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In Lavrov

Margit Selska (Reich)

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Basic information
ID
Ж-5320
Author
Margit Selska (Reich)
Name
In Lavrov
Date of creation
1975
Country
the Ukrainian SSR
Culture
Contemporary times
Technique
oil painting
Material
canvas oil
Dimensions (height x width, cm)
68 x 48.3
Additionally
Type
painting
Genre
landscape
Plot
Landscape
Provenance
Handed over by the Exhibition Directorate of the Union of Artists of Ukraine
Information about author
Author
Margit Selska (Reich)
Author in the original
Margit Sielska (Reich)
Artist's lifetime
1900–1980
Country
Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ukrainian SSR, now Ukraine
Biography
Margit Selska (Reich) (1900, Kolomyia – 1980, Lviv) was a Ukrainian artist, the wife of Roman Selskyi. She was born in Kolomyia to the family of engineer Isaac Reich. She attended the private Free Academy of Arts of Leonard Podhorodecki in Lviv (1918); her teacher was Feliks Wygrzywalski. In 1921, Margit Selska graduated from the State Industrial School in Lviv, then studied painting at the Krakow Academy of Arts (1921–1922) under Wojciech Weiss and Wladyslaw Jarocki, and from 1922 to 1923 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. In 1924, the artist moved to Paris, where she visited exhibitions of modern artists, became interested in cinema and photography, and studied at the Académie Moderne, a private art school of Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant. The artist participated in the Salon des Indépendants (Paris, 1926). The following year she had her first solo exhibition in Lviv. She was a member of the artistic association "Artes" (1929–1935) and the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists (1931–1939), participated in the activities of the "New Generation" (1932–1935) and the Lviv Professional Union of Plastic Artists (LZZAP, 1932–1939). During the Holocaust, Margit Selska was imprisoned in the Yaniv concentration camp, from which she managed to escape to Krakow with the help of friends. In 1943, the Selski couple returned to Lviv. In 1978, for the first time after the war, the artist presented her works in an exhibition at the Lviv Art Gallery. Margit Selska authorises numerous portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. Post-Impressionism, Cubism and Constructivism strongly influenced her oeuvre. Her works are characterised by a particular colouristic and compositional solution, especially her early works Hel (1932), Woman with a Cat (1960s), Crimea. Uiutne Village (1962), Carpathian Landscape (1965), Near the Sea (1964), Grape Harvest (1968), Old Ash Tree (1976), etc.
Object description
A significant body of M. Selska's work was formed by landscapes that combined subtle mood with the generalisation of empirically available natural forms in the modernist paradigm. A prominent place among them was occupied by the post-Impressionistic ones, characterised by manifesting the fundamental meanings of life through impasto painting on the valuable pictorial surface. The peculiarity of M. Selska's landscape works was the post-Impressionist visualisation of the constant, the perception of mythologies, archetypes, symbols of the folk myth-folklore tradition and the creation of valuable "ideal versions of life" based on the reflection of the whole in the partial. The concept is most fully embodied in the compositionally balanced, closed, decorative, rational, and structural, with conventionally interpreted space and images of peasant farmsteads. Diverse in their artistic solutions, they reflect the axiosphere of folk culture, the idea of the home as a model of the world that acts energetically at a distance, mentally, and accompanies a person throughout their life. Among them – the landscape "In Lavrov", created in the village of Staryi Sambir, Lviv region – the birthplace of the famous Lviv artist K. Zvirynskyi and, according to the legend, the burial place of the son of Danylo Halytskyi Lev Danylovych, after whom the city of Lviv is named. The peculiarity of the landscape is the creation of a harmonious microcosm imbued with a lyrical mood by means of post-Impressionist artistic expression – with an old hut in the honey evening, near a sloping fence, among chimneys and old trees. The "semantic basic text" of the painting, which links it to the semantics of folk culture, is formed by the semantics of the tree – associated with the World Tree, its blossoming or decay – and the stacks, fence and gates – boundary signs of the natural and human-ordered, cultivated world. An essential role in the figurative structure of the painting is played by the spiritualised image of the house – a secret witness of the times. The evocative and moody component of the picture is the setting sun, which consolidates the colour structure of the canvas with a single tone and emphasises it with warm accents. The lyrical and nostalgic mood is created by the colour scheme based on the harmony of rich, deep browns, ochres, blues, oranges, and warm greens.
Inscriptions
On the back, at the top, is an inscription: "M. Selska 'In Lavrov'", 1975".
Legal regulation
Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery

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