a stained-glass panel designed by Opanas Zalyvakha for Kyiv University, which was later destroyed by the authorities. For speaking out against the political persecution of her friends she was expelled from the Union of Artists of Ukraine in 1968. In 1970-5 she produced several relief sculptures of Slavic pagan gods for the Cinema Building and the Kyivan Cave Historical-Cultural Preserve in Kyiv. Sevruk has won recognition for her many small ceramic reliefs depicting historical figures from Ukrainian history, mythology, folklore, and famous historical buildings. She has also done over 20 paintings (mostly in tempera) and over 30 ink drawings. A strong sympathizer of the dissident movement, Sevruk executed portraits of such dissidents as Alla Horska, Ivan Svitlychny, Nadiia Svitlychna, and Mykhailo Braichevsky. The first solo exhibition of her works was held in Kyiv in 1984, and in 1991 she had a solo exhibition in Toronto...

ZVIRYNSKY, KARLO, b 14 August 1923 in Lavriv, Turka county, Galicia, d 8 October 1997 in Lviv. Painter and educator. He studied at the short-lived Lviv Academy of Art in 1942-3 under Mykola Butovych, Volodymyr Balias, and others. Under Soviet rule he studied at the Lviv Institute of Applied and Decorative Art under Roman Selsky and graduated in 1953. He later taught at the institute (1959-82), but was dismissed from his position as a consequence of his nonconformist stance. For years Zvirynsky gave illegal private lessons (known informally as the 'Zvirynsky academy') to his most talented students and had a powerful influence on the next generation of Ukrainian painters. Among the more prominent student's at his 'private academy' were Zenovii Flinta, Oleh Minko, Ivan Marchuk, Roman Petruk, and Vasyl Bazhai. In independent Ukraine Zvirynsky worked, from 1993, as professor at the Lviv National Academy of Arts. Zvirynsky experimented with the formal aspects of composition, form, line, texture, and color. Some of his works of the 1960s parallel the formal achievements of Western abstractionists. Zvirynsky has also painted semiabstract landscapes and complex still lifes, in which an assortment of objects fill the canvas. His numerous collages and relief constructions on panels explore the formal relationships of form and color. He also decorated several churches in Galicia and painted icons in a traditional style. Suppressed during Soviet time, Zvirynsky began to exhibit his works only in the 1990s...

PATYK, VOLODYMYR, b 9 October 1926 in Chornyi Ostriv, Bibrka county, Galicia, d 28 August 2016 in Lviv. Painter and muralist. A graduate of the Lviv Institute of Applied and Decorative Art (1953), where he studies under Roman Selsky, Yosyp Bokshai, and others, he later worked as an artist in Lviv. In the 1960s he incorporated ethnographic themes and elements into paintings such as Korovai (1964) and Girl from Bukovyna (1966). Although most of his work is figurative, he has painted several canvases using Easter egg symbols as the basis of the compositions. Patyk is best known for his expressionist landscapes painted energetically in brilliant, high-intensity colors that convey his emotional response to nature and love of his homeland. The Green Carpathians (1970) and Autumn in the Carpathians (1986) are examples of the many paintings of the Carpathian Mountains created by the artist. Patyk has also painted thematic canvases, such as Dovbush--Our Glory (1967) and the funereal The Last Journey (1987), in which he used a dark, brooding palette in keeping with the subject. In 1999 he was awarded the Shevchenko Prize...

NONCONFORMIST ART (aka unofficial art). A term for art created in the USSR that, until the period of glasnost and perestroika in the 1980s, did not meet official approval and recognition. The creators of this art did not adhere to the prescribed program of socialist realism formulated at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. They did not, however, constitute a movement, nor did they represent one style, ideology, or worldview. In most cases their art was not an expression of political dissent. What unified them was their belief in and insistence on the freedom of creative individual expression. Strictly speaking, nonconformist art was not forbidden as long as it was kept private; when it was shown publicly, however, its creators were often subjected to reprisals and persecution. This state of affairs forced nonconformist artists to work in solitude and without official recognition. Ukrainian nonconformist artists who remained in the USSR were unable to exhibit their work publicly until the early 1980s. At that time shows by some more prominent nonconformists, such as Ivan Marchuk, were sponsored by official organizations, such as the Writers' Union of Ukraine...

