Back

Beach

Vasyl Poliovyi

Basic information

ID: Ж-7009
Author: Vasyl Poliovyi
Name: Beach
Date of creation: 1965
Culture: Ukrainian art of the Soviet period
Technique: original technique
Material: cardboard
Dimensions (height x width, cm): 110 x 120

Additionally

Type: painting
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 was created in the 1960s, one of the most productive periods of Vasyl Poliovyi's artistic career. During this time, he found a unique technique and narrative development approach. The piece combines everyday observations with symbolic, allegorical and partially surrealistic intonations in conveying its idea. The composition revolves around a group of people resting on a beach, presumably near a sea. In the foreground, on a somewhat rocky shore (likely Caucasian), two men are sitting. Next to them, one woman is lying on her side, while another is turned in three-quarters, with her head in profile. The man on the left has turned his head to the side, facing three standing people – a young man embracing a woman around her waist (they are facing the stylised sea waves, looking away from the viewer), and a middle-aged man standing at a distance. The distinctive approach to interpreting light on the figures and depicting the characters' positions creates an impression of artificiality; the distances between groups of people do not entirely correspond to the notions of acceptable social distances in public spaces of the 1960s. The design features of both male and female characters' swimwear, particularly the bikini, are not characteristic of the time. Combined with an absence of a clear horizon line and the depiction of space from two perspectives (normal and enormously exaggerated), a symbolic seashell form (possibly a murex) is notable. Located in the upper part of the artwork, it is many times larger than its actual size. This indicates that the artist is portraying a memory association evoked by the sound effect of holding a seashell to the ear, commonly referred to as the "sound of the sea". Due to the distance of events, the images fall into the category of vague and more associative rather than directly reflecting reality. This interpretation is facilitated by the soft and light colour scheme and the absence of vibrant colours typically found in a natural landscape under bright sunlight, which is partially present in the composition (the "sunlit patches" on the head of the man sitting on the left and the body of the woman sitting next to him).

Legal regulation

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery

Beach

Other