Executed Renaissance of Ukrainian art

Mykhailo Boichuk is a person who successfully combines life-asserting peasant nature with a refined taste of an intellectual. He was a Galician by origin and was brought up on Galician traditions. He received artistic training in the academies of Krakow, Munich, and Paris. Later in his life he moved from Lviv to Kyiv to develop the trend of “neo-Byzantism,” he founded in Paris, into the “school of Ukrainian monumentalism” and by doing so to fulfill his old dream of reviving Ukrainian art.

Original “school of Ukrainian monumentalists” is a world’s culture phenomenon which was founded as a result of long-term self-sacrificing work of Boichuk in 1917, and in 1937 it ceased to exist. At first, a playful, but with clear understanding of the importance of the phenomenon, and absolutely not offensive name for the artists of this group – “boichukist” has acquired a sinister character in critical speeches and publications in the Soviet press and stuck to them as an implementation of their membership in the group of formalists-modernists, who under the Soviet Ukraine were also identified with bourgeois nationalism. It was like a brand that made them “companions in misfortune” rather than “friends of labor.” Their artistic work, their artistic lives went differently from what the great master imagined and what they dreamed for themselves. Each one of them drained their cup to the dregs.

It all began so romantically because there was a whole life ahead of them.

Mykhailo Boichuk was born on October 30, 1882 in the Galician village of Romanivka in Ternopil region, Austro-Hungarian Empire. With God’s providence or luck (local teacher noticed little boy’s talent and sent an advertisement to Lviv newspaper Dilo, to which an artist responded) 15-year-old young man came to Lviv to the private art school of Yulian Pankevych. In 1898 Boichuk entered the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied with great professors Florian Cynk and Leon Wyczolkowski. In 1904 he graduates from the Academy with a silver medal. Ivan Trush wrote about Boichuk’s achievements of that time in Artistic Journal in 1905.

As a holder of the Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky’s scholarship, talented young man continued his studies at the Munich Academy of Art but in 1906 he was mobilized for military service in the Austrian Army in Dalmatia. After demobilization Boichuk finally reached the long-desired artistic Mecca. “Today I stepped on Parisian soil,” with these words the young artist began his letter to Metropolitan Sheptytsky dated from April 13, 1907.

Ignoring official Academy of Arts, where he had to study, Boichuk attended Ranson classes from the Paul Serusier studio (1907-10) which was distinguished for democratic learning process and extraordinary student environment. Already in 1909 at the Fall Salon the young artist presented several of his works – Lady with Geese and Portrait of a Woman made in the technique a la tempera and “dramatically different from other paintings.”

Boichuk participated in Fall Salon and in Salon of Independent Artist, was a member of the International Union of Artists and Writers (1910). Boichuk also became the founder of the avant-garde art group Renovation Byzantine (1909-10) which gathered such renowned figures as Mykola Kasperovych, Sofia Sehno, Sofia Baudouin de Courtenay, Sofia Nalepinska, Helena Schramm, and others. Original works of these artists were praised by European press.

Boichuk deliberately chose to focus on “revival of Byzantine art,” in which he was searching for national roots of Ukrainian art. Meanwhile, in the circle of Parisian friends Boichuk expressed a significant thought: “We are the school of Byzantine revival because our culture was greatly influenced by it. Neo-Byzantism is only a term to facilitate understanding, after all we have a right for this. In our home country we have a different name.”

In fall of 1910 the artist together with Nalepinska and Kasperovych returned to Lviv, where he settled in unoccupied studio which used to be a workplace for Trush in the house of the Taras Shevchenko Scientific Society. At the invitation of the director of National Museum Ilarion Svientsitsky he got engaged in the restoration of icons and works of tempera painting and also created his own compositions on religious topics. Icons Lord’s Supper and The Prophet Elijah in the Desert are stored at the National Museum and a series of tempera sketches, drawings and watercolors of that period were preserved with great care by Boichuk’s student of Lviv period – artist Yaroslava Muzyka.

Boichuk was the author of frescoes in Chapel of Lviv Theological Seminary (does not exist nowadays), in Basilians Monastery in the village of Slovita near Zolochev (Ukraine), and in the Church of the Transfiguration of Christ in Jaroslaw (Poland), which have been repainted by now. At the invitation of the Russian Archaeological Society, along with his younger brother Tymko and Kasperovych, the artist worked on the restoration of icons in the Church of Three Saints in the village of Lemesh in Chernihiv region from 1912 through 1914. However once the World War I broke out the artist, as a citizen of Austrian Empire, was interned by the Russian government to the city of Uralsk, later – Arzamas.

