Hlushchenko, Mykola

Hlushchenko, Mykola [Глущенко, Микола; Hluščenko] (Gloutchenko, Nicolas), b 17 September 1901 in Novomoskovsk, Katerynoslav gubernia, d 31 October 1977 in Kyiv. Artist. A graduate of the Academy of Art in Berlin (1924), from 1925 he worked in Paris where he immediately attracted the attention of French critics. From the Neue Sachlichkeit style of his Berlin period he changed to postimpressionism. Besides numerous French, Italian, Dutch, and (later) Ukrainian landscapes, he also painted flowers, still life, nudes, and portraits (of Oleksander Dovzhenko and Volodymyr Vynnychenko, as well as portraits commissioned by the Soviet government of the French writers Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, and Victor Margueritte and the painter Paul Signac). At the beginning of the 1930s, Hlushchenko belonged to the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists and helped organize its large exhibition of Ukrainian, French, and Italian paintings at the National Museum in Lviv. In 1936 he moved to the USSR, but was allowed to live in Ukraine only after the war when his works began to reflect official approved socialist realism. In the 1960s, having come into close contact with new artistic trends on his trips abroad, he revitalized his paintings with expressive colors, and assumed a leading position among Ukrainian colorists. Hlushchenko's work was exhibited in Berlin (1924), Paris (five exhibits 1925–34), Milan (1927), Budapest (1930, 1932), Stockholm (1931), Rome (1933), Lviv (1934, 1935), Moscow (1943, 1959), Belgrade (1966, 1968), London (1966), Toronto (1967–9), and Kyiv (over 10 exhibits).

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kovzhun, P.; Hordyns’kyi, S. Mykola Hlushchenko (Lviv 1934)
Shpakov, A. Mykola Petrovych Hlushchenko (Kyiv 1962)
Buhaienko, I. Mykola Hlushchenko (Kyiv 1973)

Sviatoslav Hordynsky

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