Mikhailo Boichuk Lvovich

Biography

Early years

The sociologist V. Starosolskyi established the exact date of the artist's birth - October 30, 1881, based on the metrical entry in the church book. His native village of Romanivka is a secluded nook 18 kilometers from Terebovla.

Father is a farmer, signed his letters Leo or Levontius. The mother is Hanna, daughter of Andriy. After her death (April 9, 1907), the father remarried. From his first marriage, he had children Mykhailo, Ivan, Dmytro, Maria, Timko, Kateryna and Yulia, from the second - Elena and Rosalia. The family owned 14 field morgues. The hut burned down after the war, and later it was dismantled - along with it, Mykhailo's early drawings disappeared.

In 1898, the future artist arrived in Lviv to study at a painting school. He studied in the studio of Julian Pankevich in Lviv.

Supported by the Scientific Society named after T. Shevchenko, led by M. Hrushevskyi (he himself became a member of the society in 1912), he studied at the Vienna Academy of Arts with the funds of the National Academy of Sciences and Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytskyi, then at Leon Wychulkovskyi in Kraków.

After graduating from the academy with a silver medal, he went to study at the Munich Academy, then for several years to Paris, where he became one of the founders of the Ukrainian community. Studying the achievements of world culture, the artist at the same time delved into primitive folk art.

Visits to Paris

Having found himself in Paris in 1908 - the capital of European artistic life at that time - M. Boichuk studied the works of Cézanne and Renoir in the originals, got acquainted with Picasso. These masters finally confirmed his doubts about the academic routine of a formal school. They attract him with the analysis of the artistic culture of the present and the past, as well as the simple and expressive art of the primitive. At the same time, Boychuk is not fascinated by individualistic, disjointed formal searches. It was in Paris that he "got the idea to make art a good thing, the property of the masses." M. Boychuk thinks about the importance of collectivity in art (it was not only about the collectivity of perception, so that works become collective property, but also about collective creativity). This is how he came to the idea of ​​monumentalism.

Boichuk convinced his followers, and then his students:

Don't be afraid to lose your individuality. Look at who works better. You should not be afraid to borrow from others, you should try to do better. Individuality will reveal itself when the master matures.

The group of artists, the so-called "Boichukists", formed under his leadership (Mykola Kasperovych, Sophia Beaudoin-de-Courtenay, Sophia Nalepynska), consciously went to authorial self-denial, working collectively.

Studying the history of art in Paris, the artists soon came to focus on Byzantine art and the art of Kyivan Rus, seeing in it the pinnacle phenomena of artistic creativity (M. Boichuk sought to start the revival of the new Ukrainian art on such basis). Together, in the Parisian "Salon of Independents", they began to exhibit under the common slogan "Revival of Byzantine art". In 1909, he founded a workshop of neo-Byzantine art here, which became the beginning of his creative school.

In 1910, the St. Petersburg elite magazine Apollo wrote about another such exhibition, in which more than two thousand authors took part:

Amidst the anarchy and bacchanalia prevailing at the exhibition of the Independents, something serious and great can be felt in the friendly atmosphere of this (that is, Boychukova) close group — a longing for monumental style, for anonymous and collective creativity, for painting as a professional secret of artisans (artists). and monks.

In Paris, Mykhailo Boychuk married Sofya Nalepynska. In 1910-1911, he also visited Italy, where he studied works of monumental art, primarily of the Proto-Renaissance period, and mastered various technical techniques in tempera and fresco.

Return

In 1911-1912 Mykhailo Boychuk lived in Lviv. He worked on monumental paintings in the city of Yaroslav (now Poland), restored icons in the National Museum in Lviv, painted the church of the monastery of Vasiliyanok nuns in the village of Slovita (now Zolochiv District, Lviv Region), painted the icon "The Protection of the Mother of God", a self-portrait, etc. At the invitation of the Russian Archaeological Society, he carried out restoration work in the temple in the village of Lemeshakh of the Chernihiv province (1912—1914).

During the First World War, Boychuk, together with his younger brother Timko, were exiled by the Russians to Arzamas as Austrian subjects, where they had to suffer a half-starved existence. And when they started organizing the Ukrainian Academy of Arts in Kyiv (1917), Mykhailo Boychuk was chosen as its professor from among the most prominent artists of Ukraine at that time. So, since 1917, he has been working in Kyiv. He restored several works in the collection of Bohdan Khanenko, proposed a method of fixing frescoes in the baptistery of St. Sophia's Cathedral (1919), in 1924 he opened frescoes in the Dormition Cathedral of Yeletsky Monastery in Chernihiv.

Zin the same year, 1924, he became a professor at the Kyiv Art Institute. Mykhailo Boychuk took part in monumental propaganda, led the first state workshops. His group painted the propaganda steamer "Bolshevik", Lutsk barracks in Kyiv (1919), decorated the holiday of May 1, 1919, decorated the Kyiv Opera House during the first All-Ukrainian congress of representatives of the municipal executive committees (1919), in the spring of 1921, at the invitation of the government of the Ukrainian SSR, decorated the premises of the Kharkiv Opera House, where the fifth All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets was held, worked at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition in 1923, executed about twenty full-length portraits of cooperative and state figures for the Kyiv Cooperative Institute, painted murals of the sanatorium named after VUCVK on Khadzhibey estuary in Odesa (1928), Chervonozavod Theater in Kharkiv (1933-1935).

