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Self-Portrait

Roman Turyn

Basic information

ID: Ж-5704
Author: Roman Turyn
Name: Self-Portrait
Culture: Contemporary times
Technique: oil painting
Material: canvas oil
Dimensions (height x width, cm): 64 x 50.2

Additionally

Type: painting
Genre: portraiture
Plot: Self-portrait
Provenance: Purchased from a private individual

Information about author

Author: Roman Turyn
Artist's lifetime: 1900–1979
Country: Austro-Hungarian Empire, Poland, the Ukrainian SSR
Biography: Roman Turyn (2 September 1900, Sniatyn – 29 August 1979, Lviv) was a Ukrainian painter, portraitist, and public figure. He was born in Sniatyn, in the Ivano-Frankivsk region. The artist's family is known in Galicia for its social and cultural support. His father, Mykola Turyn, was a merchant, an active member of the Union of Ukrainian Merchants and Industrialists, and a patron of craft and trade training for Ukrainians. The family often visited Vasyl Stefanyk, who was on friendly terms with Roman's father. After returning to Ternopil, R. Turyn studied in the private art studio of V. Perebyinis, with whom he went to Krakow in 1921. His passion for painting led R. Turyn to the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied under J. Pankiewicz, I. Penkovskyi, and W. Jarocki. In the mid-1920s, he went to Paris to continue his studies with the Kapists (the KP group or Paris Committee, organised by J. Pankiewicz). In the artistic capital of Europe, he became interested in the work of the Post-Impressionists. He exhibited his paintings in the galleries of famous Parisian marshals. At the same time, he became interested in photography and cinematography, photographic advertising and photo editing. He gained his first professional experience in the field of cinema at the Tobis-Klangfilm studio, where he later assisted famous directors. He worked independently in small studios, specialising in short films. He liked the avant-garde films of René Clair, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, and Victor Trivas. In the winter of 1931, he met the self-taught Lemko artist Epifanii Drovniak, known as Nykyfor. In 1932, he bought and exhibited his drawings in Paris at the Leon Marseille Gallery. He then organised exhibitions of talented artists in Lviv and supported them for many years. At the beginning of the 1930s, Turyn moved to Lviv, where he actively promoted cinema and realised a number of his creative projects (the films "On a High Meadow", "With Styr and Foam", "Hutsul Fragments", "Over the Prut in the Meadow", and "A Boy Goes to Town"). Some of them were made together with the young film enthusiast Stanislaw Lipinski, who later became a famous Polish cinematographer. After 1939, Turyn was unemployed for some time and earned money by copying portraits. In 1949, he co-founded and became director of the Lviv School of Art, which he directed for 25 years. The integration of the influences of various trends of European modernism characterises the artist's work of the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1940s and 1950s, R. Turyn was forced to adapt his works to the requirements of realism. In the 1960s and 1970s, he created an original, individual style characterised by a synthetic generalisation of natural materials and a post-Impressionist interpretation of form. He showed his works at exhibitions, particularly as a member of the Union of Ukrainian Fine Artists and the Union of Artists of Ukraine. He died in Lviv, buried in the family tomb in the Lychakiv cemetery. The first personal exhibition of R. Turyn was held in Lviv in 1982, after his death.

Object description

The inspirations of postmodernism, translated into an individual, original artistic language, are a feature of Turyn's work from the 1920s to the 1930s and from the 1960s to the 1970s. "Self-Portrait" is a bright example, with a reliably reproduced figure crystallising from the combination of planes of colour and elongated, tremulous strokes. The work is characterised by a clear compositional structure formed by the artist's figure and easel against an interior background. The combination of deep, muted green-blue and brown-ochre colours creates the impression of a twilight atmosphere and, simultaneously, of the sitter's reflective thought. In relation to the viewer, the picture models the space of a trusting, meaningful dialogue that corresponds to the artist's intellectual nature. The opposition and unity of the signifier and the signified, the artistic and the real, is emphasised by the combination of the easel and the canvas on it with the edge of the picture plane.

Legal regulation

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery

Self-Portrait

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