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Sketch for the "Harvest Festival" Mural

Vasyl Poliovyi

Basic information

ID: Г-II-330
Author: Vasyl Poliovyi
Name: Sketch for the "Harvest Festival" Mural
Country: the USSR
Culture: Ukrainian art of the Soviet period
Technique: original technique
Material: cardboard pastel mixed media
Dimensions (height x width, cm): 110 x 84.5

Additionally

Type: painting
Genre: genre 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 sketch is part of a series dedicated to agriculture. The scene is set against a landscape backdrop: hills and mountains covered with pointy haystacks, common to the Carpathian region; the sky is a rich ultramarine tone with whitewashes indicating clouds. The warm palette with tonal contrasts and accents is dominated by ochre and red hues. The viewer can observe an episode of six women who are about to gather the haystacks. They are of different ages; three of them are mature women in formal clothes, wearing richly embroidered shirts and colourful headscarves; two of them are wearing traditional patterned corsets – kersetkas. There are dark accents in their clothing. The women's headscarves are distinctly tied, completely covering their necks. The woman on the right side is facing away from the viewer, while the woman in the centre is in profile, looking at the person on the left who is facing the viewer and raising both hands to her face, slightly tilting her head. In the foreground, three younger women turned in profile, with small floral headscarves tied at the back of their heads, are holding rounded homemade rakes. The rhythm applied by the artist to this group has a certain parallel with thematically consonant scenes in the monumental art of Ancient Egypt and the practices of the Boychukists. The interpretation of the ground and stylised plants in the background may allude to the iconographic painting of the Middle Ages.

Legal regulation

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery

Sketch for the "Harvest Festival" Mural

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