Unit 5, Part 4

Over the centuries the Ukrainian people have evolved a varied folk art. Embroidery, wood carving, ceramics, and weaving are highly developed, with stylised ornamentation that represents many regional styles. Intricately designed Easter eggs have become popular in many countries that have Ukrainian immigrant populations.

With the introduction of Christianity in the 10th century, the various forms of Byzantine art (architecture, mosaics, frescoes, manuscript illumination, icon painting) spread rapidly and remained the dominant art forms through the 16th century. The beauty and supposed miraculous power of Ukrainian icons was recognized by the invading Poles and Russians, who removed two outstanding ones for veneration to Czestochowa and Vladimir, respectively.

The mosaics and frescoes of the churches of Kiev, notably the Cathedral of St. Sophia (11th-12th century), and the icons of the more distinctively Ukrainian school in Galicia (15th-16th century) are particularly noteworthy. Because such buildings evoked Ukrainian nationalist feelings, a number of outstanding churches, such as the Cathedral of St. Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery (early 12th century), now blissfully restored, were demolished by the Soviet authorities in 1934, and only international protests saved that of St. Sophia from the same fate.

Western European influences in the 17th and 18th centuries affected iconography and stimulated portrait painting, engraving, and sculpture. From Ukraine the Western trends penetrated into Russia, where many Ukrainian artists worked, especially after Ukraine lost its autonomy to Russia in the 18th century. During the late 18th and early 19th centuries the sculptor and rector of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, Ivan Martos, and the portraitists Dmytro Levytsky and Volodymyr Borovykovsky were among the leading figures of the St. Petersburg Classical school of painting.

The Classicism and the emergent realism of the 19th century are best exemplified by the poet-painter Taras Shevchenko. New art movements are evident in the work of such 19th-century painters as the Impressionists Ivan Trush, Mykola Burachek, and Aleksander Murashko, the Postimpressionist Mykola Hlushchenko, and the Expressionists Oleksander Novakivsky, Oleksa Hryshchenko, and Anatoly Petrytsky.

The brief renewal of Ukrainian independence in 1918 fostered further avant-garde trends that reflected a resurgence of Ukrainian national traditions. Two schools developed: in painting, the Monumentalism of Mykhaylo Boychuk, Ivan Padalka, and Vasyl Sedliar, consisting of a blend of Ukrainian Byzantine and Early Renaissance styles; and, in the graphic arts, the Neobaroque of Yuriy Narbut.

Modernist experimentation ended in Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s, however, when both these schools were suppressed and Socialist Realism became the only officially permitted style. The Ukrainian avant-garde was rejuvenated following Nikita Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaigns of the late 1950s; it consisted mostly of Expressionists who wanted to illustrate Ukraine's tragic modern history. These artists, who included Alla Horska, Opanas Zalyvakha, and Feodosy Humenyuk, were again suppressed by the Soviet authorities in the 1970s and '80s.

A number of Ukrainian artists have won considerable renown in the West, among them Grishchenko, who began with Cubism and then turned to a dynamic form of Expressionism, and the painter and engraver Jacques Hnizdovsky, who developed a simplified style of realism. The sculptor Oleksander Arkhypenko, one of the pioneers of Cubism, who later experimented in Constructivism and Expressionism, was a major figure of 20th-century European art.