Over the last six months, I have published a series of articles looking at the careers and work of all the Ukrainian painters I have been able to obtain sufficient information and images for. This article tries to make sense of that information in historical context, and provides an index at the end. I apologise in advance for any errors that I may have made from the limited information available to me, and look forward to your corrections, please.
At the start of the nineteenth century, much of central and eastern Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire, although in western areas like Galicia and the Carpathians, Polish and Austrian affiliation remained dominant.
When academies had replaced apprenticeship and guilds, the training of painters had become centralised across Europe. The Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna originated as a private academy in 1688, and in 1757 the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg was founded. When Ivan Soshenko (1807-1876) and his protégé Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861) trained, it was reasonable that they should do so at the Imperial Academy, just as artists in Galicia aspired to train in Poland or Austria.
After his training in Russia, Soshenko returned to Ukraine to paint and teach, and it was from there that he encouraged and assisted the training of Taras Shevchenko.
Russia was relatively slow in opening up its collections of art to the public. Those of the Medici family in Florence had been opened to the public as the Uffizi Gallery around 1789, and the French royal collection became the Louvre Museum shortly after, in 1793; even London’s National Gallery was founded in 1824. Russia’s earliest public collection, also located in Saint Petersburg, wasn’t opened to the public until 1852, and the next two were even later: the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow in 1867, and the Aivazovsky National Art Gallery in Feodosia, Ukraine, in 1880.
After Arkhyp Kuindzhi (1841–1910) had trained at the Imperial Academy in 1868-72, instead of returning to Ukraine to teach, he found patrons like Pavel Tretyakov in Moscow, and was appointed professor in Saint Petersburg in 1892. Fortunately he found time to return to Ukraine to paint, and to influence other Ukrainian artists.
The oldest art school in Ukraine, now named the Grekov Odesa Art School, is in Odesa, and was initially founded as a drawing school in 1865. Within twenty years, there were art schools in other major cities including Kyiv, but the attraction of the Imperial Academy remained, together with the pool of wealthy Russian patrons.
Volodymyr Orlovsky (1842–1914) started training in Kyiv under Soshenko before he went to study at the Imperial Academy in 1861-68. Russia retained him there, first by providing him travelling funds to tour Europe, then with the post of professor in 1876. Ten years later, though, he broke free and returned to Kyiv to teach, and co-founded Kyiv Art School in 1900.
By the turn of the century, most major cities in Ukraine were in the process of forming their own public art collections. The National Art Museum of Ukraine (NAMU) in Kyiv was founded in 1899, the same year as the Odesa National Fine Arts Museum. Kharkiv Art Museum followed in 1905, and the Borys Voznytsky Lviv National Art Gallery was formally opened in 1907.
Mykola Pymonenko (1862–1912) started his training in his father’s icon workshop in Kyiv, prior to his discovery by Mykola Murashko of the Kyiv Art School, where he trained before heading off to Saint Petersburg. He returned to Kyiv in 1884 to teach and to paint in the Naturalist style that was so popular at the Salon in Paris at the time. It was he who perhaps painted the first distinctively Ukrainian works that drew on local themes such as Paska at Easter, traditional weddings and the grain harvest.
Many Ukrainian artists had depicted Zaporozhian Cossacks, and they remained a favourite theme for Ilia Repin right up to his death, but the first prominent specialist national history painter was Mykola Ivasyuk (1865–1937), who was brought up in western Ukraine when it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He therefore trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, but chose to spend much of his career in Chernivtsi and Kyiv, where he also taught.
During the nineteenth century, the evolution of painting in Ukraine had largely been constrained by the orthodoxy of the Imperial Academy, and the supply of Russian patrons. As its own art schools flourished, and support for the arts grew, the pace of progress rose rapidly in Ukraine. The first decade of the twentieth century saw Ukrainian artists in the same avant garde as those in France and the rest of Europe, until the First World War and the October 1917 Revolution.
The war threw Ukraine into the midst of the conflict between Austro-Hungary and Russia, with Ukrainians fighting one another on behalf of two different empires. Then from 1917 onwards, the country lapsed in and out of complete chaos. By 1920, many Ukrainian artists had been forced to leave, or were intending to do so.
For painters like Ivasyuk, the world changed too rapidly. Initially he was commissioned to design postage stamps, then in 1926 he was made a professor at the Kyiv Art Institute. In a few years he had been moved away to Odesa as a result of political criticism. In the autumn of 1937, he was arrested, convicted of terrorism on the basis of his history paintings, and was shot by a firing squad at the age of seventy-two. Many of his paintings were confiscated or destroyed in a bid to erase him and his work completely.
Oleksandr Bohomazov (1880–1930) trained at the Kyiv Academy of Arts from 1902, alongside Oleksandra Ekster and the sculptor Oleksandr Arkhypenko who were to play major roles in the development of modernist art in Ukraine and Europe. After a period studying in Moscow, he returned to Kyiv in 1908, where he became one of the leaders of the avant garde. In 1914 he wrote an innovative treatise on modern painting that formed the basis of his teaching at the Kyiv Art Institute from 1922.
Like Ivasyuk, Mykhailo Boichuk (1882-1937) came from Galicia in Austro-Hungary, but trained first in Lviv then in the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, Poland. He returned to Lviv in 1910, where he developed a novel style, unique to Ukraine, known as Monumentalism or Boichukism, which brings together traditional Byzantine icon painting and the pre-Renaissance. This enjoyed recognition and popularity during the 1920s, when there were more than two dozen visual artists creating commissioned works for public buildings throughout Ukraine.
They too fell from grace during Stalin’s Great Purge of 1937, when Boichuk was accused of being a bourgeois nationalist. For that, he and many of his colleagues were executed, and most of their work destroyed. They weren’t the last to die for their art, either: in 1946, for instance, Ivan Ivanets, director of the Lviv Art Gallery, was kidnapped and killed in Russia.
Despite the assimilation, control and waves of destruction under a succession of empires, painting in Ukraine has somehow flourished by the dedication of this succession of artists. Long may the artists, teachers and art collections of Ukraine flourish.
Historical compilations
19th century Realism
Transition to the 20th century
The Modern
Index of artists
Ivan/Hovhannes Aivazovsky
Wladimir Baranoff-Rossiné
Marie Bashkirtseff
Mykhaylo Berkos
Oleksandr Bohomazov
Mykhailo Boichuk
Mykola Burachek
Oleksandra Ekster
Mykola Ivasyuk
Kyriak Kostandi
Fedir Krychevskyi
Arkhyp Kuindzhi
Mykola Kuznetsov
Arnold Lakhovskyi
Kazymyr Malevych
Abraham Mintchine
Oleksandr Murashko
Petro Nilus
Volodymyr Orlovsky
Khariton Platonov
Ivan Pokhitonov
Mykola Pymonenko
Ilia Repin
Mykola Samokish
Oleksandr Shevchenko
Taras Shevchenko
Kazimierz Sichulski‘s Galician Landscapes 1
Kazimierz Sichulski‘s Galician Landscapes 2
Ivan Soshenko
Rufin Sudkovsky
Serhii Svitoslavskyi
Ivan Trush
Serhii Vasylkivskyi
Viktor Zarubin
References
Andrey Kurkov and others (2022) Treasures of Ukraine, A Nation’s Cultural Heritage, Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978 0 500 02603 8.
Konstantin Akinsha and others (2022) In the Eye of the Storm, Modernism in Ukraine 1900-1930s, Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978 0 500 29715 5.