During the first decades of the twentieth century, Mykhailo Boichuk (1882-1937) was the leader of a school of art unique to Ukraine, identified by Guillaume Apollinaire as the School of Byzantine Revival, now more generally known as Boichukism or Monumentalism. During the Stalinist purges of 1937-38 many of them paid for their art with their lives.

Boichuk was born in Romanivka, to the south of Ternopil in western Ukraine, when it was part of Galicia in Austro-Hungary. He started his studies in Lviv before moving to Kraków’s Academy of Fine Arts, from which he graduated in 1905. He then travelled in Europe, studying in Vienna and Munich, and went on to Paris in 1907. While he was there he worked with and was influenced by former Nabis including Félix Vallotton and Maurice Denis, as well as Paul Sérusier, and in 1909 he formed a group based on the precepts of Byzantine art. He also visited Italy, where he studied pre-Renaissance paintings of Cimabue and Giotto.

He painted this Portrait of a Woman in 1909.

In 1910, Boichuk moved back to Lviv, where he worked in the National Museum, primarily on the conservation of icons. This enabled him to develop his vision of monumental art based on the use of traditional techniques such as fresco and tempera, to depict works rooted in traditional religious images, but showing contemporary motifs.

Boichuk’s sketch of Yaroslavna’s Lament for a mural from the early 1910s shows a fragment of the Old East Slavic epic poem The Tale of Igor’s Campaign popularised in Alexander Borodin’s opera Prince Igor (1887). Princess Yaroslavna is Igor’s second wife, and opens Act 4 by weeping at her separation from her husband, and the defeat of his army by the Polovtsians.

A Girl Next to A Tree, also from the early 1910s, shows his neo-Byzantine style developing.

Boichuk’s The Prophet Elijah from 1913 includes ancient textile patterning typical of pre-Renaissance painting in Italy.

As an Austrian citizen, he was interned in the Russian Empire during the First World War. After the 1917 October Revolution he returned to Kyiv where he was one of the co-founders of the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts, where he taught fresco and mosaic, and was appointed rector in 1920. In 1925 he co-founded the Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine (ARMU), which evolved from the decorative art he made to welcome the Fifth All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets to Kharkiv.

During the 1920s, his school included more than two dozen active visual artists, among them Ivan Padalka, Vasyl Sedliar, Oksana Pavlenko and the artist’s wife Sofia Nalepynska-Boichuk. They received many commissions to create monumental works in public buildings throughout Ukraine.

In 1937, Boichuk and his school fell from grace during Stalin’s Great Purge. He and others were charged with treason for promoting national identity through a style and form founded on past models of religious art, making them bourgeois nationalists. For that many, including Boichuk, his wife, Sedliar and Padalka were executed, and their works of art destroyed.

Mykhailo Boichuk was shot on 13 July 1937. The remaining records of his frescos and mosaics are mostly old photographs, although a few of his paintings survive in Ukraine.

References

Wikipedia

Andrey Kurkov and others (2022) Treasures of Ukraine, A Nation’s Cultural Heritage, Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978 0 500 02603 8.
Konstantin Akinsha and others (2022) In the Eye of the Storm, Modernism in Ukraine 1900-1930s, Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978 0 500 29715 5.