Mykhailo Boichuk’s “Paris sweethearts”

The photo of a Paris-based Ukrainian group, Renovation Byzantine, has now been reproduced in a number of art history publications. But I can remember that, still in my early childhood, this enlarged and carefully mounted picture always hung over the desk in my father’s study room next to a Shkribliak-made carved cross and a reproduction of the Taras Shevchenko monument in Washington.

“I have now stepped onto the Paris land…” – these are the elated words with which a young art personality, Mykhailo Boichuk (Bojczuk), begins a letter to his patron Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, dated April 13, 1907.

Ignoring the official Academy of Arts in Paris, where he could have his own studios, Boichuk attended the Academie Ranson and Paul Serusier’s studio, which were distinguished for democratic-style teaching and an unconventional student milieu.

As soon as 1909, Boichuk exhibited some of his works – A Woman with Geese, A Woman’s Portrait a la Tempera, which considerably differ from the rest of the pictures, – at the Salon d’Automne. In November of the same year, the artist delivered a scholarly lecture on the history and development of Ukrainian art to the Ukrainian community in Paris. His co-reporter was Mykola Kasperovych, a young artist from the Chernihiv region.

The artist settled together with his compatriots A. Taran and L. Kramarenko at a rooming house at 9 Rue Campagne-Premiere, a bohemian place where the newly-arrived artists and poets lived. On the second floor, right across the corridor, there was a room for the young Polish women Zofia Nalepinska, Zofia Segno, and Zofia Baudouin de Courtenay, who had studied together in St. Petersburg at the impressionist Jan Ciaglinski’s private school, then at the studios of Professor Hollosi in Munich and that of Serusier.

In April 1910, at the Salon des Independants which displayed the works of about 2,000 artists in 43 halls, Boichuk, Kasperovych, and Segno exhibited 18 “collective” works with the general title of “Renovation Byzantine” (“Renaissance of Byzantine Art”). This group of “neo-Byzantinists” attracted general attention and was invited to join the International Union of Artists and Writers. The well-known art critic Guillaume Apollinaire thoroughly analyzed the young group’s artistic pursuit, pointing out their original ideas and experiments. The French (Le Journal, Paris-Journal, Gil Blas, L’Intrasigeant, Democratie sociale) and Polish (Nowa gazeta, Odrodzenie, Kurjer Warszawski, Literatura i sztuka) press, as well as the Lviv Ukrainian newspaper Dilo wrote about the originality of these artworks.

There is an old photo that shows the young Renovation Byzantine victors: Helena Schramm, Mykola Kasperovych, Zofia Baudouin de Courtenay, Zofia Nalepinska, Zofia Segno, Janina Lewakowska, and Mykhailo Boichuk. To the left of them is the poet Tadeusz Nalepinski, Zofia Nalepinska’s brother. This photo in fact prompted us to try – on the basis of comparative analysis and written archival materials – to identify persons on Boichuk’s unsigned portraits.

The first, A Woman’s Portrait, painted in tempera, is known to us from a reproduction in Kost Slipko-Moskaltsiv’s book M. Boichuk (Kharkiv, 1930). It can be referred to the period when “the three Zofias” met Boichuk at Paul Serusier’s studio. The portrait shows Zofia Segno, a young Polish aristocratic beauty in St. Petersburg. As Zofia Nalepinska’s younger sister Hanna Nalepinska-Pieczarkowska wrote in her memoirs, “Zofia Segno was the most beautiful girl I have ever seen in my lifetime. She had something from Raphael’s Madonna, and her eyes seemed to have been drawn by Giotto.” Naturally, a beauty like this could not escape the eye of a 28-year-old artist who managed to enchant her.

On Boichuk’s initiative, the young mistress studied Ukrainian icon painting, painted pictures for a Salon exhibition, and sang a “wonderful contralto” in the Ukrainian community’s choir in Paris. The young Polish aristocratic lady Segno “was madly in love with him and he was with her, but he was a genius, and art was more important to him,” Nalepinska-Pieczarkowska says in her reminiscences. The portrait is likely to have been painted at the time. Boichuk rapturously described Segno in 1919 in Kyiv: “What a neck she had! Only Giotto could paint one. A swan’s neck… And look at the way her neck is set, at her eyes… Giotto, Cimabue…” These features are clearly visible on both the portrait and the picture that depict Segno.

To ward off a society scandal, Zofia’s brother Henryk, the “pioneer of aviation” in Russia and Poland, took the ecstatic young lady to Petersburg after settling “gentlemen’s scores” with Boichuk. Agonizing over a forced separation, she soon married bank manager Lipynski and moved to Warsaw.

The second, The Portrait of a Woman, was painted in tempera on cardboard in 1910. It is a full-face picture of a young big-eyed beauty – perhaps Zofia Nalepinska. Here is how her sister Hanna describes her in a letter to the Kyiv-based art critic Dmytro Gorbachov: “Maybe, Zofia was not classically beautiful, but there was something inspirational, truthful, purposeful, and attractive about her. In her youth she was tall and slim. You are asking about her looks. Take Cimabue’s Madonna – she looks like her.” This brief description coincides with the images on the picture and the abovementioned portrait. After a scandalous departure of Segno, Boichuk feasted his eyes on a “modest, kindhearted, and unselfish” Zofia Nalepinska. “He captivated her with his ideas and, to be frank, she also fell in love with him,” Hanna Nalepinska claims. She fell in love in order to carry her cross together with Boichuk until the sorrowful year 1937.

The third, The Portrait of a Man, was painted in watercolor on a sheet of paper in 1909-10. Compared to the picture, it can be identified as an image of Tadeusz Nalepinski (1885-1918), a Polish national democratic poet and brother of Zofia Nalepinska, who played a certain role in cementing the relations between “the three Zofias” and the young Ukrainian artists. Boichuk also designed the cover of Chrest, the poet’s first collection published in Krakow in 1910.

One more work, Four Women and a Cat, painted with gouache on paper, can be viewed as a humoristic grotesque: it comprises stylized portraits of Paris studio girl pupils. In the foreground, with a red headscarf on, is Zofia Nalepinska, next to her is Zofia Baudouin de Courtenay, behind them is Zofia Segno, and Helena Schramm stands to the left. Boichuk “depicted” himself as a cat in the background.

What I have offered Den’s readers on the day of the famous artist’s birth anniversary is the attempt of a comparative analysis and identification of the Boichuk-made portraits with concrete historical figures in a Renovation Byzantine picture, coupled with reminiscences of the young artists’ private life.