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On the Outskirts of the City

Roman Turyn

Basic information

ID: Ж-5708
Author: Roman Turyn
Name: On the Outskirts of the City
Culture: Contemporary times
Technique: oil painting
Material: canvas oil
Dimensions (height x width, cm): 46.5 x 6

Additionally

Type: painting
Genre: landscape
Plot: Landscape
Provenance: Gifted by 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

Turyn's landscape "On the Outskirts of the City" is characterised by a combination of mimetic principles and the experience of the Kapists, with its inherent reflection of reality in gradations of vibrant colour. The likelihood of Kapists inspiration is confirmed by Turyn's studies under Jozef Pankiewicz, the prime mover of the KP group, and the artist's trip to Paris with its members in the mid-1920s. The work is thus related to the aesthetics of the Kapists through the understanding of a natural motif as a pretext for the construction of chromatic harmony and the emphasis on the quality of the painting material and the surface of the picture, which is covered with myriads of elongated, trembling strokes. The peculiarity of the canvas is the depiction of an autumnal landscape shrouded in mist through the "evocation" of white-grey, green and blue tones from the dominant grey-pink. The composition's horizontal structure, the orientation of the buildings, the horizon, and the leafless trees along the river are striking.

Legal regulation

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery

On the Outskirts of the City

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