Viktor Ryzhykh

Viktor Ryzhykh was a Ukrainian painter of expressionist inclination who maintained a high-profile career in the art establishment during the Soviet years, yet he was also connected to the Ukrainian dissident artistic generation of the 1960s (shistdesyatnyky). Hosting an art salon in his home with his wife, Halyna Neledva (1938–2017), while holding official positions in the Ukrainian Union of Artists, he was a visible figure in Kyiv’s artistic milieu in both Soviet and post-Soviet times. His art was lyrical, intellectual, and historicist, displaying lush, layered brushwork and nuanced color combinations.

Ryzhykh graduated in 1958 from the Kyiv State Art Institute (now National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture), where he studied history and genre painting in the studio of the prominent socialist realist painter Karpo Trokhymenko (1885–1979), famous for his large-scale canvases of the Soviet industrialization of Ukraine. Despite his training, Ryzhykh became a classic representative of the 1960s generation with his intensely lyrical, emotional, and philosophical landscapes and still lifes. His contemplative paintings hardly followed the obligatory Soviet glorification of labor and were often free of didacticism and narrative. During the last year of his studies, Ryzhykh met Halyna Neledva, who became his wife, artistic collaborator, and muse (as the subject of nearly fifty portraits painted over the couple’s fifty years together). According to the art critic Olga Petrova, they hosted many gatherings in their studio that influenced the art of their time in Kyiv: “With their painting and personal integrity, Viktor Ryzhykh and Halyna Neledva embodied not only a quest—but the very artistic consciousness of an entire generation of the 1970s–1980s.” [1]

From the 1950s on, with the increased artistic freedom during the Khrushchev Thaw, Ryzhykh’s paintings were influenced by neither official ideological maxims nor the style of nineteenth-century Russian realism. In place of Soviet compulsory optimism, a soft, elegiac atmosphere permeated his paintings, which demonstrate his fascination with Paul Cézanne, classical antiquity, and Proto-Renaissance and naive art. His work at the time often emphasized the heroic romanticism of the Soviet people, in keeping with the then-current severe style, which intended to revitalize Soviet socialist realist painting by focusing on revolutionary romantics or the heroism of World War II, and was more somber and psychological than the official style. His early canvas Реліквії Бреста [Brest Relics] (1968, National Art Museum of Ukraine) in this vein made the artist well known.

Ryzhykh was frequently praised for his mastery of multifigure compositions, in which the inherent geometric forms of figures and landscapes resonated with one another, producing rhythmic patterns and internal structural harmonies. His impasto brushwork and arrested movement of figures frequently endowed his subjects with a sculptural quality. His painting Гості Києва [Guests of Kyiv] (1977) situates the visitors and their hosts in a typical Kyiv landscape of rolling hills and churches, with the rococo masterpiece St. Andrew’s Church placed hierarchically on top and accentuated with a highlight. His 1980 canvas Венеція (Venice) captures a colorful crowd of people on a boat about to pass under the famous Rialto Bridge, setting human emotions and liveliness against the timeless architectural icon. Among the boat’s passengers is the artist’s wife, pensively smoking a cigarette and almost obscured by the muscular newspaper reader at the left. Both paintings display expressionistic impasto brushwork and simplification of form. The art critic Volodymyr Tseltner commented on the connection between Ryzhykh’s work of the 1980s and baroque painting: “His plasticity—a certain heaviness of form, solid craftsmanship in painting, and impeccable drawing skills, finally, a composition carefully balanced in contrast to its fantastical concept—somewhat resembles old allegorical paintings.” [2]

As an official painter unassociated with dissent, Ryzhykh was allowed to travel internationally, and many of his paintings were created during trips to Italy, France, and Georgia or were inspired by memories of these visits. While traveling, he came to the conclusion that Ukraine belonged to the Mediterranean region culturally and wanted to underline this affinity in his art [3], as seen in his painting Спогади про Венецію [Memory of Venice] (1981), in which the famous Venetian view resembles a decorative tapestry with Ukrainian folk motifs and colors. An untitled painting from the Zimmerli collection (n.d., ZAM, D24257) depicts the Parisian Eiffel Tower as a statuette set on a chair flanked by a dark green drapery in an empty room. The painting, merging still life and landscape, demonstrates the strong alignment between the two genres in Ryzhykh’s oeuvre. The moody, dark atmosphere lends a surreal quality to the still life, which brims with enigmatic theatricality. This painting is one of a number of landscapes by Ryzhykh that enter into a dialogue with metaphysical cityscapes by Giorgio de Chirico. Devoid of human presence, such works are filled with inner tension and mystery, with the architecture almost coming alive with human emotions.

Sports was another major recurring theme in Ryzhykh’s work. In his 1966 painting Хокей [Hockey] the figures, depicted in violent movements and body contortions, display some geometric abstraction. He himself played soccer for the Sport Section of the Union of Artists of Ukraine in the 1970s and ’80s, and his most famous sports painting was the canvas Київський футбол [Kyiv Soccer] (1998), dedicated to a dramatic moment in the 1975 UEFA Super Cup in Kyiv. Three legends of the Ukrainian soccer team Dynamo Kiev—Oleh Blokhin, Viktor Kolotov, and Volodymyr Veremeiev—are captured frozen in midair as if flying above the field as the ball is about to cross the line to score a goal. The near-mythic character of the scene is also conveyed through the intensely red skies evoking the battle of the Titans.

Ryzhykh was a vital figure in Kyiv’s cultural life for many decades, tirelessly attending art openings and generously providing feedback and support. He was awarded the title of Honored Artist of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in 1980 and served as a deputy head of the Ukrainian Union of Artists during the perestroika years (1986–89). He was named a People’s Artist of Ukraine in 2004 and an Academician of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine in 2007. His daughter (with Halyna Neledva) Olena Ryzykh (b. 1965) is also an artist.

Olena Martynyuk and Anna Luhovska

Notes:

1. Petrova, Olga. “Neformalni khudozhni tsentry” [Informal art centers]. Aktualni problemy mystetskoi praktyky i mystetstvoznavchoi nauky, no. 8–9 (2016–17), 60

2. Vladimir Tseltner, Viktor Ivanovich Ryzhykh. Katalog Vystavki. [Viktor Ivanovich Ryzhykh: Exhibition catalogue, in Russian] (Moscow: Izdatelstvo “Sovetskii khudozhnik,” 1982), 2.

3. “My deep conviction,” he said, “is the understanding of Ukrainian culture as Mediterranean. We belong to this area of the broader European tradition.” Olga Petrova, “Pomer khudozhnyk Viktor Ryzhykh” [The artist Viktor Ryzhykh died]. Den’.