Hromnytsky, Pavlo

Hromnytsky, Pavlo [Громницький, Павло; Hromnyc'kyj], b 15 December 1889 in Hromnytsia, Katerynoslav gubernia, d 23 August 1977 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Postimpressionist painter. He was a student of Ilia Repin and Nikolai Dubovskoi and lived in Paris in 1922–5, where he studied with Henri Matisse. From 1928 he lived in Prague (where he initially studied at the Ukrainian Studio of Plastic Arts) except for a brief period of imprisonment in the USSR (1945–7). His works include Poisonous Flowers (1925), a portrait of Ivan Ya. Horbachevsky (1935), two portraits of Oleksander Oles (1941, 1944) that in 1967 were presented by the painter as a gift to the Writers' Union of Ukraine, The Builders (1948), and Autumn Mood (1958). Some of Hromnytsky’s paintings are found in the collections of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the Luxembourg Museum in Paris, the National Art Museum of Ukraine, the National Gallery in Prague, and the Svydnyk Museum of Ukrainian Culture in Slovakia.

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