75. Cubism in Ukrainian painting

Cubism. Artistic movement that regarded painting not as a depiction of nature, but as a free play of forms subject to loosely treated laws of geometry. Cubism reduced all forms to their primary state—sphere, cone, cylinder, and cube—and at the same time introduced new materials into art, often combinations of paint, wood, metal, glass, wire, and so on.

Mykhailo Boichuk and his school were closely related to the cubist movement as early as the mid-1910s. Alexander Archipenko is considered to be the first cubist sculptor in world art. The following Ukrainian artists made use of the innovations introduced by cubism: Vasyl Yermilov, Vadym Meller, Oleksander Bohomazov, Mykhailo Andriienko-Nechytailo, Oleksa Hryshchenko, and Pavlo Kovzhun. They often combined the cubist style with Constructivism.

Boichuk, - Influential Ukrainian modernist painter, graphic artist, and teacher. Boichuk studied at Yuliian Pankevych’s art studio in Lviv (1898), a private art school in Vienna (1899), and the Cracow Academy of Arts (1899–1905). He continued his studies at the Munich and Vienna academies of art and exhibited his works at the Latour Gallery in Lviv in 1905 and in Munich in 1907. While living in Paris Boichuk he founded his own studio-school, at which his future wife Sofiia Nalepinska, Mykola Kasperovych, S. Baudouin de Courtenay, S. Segno, J. Lewakowska, O. Shaginian, and H. Szramm studied.

The principles of Boichukism were followed by a large number of admirers, who sometimes (went on to create their own schools.

76. Constructivism in Ukrainian arts

Constructivism. Artistic movement based on the principle of functionalism and favoring mostly simple geometric forms. In architecture constructivism emphasizes the structure itself and the building materials (reinforced concrete, metals, glass) and avoids decoration. In Ukraine constructivism was popular after 1920 and manifested itself in a series of factorylike buildings: the Building of State Industry and the Projects Building (1925–9, designed by S. Kravets and S. Serafimov), the Post Office (1927–9, by A. Mordvinov), and the Railwaymen's Club in Kharkiv; the Palace of Culture in Kadiivka; the Palace of Labor in Dnipropetrovsk, the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station, and so on. After the war a number of buildings in the constructivist style were built, mostly in Kyiv: the Dnipro Hotel (1960), the Sports Palace (1960), the Boryspil airport (1965); Tarasova Hora Hotel in Kaniv (1961), and a large number of palaces of culture throughout Ukraine.

In painting, constructivism uses abstract combinations of lines, objects, and colored planes. The first constructivist artists in Ukraine were Alexander Archipenko, Kazimir Malevich, A. Ekster, and Mykhailo Andriienko-Nechytailo. The influence of constructivism and cubism is evident in Ivan Kavaleridze's monuments to Fedor Artem (1923–4 in Artemivsk (Donetsk oblast) and 1927 in Sviatohorsk) and to Taras Shevchenko (1926 in Poltava). Constructivism was adopted most widely in stage design. In the 1920s and at the beginning of the 1930s it was the dominant style in the theaters of Ukraine. Its main exponent was Vadym Meller and his students—Dmytro Vlasiuk, Mylitsa Symashkevych, and others—at the maquette workshop of the Berezil theater. Other prominent stage designers who worked in this style were M. Matkovych, V. Miuller, and Yurii Pavlovych at the Odesa Ukrainian Music and Drama Theater; Borys Kosariev, at the Kharkiv Chervonozavodskyi Ukrainian Drama Theater; Heorhii Tsapok at the Kyiv Ukrainian Drama Theater; and Anatol Petrytsky, Oleksander Khvostenko-Khvostov, and Ivan Kurochka-Armashevsky at the Kyiv Theater of Opera and Ballet, the Kharkiv Theater of Opera and Ballet and the Odesa Opera and Ballet Theater. Constructivists took an architectural approach to graphic art and used various scripts. Vasyl H. Krychevsky, Pavlo Kovzhun, Vasyl Yermilov, H. Tsapok, Vladimir Tatlin, Leonid Khyzhynsky, and Olena Sakhnovska were among those known for their graphics