Collection

Painter

Mykhailo Boichuk

Basic information

ID: ФМз-Г-IV-313
Author: Mykhailo Boichuk
Name: Painter
Date of creation: 1st half of the 20th c.
Country: Ukraine
Technique: woodcut
Material: paper
Dimensions (height x width, cm): 13.8 x 14.6

Additionally

Type: graphic art
Genre: narrative art
Provenance: Yaroslava Muzyka Fund

Information about author

Author: Mykhailo Boichuk
Artist's lifetime: 1882–1937
Biography: Mykhailo Boichuk was a Ukrainian muralist and representative of the Ukrainian cultural Renaissance of the early twentieth century. He was the founder of Boichukism, the original school of Ukrainian art, and leader of the group of Boichukists. His name is given to an artistic phenomenon that combined the forms of folk art and the heritage of Byzantium and Proto-Renaissance. The French called it Renovation Byzantine (Neo-Byzantism). In 1913, he became a member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society, and in 1917 – of the Ukrainian Scientific Society. Mykhailo Boichuk was born on October 30, 1882, in the village of Romanivka, near Terebovlia. He received an excellent artistic education thanks to the support of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky. The painter studied in Lviv, Vienna, Krakow, and later in Munich and Paris. In 1909, he founded his own school where Mykola Kasperovych, Zofia Nalepinska, Zofia Baudouin de Courtenay, Helena Schramm and others studied. In 1911, he returned to Lviv where he worked as a fine art restorer and muralist at the National Museum (now the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum in Lviv). In 1917, he became one of the founding professors of the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts where he headed the icon and fresco studio. In 1925, Mykhailo was one of the organizers of the Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine. The most significant works made together with students were paintings on modern themes in the Lutsk barracks in Kyiv in 1919, Sanatorium for Peasants on the coast of the Khadzhibey Estuary in Odesa between 1927 and 1928, and the Chervonozavodskyi Theater in Kharkiv between 1933 and 1935. All monumental paintings have not survived. On November 25, 1936, Mykhailo Boichuk was arrested and charged with Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism as well as being a leader of a national-fascist terrorist organization. The artist was shot, and most of his works were destroyed.

Object description

The work is made on a small (smaller than A4) sheet of paper. Most of the composition is taken up by a figure of a young man with long hair. The man turned three quarters to the left is sitting on a three-legged backless stool. The young man has a palette and brushes in his right hand, and a brush in his left hand. An easel with a hilly landscape and a tree is depicted in front of the painter. In the background, the artist painted a window frame. The image is framed by three black frames, which are different in width. In general, Mykhailo Boichuk paid great attention to the line, its capacity, because in each work he sought to achieve completeness of content, using the most concise means and forms.

Painter

Other