Arists' biographies

Jacques Hnizdovsky

was born in Ukraine in 1915 and he studied art in Warsaw and Zagreb. Soon after he moved to the United States in 1949, A. Hyatt Mayor of the Metropolitan Museum chose his woodcut 'Bush' for a Purchase Award at the 1950 Minneapolis Institute of Art print exhibition. That was a key moment encouraging the artist to abandon other work and become a full-time artist.

The art of Hnizdovsky draws inspiration from the realist tradition of art with the academic background of mainstreams of European school. The artist has not been lured into avant-garde. He also largely avoided social commentary, remaining open to what appears to us so imminent and naturally.

Graphically, Hnizdovsky's world encompasses a limited spectrum, essentially a natural history of animals and birds, plants, trees. Still life is another subject matter with which the artist dealt strikingly. Between 1950 and his death in 1985 the artist produced more than 375 prints, primarily woodcuts and linocuts, as well as several fine etchings.

Mykola Butowych

(b. 1 December 1895 in the village of Petrivka, Poltava gubernia, d. 21 December 1961 in Hackensack, NJ). Modernist painter and graphic artist. Butovych studied in Prague, Berlin and Leipzig (at the Academy of Graphic Art, 1922-26). The artist worked in Lviv and from 1947 in the United States. Individual shows were held in Lviv (numerous exhibits of the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists), Paris (the Salon d'Automne), Los Angeles (exhibiting bookplates in 1933), Rome (graphics in 1938), Brussels (1946), and from 1952 a number of exhibits in the United States.

Butowych's work is based on themes from Ukrainian folkways, mythology, and folklore, which are often treated in a humorous or grotesque way. His works include illustrations to books by M. Gogol, V. Stefanyk, and I. Kotliarevsky; numerous book-cover designs, bookplates, and emblems.

David Burliuk

(b Kharkiv, Ukraine, 21 July 1882; d Southampton, Long Island, NY, 15 Jan 1967). Painter and writer. He studied art in Kazan' and Odessa from 1899 to 1901, when he left for Munich to study with Anton Azbé. In 1904 he attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, under Fernand Cormon. Returning to Russia, he settled in Moscow but again studied at the Odessa School of Art from 1910 to 1911 and then entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, from which he was expelled in 1914.

Burliuk - Ukrainian family of artists. All six children in the family showed artistic or literary talent, but (1) David Burlyuk, the eldest, and (2) Vladimir Burlyuk are especially noted for their contributions to avant-garde movements in Ukraine in the early 20th century, in particular to Ukrainian Futurism.

The Grove Dictionary of Art Macmillan Publishers Limited

Oleksa Hryshchenko [Alexis Gritchenko]

(b Krolovets, 2 April 1883; d Vence, 28 Jan 1977). Ukrainian painter and theorist. He studied philology and biology at the universities of Kiev, St Petersburg and Moscow before turning to art. He studied painting in Moscow and established close ties with the collectors Sergey Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. In 1911 he visited Paris where he became an enthusiast of Cubist painting, which, after a trip to Italy in 1913-14, he blended with his study of early Italian Renaissance painters, creating a style that brought together the cosmopolitan and urbane with the orthodoxy of the Byzantine legacy of sacred art. Hryshchenko devoted his theoretical work to the subject of Byzantine art and its links with modern art (1912) and to an analysis of the formal and stylistic properties of Byzantine painting in terms of modernist tendencies and practice (1916). After the 1917 revolution he became a professor at the Free Art Studios (Svomas) in Moscow and a member of the Commission for the Preservation of Historic Monuments. In 1919 he left Russia by way of the Crimea for Constantinople and Greece, which marked the beginning of a distinctive and inspired period of watercolour painting. In 1921, when he arrived in Paris, 12 paintings of Constantinople were included in the Salon d'Automne. A subsequent trip to Greece resulted in works that brought him into contact with renowned dealers and distinguished collectors (Léopold Zborowski, Albert C. Barnes). After 1924 Hryshchenko lived in southern France where he painted in muted, controlled and diaphanously transparent tones. In 1937 a one-man exhibition was held at the Museum of Ukrainian Art in L'vov (now L'viv). Later, the works that had been housed in the L'viv museum were branded as 'formalist' and destroyed during the Stalinist years. To preserve his artistic legacy the Alexis Gritchenko Foundation was formed in New York in 1958.

The Grove Dictionary of Art Macmillan Publishers Limited

Yuriy Solovij

(b Lviv, 6 June 1921). Painter, sculptor, and art critic. A graduate of the Lviv Arts and Crafts School (1944). After World War II moved to Germany and then the United States. Mr. Solovij has experimented with several styles (postimpressionism, expressionism, abstract expressionism). Since the 1950s he has been preoccupied with the themes of birth and death. His later works deal with the universality of pain in human life. Some of his characteristic works are 'Motherhood' (1947), 'Crucifixion' (1950, 1969), and the series '1,000 Heads.' Solo exhibitions of his works have been held in New York, Chicago, Toronto, Munich and Winnipeg.

Exhibition views