In December 1917, after returning to Ukraine, according to the initiative of Mykhailo Hrushevsky professor Boichuk is appointed to the position of the head of the Icons and Frescoes Studio (later the studio of monumental painting) at the Ukrainian Academy of Arts. That year he got married to Sofia Nalepinska and a year later she gave birth to their son Petro.

In the new studio professor Boichuk, discharging obsolete forms of academic learning, revolutionized the system and methods of the learning process using the form of individual workshop. The main objective of the educational system of the great master was bringing up of a national artist of a new type with synthetic thinking, able to grasp new aesthetic values and elevate Ukrainian art to the world level. In 1922 Ukrainian Academy of Arts had the first and the last graduation ceremony. Among the graduates there were students of Boichuk’s monumental studio: Vasyl Sedliar, Ivan Padalka, Tymofii Boichuk, Oleksandr Pavlenko, Anna Ivanova, Maria Trubetska, Serhii Kolos, and others.

Boichuk continued his teaching career in Kyiv Institute of Plastic Art (1922-24), Kyiv Art Institute (1924-30), Leningrad Institute of Proletarian Art (1930-31), Kyiv Institute of Proletarian Artistic Culture (1930-34), and Ukrainian Institute of Art (1934-36). He tried to develop the awareness of the great purpose of being a true artist in his students: Onufrii Biziukov, Kyrylo Hvozdyk, Oleksii Kravchenko, Mykola Rokytsky, Mark Shekhtman, and Mykola Yunak. He also tried to inculcate the understanding of the high art principles to them. “We will be building cities and painting buildings – we have to create high art,” professor optimistically declared at his lectures.

However, the conception of revival of the Ukrainian art and its European orientation alerted the Bolshevik leaders. During the ideological campaign against “khvyliovism” in literature and the time of Mykola Skrypnyk’s suicide, newspapers and magazines began active persecution of “boichukism.” The connection of the Boichuk’s school with the traditions of “Byzantism,” which was stressed by the Russian critic Yakov Tugenkhold, became the major asset for the ideologists of the Bolshevik regime in Ukraine for exposing “reactionary and hostile” boichukists. “Builders of socialism as the apostles of church,” this was the irony in press, which was setting the stage for renaming them later into “people’s enemies of nationalistic and fascist character.”

Boichuk and his best students of the Soviet period implemented their creative ideas while working on monumental paintings in Lutsk barracks (1919) and decorating the Cooperative Institute (1923) in Kyiv, where, according to the preserved photographs, “new revolutionary elevated themes, symbolic images of new life become the new creative practice.” They also were engaged in monumental decoration of the Peasant Sanatorium on Khadzhybei firth in Odesa (1928), which became “the first attempt to solve the large-scale complex issues of monumentalism in the Soviet Union implemented according to an expanded ideological and thematic plan,” and in grand mural painting of Chervonozavodsk Theater in Kharkiv (1933-35) in triumph and dynamic forms of Stalin’s “neoclassicism,” “which turned the last opus of boichukists into stilted designs common in the countries of the totalitarian regime of the 1930s.”

“A photo of Boichuk against the background of the cardboard sign Harvest Festival shows a somber figure, sad face, and insightful look at the viewer. Maybe this was the deliberate outrage?” this is how Olena Ripko, art critic described the mood of the artist during the period of painting Chervonozavodsk Theater.

Sculptor Bernard Kratko made a plaster bust of Boichuk in 1936 – “confused man with a forced smile.” The sculpture is known to us only from a small reproduction in the catalogue of the VI All-Ukrainian Art Exhibition. None of these paintings have survived until nowadays. Just like the easel works of the Kyiv period (1917-37), which were almost completely destroyed by “art experts in civilian clothes” and are known only from tiny reproductions.

Boichuk was arrested on the night of November 25, 1936 on charges of espionage and was sent to the NKVD prison as “one of the leaders of the national-fascist terrorist organization.”

Celebration of the 130th anniversary of the great artist will take place on October 30 in the village of Romanivka, Terebovlia raion in Ternopil region – the place where the artist was born.