ZALYVAKHA, OPANAS, b 26 November 1925 in Husynka, now in Kupiansk raion, Kharkiv oblast, d 24 April 2007 in Ivano-Frankivsk. Nonconformist artist. Zalyvakha grew up in the Far East, where his parents resettled in 1933. He was expelled from the Leningrad Art Institute in 1947 for not conforming to socialist realism but was readmitted after Joseph Stalin's death, and graduated in 1960. In 1961 he moved to Ivano-Frankivsk. There his second solo exhibition (April 1962) was closed down by the Communist Party authorities for 'decadent tendencies.' In 1964 Zalyvakha, Alla Horska, and Liudmyla Semykina were commissioned to create a stained-glass panel for the vestibule of Kyiv University's main building. Depicting Taras Shevchenko with a wrathful expression, the panel was destroyed on orders of Kyiv's Party secretary. Zalyvakha was arrested in August 1965 and sentenced at a closed trial in March 1966 to five years in a hard-labor camp. After his release in 1970, he was forced to work as a laborer in Ivano-Frankivsk, but continued painting. The first solo exhibition of his paintings, sculptures, and ceramics in 26 years was held in Lviv in December 1988. A second was held in Ivano-Frankivsk in May 1989...

HUMENIUK, FEODOSII, b 6 September 1941 in Rybchyntsi, Khmilnyk raion, Vinnytsia oblast. Nonconformist painter and graphic artist. A graduate of the Dnipropetrovsk Art School and Leningrad Institute of Sculpture, Architecture, and Painting (1965), in 1974 he took part in the first nonconformist art exhibition in Leningrad and in 1975 he and Volodymyr Makarenko organized the first Ukrainian nonconformist art exhibition in a private apartment in Moscow. This led to Humeniuk's expulsion from the Union of Artists of the USSR and banishment to Dnipropetrovsk. His works, which tourists had managed to bring out of the USSR, were exhibited without his permission in Toronto in 1978, 1980, and 1984. Humeniuk again settled in Leningrad in 1983, and in 1992 he returned to Ukraine where he was awarded the Shevchenko Prize in 1992. Humeniuk deals with historical and religious themes through a rich system of symbols. From a formal aspect, his work is closely related to Mykhailo Boichuk's monumentalist style, which combines the traditions of old Byzantine art with folk art and modern Western styles, and exerted a dominant influence in Ukraine's artistic processes...

MAKARENKO, VOLODYMYR, b 26 July 1943 in Verkhivtseve, Dnipropetrovsk oblast. Painter and graphic artist. A graduate of the Dnipropetrovsk Art School (1963) and Leningrad Institute of Applied Art (1969), he was forced to leave Leningrad in 1973, and settled in Tallinn, Estonia. In 1975 he received first prize at the Biennale of Graphic Art in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and together with Feodosii Humeniuk organized the first Ukrainian nonconformist exhibition, which was held in Moscow in a private apartment and featured also paintings by Volodymyr Strelnikov and Vitalii Sazonov. In 1976 his first one-man exhibition was held at the Galerie Hardy in Paris. Makarenko emigrated to the West in 1979 and settled in Paris. The subjects of most of his works are highly personal, as are his images and vocabulary, which often reflect his Ukrainian heritage and Ukrainian history and literature. Although Makarenko is not a narrative artist, some of his paintings are visual texts with multiple readings. He has successfully synthesized several disparate sources, including Kazimir Malevich, Ukrainian icons, surrealism, and abstract art, into an unusual and unique vision...

STRELNIKOV, VOLODYMYR, b 25 October 1939 in Odesa. Painter. He studied briefly at the Odesa Art School but was mostly self-taught. He worked as a muralist in Odesa and participated in and organized some of the exhibitions of nonconformist art there. Strelnikov has experimented with reduced shapes and the interrelationship between figures and architecture. In his later pictures architecture and figures have been reduced to simplified patterns within the larger contained form, so that a tension is sustained between the detailed, intricate shapes and the surrounding smooth areas of warm color. Together with Feodosii Humeniuk, Volodymyr Makarenko, and Vitalii Sazonov, Strelnikov participated in the 1975 and 1976 Moscow exhibitions of Ukrainian nonconformist artists and was consequently harassed by the Soviet authorities. In 1978 he was allowed to emigrate to Austria, and in 1979 he settled in Munich. Since that time he has exhibited in Western Europe, the United States, and Canada. He abandoned figuration in the late 1980s in favor of nonrepresentational compositions based on the interrelationship between form and color...

MARCHUK, IVAN, b 12 May 1936 in Moskalivka, Kremianets county, Volhynia voivodeship. Painter and sculptor. He graduated from the Lviv Institute of Applied and Decorative Art in 1965 and then moved to Kyiv. Until 1988 he was denied membership in the Union of Artists of Ukraine because his themes and style did not conform to socialist realism. Marchuk paints fantastic figural and floral compositions with elements of surrealism, hyperrealist portraits, enigmatic landscapes, and abstract expressionist compositions. His figural tempera paintings of the 'Voice of My Soul' series depict seemingly irrational situations with skeletal, often grotesque, persons cut off at the waist and surrounded by sinister objects and creatures set in a vast empty landscape. Marchuk's palette borders on the monochromatic, and the unreality of the imagery is thereby reinforced. His realistic landscapes have a peculiar, dense texture consisting of weblike layers of pigment that, combined with the dramatic use of light and dark, create an atmosphere of unease and mystery...