A Twitter post this week from an account drawing attention to Ukrainian art focused on the beautiful work of Vasylʹ Krychevsʹkyĭ (anglicised as Vasyl Krychevsky).  Krychevsʹkyĭ was born in the Khar’kiv region in 1873 and became a famed and feted artist in Ukraine, but he left the country after the Second World War and died far from his homeland, in Venezuela, in 1952.

In her entry for Krychevsʹkyĭ in Oxford Art Online, Myroslava M. Mudrak describes how “[t]he pure, harmonious colours of his southern Ukrainian landscapes convey the lyrical atmosphere of his native land”, as shown by the beautiful painting used in the first tweet about his work and reproduced here.  The artist’s talents stretched to architecture, stage design, book design, and more.  A list of the films to which he was artistic director or consultant can be found on this VUFKU page (in Ukrainian).

Until a few years ago, reading about Krychevsʹkyĭ in Cambridge would have involved tracking down entries about him within broader discussions of Ukrainian art.  Thankfully this situation changed when we were able to buy a wonderful and substantial 2-volume set about the artist and his work, including a significant number of writings and artistic works reproduced in print for the first time.  The contents pages of volume 1 are available here and sample pages from that volume can also be seen here; the publisher also provides the same for volume 2 (contents pages and sample pages; the latter include a reproduction of a very significant Krychevsʹkyĭ design – that of the trident Ukrainian coat of arms for the Ukrainian National Republic, from 1918).  The images below are taken from these sample scanned pages.

In her 1986 book The New Generation and artistic modernism in the Ukraine, Mudrak refers to Krychevsʹkyĭ several times – as she also does to his artist brother, Fedir Krychevsʹkyĭ.  We have a 1969 Soviet book by Larysa Chlenova published after Fedir Krychevsʹkyĭ was “rehabilitated” (he was interrogated but eventually releasd by the Soviet authorities before he starved to death in 1947 in the village of Irpin, but his name was blackmarked for many years), which includes reproductions of his art too.  You can find other books in Cambridge written or edited by Mudrak about Ukrainian art through this link and books written or edited by Chlenova through this one.

Mel Bach