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Sketch for the "Ruthenian Architects" Mural Series

Vasyl Poliovyi, Yuliia Podohova

Basic information

ID: Ж-8175
Author: Vasyl Poliovyi Yuliia Podohova
Name: Sketch for the "Ruthenian Architects" Mural Series
Date of creation: 1972–1973 (?)
Country: the USSR
Culture: Ukrainian art of the Soviet period
Technique: mixed technique
Material: particleboard oil tempera
Dimensions (height x width, cm): 33 x 70

Additionally

Type: painting
Genre: symbolic art
Plot: Allegory
Provenance: Handed over to the museum from Vasyl Poliovyi

Information about author

Author: Vasyl Poliovyi
Artist's lifetime: b.1936
Country: the USSR, the USA
Biography: Vasyl Poliovyi is a Ukrainian painter and graphic artist, one of the leading authors of Soviet Nonconformist art. He was born on April 22, 1936, in Kryvyi Rih city. The artist's father, Petro Poliovyi, worked as an engineer, and his mother, Oleksandra, was a mathematics teacher. With the start of hostilities on the territory of the USSR on June 22, 1941, the family was evacuated to the Sverdlovsk region (RSFSR). There Vasyl Poliovyi studied in school, and after completing his education in 1954, he entered an art school in Yelets. However, the artist later transferred to the Tavricheskaya Art School (Leningrad, RSFSR) and then to the Higher School of Industrial Art named after Vera Mukhina. After completing his studies, he moved to Moscow, where he worked at an art collective with his wife, artist Yuliia Podohova. He focused mainly on the monumental and decorative design of the interiors and the exteriors of public buildings and governmental institutions. At the same time, he was involved in the circle of nonconformist artists in Moscow and Leningrad, including Dmytro Krasnopevtsev, Anatolii Zverev, Mykhailo Shemiakin, Oleh Tselkov, Eduard Steinberg, Volodymyr Sterlihov, and the Lianozovo Group, as well as writers like Serhii Dovlatov, Yurii Mamleev, and Vladlen Gavrilchik. He participated in unofficial exhibitions, including those in the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Italy, and Czechoslovakia. In 1965, while visiting his brother, the researcher and inventor Renat Poliovyi, the artist created a large cycle of thematic works about Ukraine. Some of them were exhibited in Moscow. Later he joined the Artists' Union of the USSR. In 1972, Vasyl Poliovyi moved to Lviv, where he worked on monumental and easel paintings. During this period, he interacted with the local art community, including Valerii Shalenko, Mykhailo Steinberg, Yurii Sokolov, Okhrim Kravchenko, Margit and Roman Selsky, Anatolii Semahin, art critics Hryhorii Ostrovskyi and Dmytro Shelest, and writer Ihor Klekh. In 1976, Vasyl Poliovyi was expelled from the Artists' Union, which made his professional activity practically impossible. As a result, the artist decided to emigrate from the Soviet Union to the United States, where he still lives and works in Greenville, South Carolina.

Information about author

Author: Yuliia Podohova
Artist's lifetime: 1927–2021
Biography: Yuliia Podohova (1927–2021) was a monumentalist and a member of the Artists' Union of the USSR. She studied at the Stroganov Higher School in Moscow and was a student of the People's Artist of the USSR, Yekaterina Belashova. Her diploma work, stained-glass windows for an international exhibition in Brussels, was accepted as "excellent with honours". Yuliia Podohova worked on monumental murals, stained-glass windows, and mosaics. In addition, her works include easel paintings. The monumental and easel works of the artist are now kept in public spaces, museum collections, and private collections in the countries of the former USSR, including Moldova, Ukraine, and the Russian Federation. Yuliia Podohova met and later married Vasyl Poliovyi during the "Moscow period" of his work. Later, the couple moved to Lviv, where the artist created monumental works famous for her co-authored sketches for murals and mosaics (1970s). No easel works of the Lviv period have been found so far. In 1990, together with Vasyl Poliovyi, the artist moved to the United States for permanent residence, where she died in 2021 after a long illness.

Object description

The sketch for the "Ruthenian Architects" mural series was made in collaboration with Yuliia Podohova. In the work dedicated to the architectural practices of the 18th century, one can trace the manifestations of Elizabethan Baroque, buildings in tune with Classicism, and local versions of Palladianism and Neo-Gothic through the works of Vasyl Bazhenov and Matvii Kazakov. The stylisations used by the author include both recognisable objects and variations on the theme of the architectural research of the time, in which one can trace direct references to current trends and attempts to understand local architectural traditions, taking into account the current stylistic context. As in other sketches of this series, the symbolic and allegorical approach is crucial, preserving the ideological hierarchy in which the main character, the architect, is represented as the largest, and the results of his intellectual work are proportionally smaller – large-scale cathedrals and silhouettes of palaces and defensive structures, an antiquated female figure and figures of majestic sea nymphs holding the globe. The figure of the architect is interpreted compositionally as an iconography of the Evangelists when they were depicted sitting on a chair near a table with the Gospel. This monumentality, which the author has emphasised as much as possible with the tonal solution of the sketch, determines a strict and solemn approach to the unveiling of the images. The colouring of the sketch is cold, with some warm parts mixed with achromatic components, emphasising the ideas of severity and regulation inherent in this period.

Legal regulation

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery

Sketch for the "Ruthenian Architects" Mural Series

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