In his creative pursuits, M. Boychuk was close to the Mexican artist Diego Rivera. In addition, since 1909, M. Boychuk worked in the field of graphics. Famous covers for the Society of Supporters of Ukrainian Literature and Science (Lviv, early 20th century), "Shevchenko Holiday" and "Bring Gifts to the Red Army" posters (both from 1920). Together with his students, he created a series of covers for the Cherkasy publishing house "Siyach" (1918, printed under the signature "Robitnia Boychuk" and anonymously), and is also the author of a number of easel works "Collections of Women's Active" (1929), portraits of B. Lepky and S. Zheromskyi (beginning of the 20th century), theater decorations for the productions of the "Young Theater" in Kyiv ("Yola" by Yu. Zhulavskyi, "Black Panther and the White Bear" by V. Vinnychenko - both from 1918), sketches of the multi-figure tapestry "Obzhynka" (1935 ).

Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine

At the end of 1925, the Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine (ARMU) was founded in Kyiv, uniting Boychukists. ARMU promoted the introduction of art into everyday life, its combination with life, denied naturalistic realism. Boychukists strove for the national identity of Ukrainian art. These ideological and artistic principles did not fit into the canonized framework of "Soviet art", they caused accusations from the "militant socialists" of distorting the images of Soviet people and socialist reality. In addition, the unkindness of other artists, dictated by groupism, was still nagging. The latter forced Mykhailo Boychuk to leave Kyiv in 1931.

At first Boychuk taught at the Leningrad Academy of Arts, was the head of the composition department of the Academy of Arts, and already in 1932 he returned to Ukraine - to Kharkiv.

Ukrainian fascism is trying to present me as one of the leaders of the "Ukrainian national style" in art. I did not set myself the task of creating a "national Ukrainian style", I always looked at it in the way that fine art is an international language that does not need translators.

— Mykhailo Boychuk's speech at the first plenum of the Organizational Bureau of the Union of Soviet Artists and Sculptors of the USSR. November 27 - December 2, 1933. Kharkiv.

Tragic ending

In November 1926 - May 1927, Boychuk, together with his wife Sofia Nalepynska-Boichuk, students Ivan Padalka and Vasyl Sedlyar, had a creative trip to the German state, the French Republic, and the Kingdom of Italy. The trip abroad became one of the formal grounds for their arrest and accusation of "espionage" and participation in a "counter-revolutionary organization".

On November 25, 1936, the NKVD authorities arrested Mykhailo Lvovich Boichuk, and on July 13, 1937, together with his talented students Ivan Padalka and Vasyl Sedlyar, they were shot in Kyiv.

Sofia Nalepinska-Boychuk was executed on December 11, 1937, also as a "spy" and "wife of the head of a nationalist terrorist organization among artists." The fate of these four was shared by the majority of Mykhailo Boychuk's students.

Destiny after death

Contemporaries of M. Boychuk were surprised by his deliberate refusal to participate in exhibitions. He did not see the need for this, believing that the purpose of monumentalist frescoes is public buildings and wide squares, where they are "exhibited" constantly.

All of Boychuk's frescoes were urgently plastered over after the arrest of the artist. Already in 1952, according to order No. 2115 of the Committee for Arts, the frescoes were removed from the National Museum of Lviv and destroyed. In the basement of the Lviv Library of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, among the "ideologically harmful" exhibits, 14 works of M. Boychuk also perished: "Mercy", "Dream", "The Mother of God with Child", "By the Well", "The Writer" and others. However, it was possible to preserve some of Mykhailo Boychuk's works thanks to the Lviv artist Yaroslava Muzytsa, who, since 1914 (when M. Boychuk was forced to leave Lviv, leaving the paintings in his workshop), kept the artist's works and his small but significant scientific archive. From the point of view of a monumentalist, what we can see now in nature are only sketches, preparatory sketches for something bigger and more colorful.

But the work of Mykhailo Boychuk cannot be measured only by the number of works (or createdthem, or only preserved ones). In addition to works of painting and graphics, he acted as an innovator-monumentalist who created his own school in monumental painting, a team of like-minded people and followers (about 200 artists worked on the painting of the premises of the 4 floors of the Lutsk barracks in Kyiv in 1919).

"Boichuk managed to influence even other, stronger personalities in such a way that the main directions of modern Ukrainian art almost without exception followed the path of monumentalism," - this is how the well-known graphic artist and art critic Pavlo Kovzhun assessed the role and significance of this artist's creative search.

M. Boychuk trained a galaxy of students, including Timofey Boychuk (brother of Mykhailo Lvovych), Kyrylo Gvozdyk, Antonina Ivanova, Serhiy Kolos, Oksana Pavlenko, Ivan Padalka, Oleksandr Myzin, Vasyl Sedlyar, Mykola Rokytskyi, Onufriy Bizyukov, Vira Bura-Matsapura (the so-called Boychukists ) embodied his creative ideas also in ceramics, fabric, book graphics, etc.

Perpetuation of memory

• In 1991, the exhibition "Boychuk and Boychukists, Boychukism" was held in Lviv, Kyiv, Ternopil and other cities.
• In 1990, the Ternopil Regional Art Prize named after Mykhailo Boychuk was founded.
• In 1992, a monument was erected to the Boychuk brothers in their native village of Romanivka (sculptor B. Rudy).
• In the cities of Kyiv, Korosten, and Lviv there is Mykhailo Boychuk Street.
• In the city of Kropyvnytskyi, Shishkin Lane was renamed Mykhailo Boychuk Lane.
• In the city of Dnipro, Bryullov Street was renamed Mykhailo Boychuk Street.
• In 2000, the name of Mykhailo Boychuk was given to the Kyiv Institute of Decorative and Applied Arts and Design.
• In 2020, in the native village of Romanivka, Terebovlyansky district, Ternopil region, volunteers began to restore the home of the Boychuk brothers at their own expense.