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Friends

Sofia Nalepynska-Boichuk

Basic information

ID: Г-IV-2721
Author: Sofia Nalepynska-Boichuk
Name: Friends
Date of creation: 1927
Country: Ukraine
Technique: woodcut
Material: paper
Dimensions: 11.4 x 8 cm (height x width)

Additionally

Type: graphic art
Genre: genre art
Provenance: Received from All-Union Artists' Cooperative in Moscow, 1977. Legacy of A. Ivanova

Information about author

Author: Sofia Nalepynska-Boichuk
Artist's lifetime: 1884–1937
Country: Poland, the USSR
Biography: Sofia Nalepynska-Boichuk (30 July 1884, Lodz – 12 June 1937, Kyiv) was a Ukrainian artist, educator, and wife of Mykhailo Boichuk. She was a founder of the modern school of woodcut in Ukraine. She worked in easel and book graphic art and created designs for tapestries and fabrics. Sofia Nalepynska-Boichuk was a representative of the Executed Renaissance. The artist was born on 30 July 1884 in Lodz, Poland. Her father was Polish, and her mother had French origins. She received her artistic education at the art school of Jan Ciaglinski in St. Petersburg (1905–1907). In 1908, she continued her studies in Munich. She moved to Paris a year later, where she studied at the Academie Ranson. In Paris, she met her future husband, Mykhailo Boichuk. In Paris, between 1909 and 1910, Mykhailo Boichuk and like-minded individuals and students, including Sofia Nalepynska-Boichuk, founded a separate artistic school, later known as Boichukism. The style created by M. Boichuk was characterised by monumentalism, a synthesis of Ukrainian folk visual art and the sacred art of Byzantium and the Early Renaissance. In 1910, the artist and her husband moved to Ukraine. From 1917 onwards, they lived in Kyiv.
Sofia Nalepynska embraced and grew to love Ukrainian culture – she learned the Ukrainian language, studied Ukrainian songs, and became passionate about Ukrainian literature and art. From 1918 to 1921, S. Nalepynska-Boichuk taught at the Myrhorod Art School. From 1922 to 1929, the artist headed the woodcut workshop at the graphic arts department of the Kyiv Art Institute. Her students include Ukrainian artists Kateryna Hakkebush, Oleksandr Ruban, and Vira Bura-Matsapura. In the 1920s and 1930s, S. Nalepynska-Boichuk worked in book graphics, illustrating renowned Ukrainian and European literature works. In particular, she created illustrations for Taras Shevchenko's poem "My thirteenth year was wearing on" and the epic poem "Kateryna". In her creative work, the artist repeatedly addressed pressing social issues faced by the Ukrainian population in the early 20th century, as well as themes of women's friendship and rural life under Soviet reality. A distinctive feature of most of the artist's works is the integration of characters into forest, rural, and predominantly urban landscapes, as was demanded by the times. On 12 June 1937, Sofia Nalepynska-Boichuk was arrested by the NKVD on charges of participating in an anti-Soviet nationalist terrorist organisation and was sentenced to death. She was executed on 11 December 1937. In 1988, she was rehabilitated.

Object description

Sofia Nalepynska-Boichuk's oeuvre features works focused on female friendship, including scenes of girls reading books together, as exemplified in the "Friends" engraving. Against a white, unframed background is a full-length depiction of two Ukrainian village girls in headscarves, standing barefoot on the grass. The friends are attentively reading a book: one of them (on the right) reads aloud, while the other (on the left, holding a flower) listens dreamily, with her head tilted to her left shoulder.

Inscriptions

In the lower right corner of the engraving, the letter "B" is incorporated into the composition. In the lower right corner beneath the image, there is an inscription in pencil: "S. Nalepynska-Boichuk".

Legal regulation

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery

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