BOYCHUKISM. Great style project

This is a project about dreamers who wanted to change the world. About reformers of art, who abandoned the traditional format. This project is about the creators of utopia, who themselves became victims of this utopia…

Mykhailo Boychuk was a young man from Ternopil region, who in 1910 surprised pernickety Paris, having exhibited his works in the Salon des Indépendants. Tempera instead of oil, collective creation instead of individual one, return to historical heritage instead of its negation, condensation of artistic form instead of realistic reproduction. The French named these innovations ‘Renovation Byzantine’, known among scholars as the school of Ukrainian monumentalism or boychukism. This was the last attempt to realize the great style in Ukraine. The rebellion by nature, Mykhailo Boychuk saw a clearly defined goal – reforming Ukrainian art. The new Ukrainian style was to become truly national and to enter deeply into the everyday life of a person.

In the 1920s, Boychuk followers at the Kyiv State Art Institute created a medieval workshop, where the process of creation was collaborative – from the manufacture of paints and brushes to finished works. They ambitiously called themselves the ‘architects of the universe’, who create a great national style. Boychukists sincerely believed that their art is serving the building up of an ideal society, where the farmers among the lush meadows, smiling women near the apple-tree are in perfect harmony. Everyday life of the Ukrainian village is transformed to the sacred action in the works of the Boychukists. However, the Bolshevik ideologists quickly put an end to various artistic searches. After existence of a universal method of socialist realism in Ukraine, a great terror reigned.

The monumental works of the Boychukists were destroyed following their authors. Until now, only a few sketch or chamber works have survived from the heritage of their projected ‘great style’. Behind each of them – some personal courage: museum workers who ignored the directives on the destruction of ideologically hostile works; students of Mykhailo Boychuk, who, turning into ‘socialist realists’, hid their early work; collectors who understood the value of prohibited art.

We tried to collect a puzzle from these surviving fragments that would give a comprehensive picture of the Ukrainian monumentalism as an artistic direction that reflected the essence of its epoch. At the ruins of the empires, young political nations appeared, which vigorously started to develop new countries and their own culture. It is not by chance that the most impressive is the proximity between the works of the Boychukists and the Mexican Muralists, which is generated by similar historical circumstances. By the way, thanks to the massive passion for muralism that has captured our cities over the past few years, society has already learned something about Mexican artists. But little is known about the Ukrainian monumentalists, whose first monumental works appeared in 1919, even chronologically ahead of the world-famous masterpieces of Diego Rivera. So it is time to start a conversation about the Ukrainian experience of such artistic practice. Perhaps, through this knowledge, we will be able to get closer to realizing the self-sufficiency of Ukrainian art.

More than 300 paintings, graphic, mosaic works by Mykhailo and Tymofiy Boychuk, Vasyl Sedlyar, Ivan Padalka, Sofiia Nalepinska, Oksana Pavlenko, Antonina Ivanova, Mykola Rokytskyi, Serhiy Kolos, Okhrim Kravchenko are presented at the exhibition. Among them – a unique iconography by early Boychuk from a period of his studies at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts and his masterpiece – the so-called secular icon ‘Two under the tree’. It was amazingly preserved thanks to artist from Lviv Yaroslava Muzyka, who hid them at a time when the heritage of the artist from the funds of the Lviv State Museum of Ukrainian Art, according to an official order, was simply burned down in 1952 as ‘anti-Soviet and nationalistic’.

There are unique works of students of monumental painting in the 1920s preserved in the funds of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine. Pottery dishes created after sketches by the Boychukists. In particular, the plate of 1919 ‘The glorious fighter for the freedom of Ukraine Hetman Ivan Mazepa’. The original of the first edition of ‘Kobzar’ by Taras Shevchenko with illustrations by artist Vasyl Sedlyar (1931) will be presented. Little is known about the achievements of the Boychukists in the field of scenography – projects of scenic scenery, sketches of costumes for theatrical performances and even the puppets for the puppet theater.