Taranushchenko, Stefan

Taranushchenko, Stefan [Таранущенко, Стефан; Taranuščenko], b 21 December 1889 in Lebedyn, Kharkiv gubernia, d 13 October 1976 in Kyiv. Art scholar and museologist. A graduate of Kharkiv University (1916), he lectured at the Poltava Historical-Philological Faculty (from 1918) and the Poltava Ukrainian Institute of Social Sciences (from 1920), organized and directed the Kharkiv Museum of Ukrainian Art (1920–33) (see Kharkiv Art Museum), and was a professor at the Kharkiv Art Institute (1924–9), a sector head at the Department of the History of Ukrainian Culture in Kharkiv (1924–33), secretary of the subsection of Ukrainian art at the Kharkiv section of the Department of Art Studies in Kyiv (1926–33), and inspector of the All-Ukrainian Committee for the Protection of Artistic Monuments for all of Left-Bank Ukraine (1926–30). He was arrested in October 1933 and imprisoned in a Siberian labor camp (1934–6). After his release he taught in Perm (1937) and worked at the Kursk (1939–50) and Astrakhan (1950–3) art galleries. After returning to Ukraine in 1953, he worked at the Institute of the History, Theory, and Developmental Problems of Soviet Architecture. He wrote monographs, based on the many research expeditions he undertook, on the old peasant houses of Kharkiv (1922), the artistic monuments of 17th-and 18th-century Slobidska Ukraine (1922), the Cathedral of the Holy Protectress in Kharkiv (1923), the 17th- and 18th-century art of Slobidska Ukraine (1928), and the Lyzohub Residence in Sedniv (1932), and his magnum opus on the wooden church architecture of Left-Bank Ukraine (1976). He also wrote booklets on the artists Porfyrii Martynovych (1958) and Taras Shevchenko (1961) and articles on Shevchenko, Vasyl H. Krychevsky, Heorhii Narbut, Olena Kulchytska, Stefaniia Gebus-Baranetska, book graphics, Easter eggs, folk architecture, interior painting, handicrafts, furniture, and kilims.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]