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Still Life

Roman Turyn

Basic information

ID: Ж-6858
Author: Roman Turyn
Name: Still Life
Culture: Contemporary times
Technique: oil painting
Material: cardboard oil
Dimensions: 41 x 31.5 cm (height x width)

Additionally

Type: painting
Genre: still life
Plot: Still life

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

R. Turyn's "Still Life" is characterised by integrating modernist inspirations and their reinterpretation in an original artistic language. Thus, the picture is related to the experience of Post-Impressionism through "the realisation of not an impression, but a stable visual perception", the intrinsic value of the painting surface, the combination of clear structure and intense colour drama. The influence of Fauvism is evident in the combination of saturated, "eloquent" colours, transformed into an independent artistic theme of violet, carmine, blue, green and gold tones. Preserving the link between the signified and the sign, the still life appears as a self-sufficient artistic reality with accentuated "objectivity" and ontological validity of the reproduced everyday household objects: vases, bottles, plates, and sweet boxes, organised in a visual "register". The horizontal composition, reminiscent of a frieze, completes their visual representation. The affirmation of the world's materiality in combinations of dense planes of colour created ornamentation and decorative expressiveness, referring to oriental artistic traditions and the aesthetics of decorative and applied products of folk artists. The peculiarity of the work is the reflection of integrity and harmony, fullness and diversity of life in the materiality of the objects depicted.

Legal regulation

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery

Still Life

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