Bohomazov, a pure futurist artist

“April 2010 saw the futurist artist Andrii Bohomazov’s 130th birthday anniversary. He was one of the founders of the Academy of Arts in Kyiv. Bohomazov believed that Ukrainian children should not study in Petersburg or at any other foreign academy, as they must have their own art school with a program built to meet the particular temperament of the Ukrainian artist,” said Oksana BARSHYNOVA, senior research worker at the Ukrainian National Art Museum, in an interview to The Day. “The renowned art critic Dmytro Horbachov maintains, referring to certain sources, that Bohomazov and two Italian masters make up the three so-called pure futurist artists.”

The works shown on this page are illustrative of the painter’s artistic manner and represent various periods of his career. The Kyiv Cityscape is characteristic of futurism painting because here we can see dynamic shapes and deformed buildings, as if glimpsed by someone who raced past in a car – exactly this sudden look, so typical of futurists.

As to Stropping the Saws, this painting is central to Bohomazov’s art of the mid-1920s. That was the time when avant-garde experienced a period of theorizing, as if pondering which way to develop. It was at a deadlock because, regardless of their slogans like “New art, new country!”, avant-gardists failed to satisfy the Soviet regime’s “artistic” demands. That is why both Malevich and Bohomazov plunged into teaching, immersing themselves in theory – though with time they came back to figurative painting.

Why was avant-garde at odds with the new regime? The reason may be that in the 1920s, a new power doctrine was being formulated, and the artists realized that they were doomed to create a new mythology, social realism. It meant creating a reality which would look similar to nature, lifelike, yet at the same time quasi-real.

Meanwhile, the sense of avant-gardism is in the tendency to objectlessness, to the destruction of the object, and the expression of abstract notions. The regime, on its part, quickly understood that any avant-gardist (and this is especially easy to track in the work of Malevich) creates his or her own world, severed from the tasks envisaged for art as an ideological weapon. The regime understood that the avant-garde world would not perform any social orders.

Meanwhile, the futurist artists were reading philosophical texts, first of all, Henri Bergson and Nietzsche (for futurism drew considerable on the ideas of the superhuman), and they also communicated among themselves. The memoirs by the writer Yurii Smolych, published in Kharkiv in the 1960s, indicate the communication among futurist artists, both painters and men of letters.

Thus, Anatolii Petrytsky, who at the dawn of his career leaned towards cubism, executed a series of portraits of Ukrainian writers, musician, authors, and painters in the late 1920s. Among them, for example, is the portrait of Mykhail Semenko, which has miraculously survived and is now part of the Museum’s collection.