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Sketch for the "Harvest Festival" Mural

Vasyl Poliovyi

Basic information

ID: Г-II-333
Author: Vasyl Poliovyi
Name: Sketch for the "Harvest Festival" Mural
Date of creation: 1970s (?)
Country: the USSR
Culture: Ukrainian art of the Soviet period
Technique: mixed technique
Material: cardboard pastel
Dimensions (height x width, cm): 109.5 x 84

Additionally

Type: graphic art
Genre: symbolic art
Provenance: Handed over to the museum from Vasyl Poliovyi

Information about author

Author: Vasyl Poliovyi
Artist's lifetime: b.1936
Country: the USSR, the USA
Biography: Vasyl Poliovyi is a Ukrainian painter and graphic artist, one of the leading authors of Soviet Nonconformist art. He was born on April 22, 1936, in Kryvyi Rih city. The artist's father, Petro Poliovyi, worked as an engineer, and his mother, Oleksandra, was a mathematics teacher. With the start of hostilities on the territory of the USSR on June 22, 1941, the family was evacuated to the Sverdlovsk region (RSFSR). There Vasyl Poliovyi studied in school, and after completing his education in 1954, he entered an art school in Yelets. However, the artist later transferred to the Tavricheskaya Art School (Leningrad, RSFSR) and then to the Higher School of Industrial Art named after Vera Mukhina. After completing his studies, he moved to Moscow, where he worked at an art collective with his wife, artist Yuliia Podohova. He focused mainly on the monumental and decorative design of the interiors and the exteriors of public buildings and governmental institutions. At the same time, he was involved in the circle of nonconformist artists in Moscow and Leningrad, including Dmytro Krasnopevtsev, Anatolii Zverev, Mykhailo Shemiakin, Oleh Tselkov, Eduard Steinberg, Volodymyr Sterlihov, and the Lianozovo Group, as well as writers like Serhii Dovlatov, Yurii Mamleev, and Vladlen Gavrilchik. He participated in unofficial exhibitions, including those in the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Italy, and Czechoslovakia. In 1965, while visiting his brother, the researcher and inventor Renat Poliovyi, the artist created a large cycle of thematic works about Ukraine. Some of them were exhibited in Moscow. Later he joined the Artists' Union of the USSR. In 1972, Vasyl Poliovyi moved to Lviv, where he worked on monumental and easel paintings. During this period, he interacted with the local art community, including Valerii Shalenko, Mykhailo Steinberg, Yurii Sokolov, Okhrim Kravchenko, Margit and Roman Selsky, Anatolii Semahin, art critics Hryhorii Ostrovskyi and Dmytro Shelest, and writer Ihor Klekh. In 1976, Vasyl Poliovyi was expelled from the Artists' Union, which made his professional activity practically impossible. As a result, the artist decided to emigrate from the Soviet Union to the United States, where he still lives and works in Greenville, South Carolina.

Object description

The artwork belongs to a series of thematic sketches executed in a mixed technique. The stylistic approach to composition combines characteristic modernist principles of interpreting individual elements and the overall imagery. The approach to form creation is decorative, and so are the colour combinations. The colour palette is diverse, with warm shades of earthy and ochre pigments predominating. There are individual splashes of ultramarine (the sky in the upper part) and whitened red (in the bottom). The viewer is presented with a scene where four women in traditional national attire (long linen shirts, zapaskas – rectangular aprons, and skirts) engage in an unspecified gathering activity in a forest area. It is difficult to visually determine what exactly they are gathering due to the stylisation. All the characters are depicted barefoot, indicating a warm season. There is a specific age gradation between the women: the woman on the far left is depicted wearing a headdress (namitka), which denotes marriage; the woman on the far right and one woman in the centre are wearing flower wreaths, which young girls wore. Two women in the centre are depicted bent over the ground, while the two figures flanking the composition stand at full length. Essentially, we are presented with a scene of dialogue with elements of morality (a characteristic hand gesture of the woman on the left). However, the approach to the stylisation of the trees against which the scene unfolds encourages a broader interpretation of this picture, as the "illusiveness" of the event's context may hint at its timelessness and the overall symbolism of what is happening here.

Legal regulation

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery

Sketch for the "Harvest Festival" Mural

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