UK
Collection

Male Portrait (Sketches of two female heads on the reverse side)

Mykhailo Boichuk

  • Male Portrait (Sketches of two female heads on the reverse side) 2
  • Male Portrait (Sketches of two female heads on the reverse side) 3
Basic information
ID
ФМз-Г-V-3
Author
Mykhailo Boichuk
Name
Male Portrait (Sketches of two female heads on the reverse side)
Date of creation
1910s
Technique
drawing
Material
paper pencil
Dimensions (height x width, cm)
31.2 x 22.5
Additionally
Type
graphic art
Genre
genre 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 simplicity of the lines and the rigour of the composition are characteristic of genre portraits and graphic works by Boichuk made in the Lviv period. The search for compositional regularities became an extremely important and fundamentally new quality of the artist's drawing. Such a drawing is generalized to the level of a sign, where the categories of space and time become abstract. The line became the most appropriate means of expression in relation to the task. Its rhythmic repetitions do not create a sense of motion, but due to the verification of the image, they establish a form that acquires weight and completeness. In 1973, this unique exhibit item got into the collection of Lviv National Art Gallery from the private collection of Yaroslava Muzyka, who closely worked with Boichuk and his followers during the Lviv period of the artist's life. Yaroslava Muzyka lived in a house on Charnetskyi Street (now Vynnychenko Street, 26), where Boichuk's studio was located; she managed to preserve a significant amount of archival material and some works that remained after the artist’s moving to Kyiv.

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