Anatoliy Bezpalyi

Anatoliy Bezpalyi, a Ukrainian painter of monumental and decorative artworks, designed public interiors and was famously a master of artistic batik. He was also a teacher and a member of the Kharkiv organization of the Union of Soviet Artists of Ukraine. In his work he synthetically combined decorative abstraction with features of baroque realism. Bezpalyi occupied his own creative niche, distancing himself from both official art and nonconformism. He belonged to the artistic “sixties generation” (shistdesyatnyky), turning to universal humanistic ideals in his work while remaining a well-known Soviet artist.

Bezpalyi studied at the Kharkiv State Art School (now Kharkiv Professional Higher Art College) from 1951 to 1957, where he was a student of Mykola Slipchenko (1914–1975), Yevhen Trehub (1920–1984), and Ihor Stakhanov (1925–2008), all of whom were considered socialist realist artists. He then received his higher art education at the Leningrad Vera Mukhina Higher School of Art and Industry (now the Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design), where he studied at the Department of Interior and Equipment from 1960 to 1967 with a specialty in interior design. In Leningrad he was shaped by his teacher and thesis supervisor, Yakov Lukin (1909–1995), an architect and rector of the school who established the department and was its first head.

These two educational experiences helped shape Bezpalyi’s artistic approach, in which an artwork was integrated with an architectural space to make a unified whole. His batik interior designs utilized various techniques of decorative composition and reinterpreted baroque strategies, using collage, subordinated narrative scenes, and figurative images in conjunction with a rhythmic compositional structure. His most recognizable style combined realism with geometric abstraction and the stylization of decorative interiors.

Over Bazpalyi’s career, he was employed in Kharkiv, Alma-Ata, Leningrad, and Boston. He worked as an artist at the Kharkiv Road Engineering Plant in 1958–59 and was the head of an art class for youth at the House of Pioneers in Kharkiv in 1959–60. After graduating from the Mukhina Higher School, he was invited to work as an artist at the Alma-Ata art workshops of the Kazakh Art Fund (1967), where he and a group of graduates from his university carried out project work on the interior design of the Central Regional Museum of the Kazakh SSR (now the Central State Museum of Kazakhstan). During these years, he lived in Leningrad, where in 1968 he worked as an artist for the Leningrad Production Plant that served the Rospishchepromreklama (Russian Food Industry Advertising Agency). Then he worked at the Lenoblroektbureau (Leningrad Regional Design Bureau), where he designed the interiors of newly constructed buildings in the Leningrad region. From 1969 he began living in Kharkiv, initially working as an artist at the Kharkiv Art and Production Combine (kombinat) of the Art Fund of the Ukrainian SSR. From 1971 to 1978, he taught drawing, painting, and composition at the Kharkiv State Art School, and in 1978 he was invited to work as a designer at the newly founded Kharkiv Regional Art and Design Combine (kombinat) of the Art Fund of the USSR, where he was also a member of the art council. He continued there until the early 1990s, when the institution was disbanded.

Since 1967 Bezpalyi had been working actively as an artist and taking and fulfilling artistic orders. In 1981 he began participating in all-union art exhibitions and designing the interiors of restaurants, hotels, and educational institutions, including the assembly hall of the Zoo Veterinary Institute and the Museum of Armored Troops of the Military Plant in Kharkiv, the interiors of the Lisovyi restaurant in Krasnohrad (now Berestyn), and the catering facilities of the Donetsk Metallurgical Plant. The main features of his work were decorative wall panels, curtain paintings, and batik art fabrics, such as those made for the Komunar boarding house, the educational building of the Taras Shevchenko plant, the Radioproekt Research Institute, a home for veterans, and the dormitory of the Institute of Culture and the Rovesnyk café, all in Kharkiv, as well as the catering facilities of the Donetsk Metallurgical Plant. In addition, he worked with hot enamel, relief, and metalwork, painted on levkas (a preparatory ground made from slaked lime and filler, adapted from icon-painting techniques for use in murals), made plaster reliefs, and created monumental and decorative compositions for the facades and interiors of public buildings. Examples of those interiors include Vibrations in the dining room of the café Kharkiv in Kyiv and Birth of Cold at the Research Institute of Refrigeration Installations in Kharkiv.

The return of a young monumental artist educated in Leningrad to Kharkiv gave a significant impetus to the development of monumental art in the city. Previously, Kharkiv had lacked any such specialists, since easel and monumental specialties fell into decline for two decades after the Kharkiv Art Institute was re-formed as an artistic and industrial institute in 1962–63. It was only in the early 1980s that a separate department of monumental and decorative painting was established at the Kharkiv Institute. Thus, Bezpalyi was among the few artists who transferred their artistic experience of studying in Moscow and Leningrad to Kharkiv.

In the beginning of his new Kharkiv period, Bezpalyi had worked with another well-known Kharkiv monumental artist, Valery Paltsev (1935–2022), who had received his artistic education in Moscow and came to work in Kharkiv at the same time as Bezpalyi. In 1973 they made a joint artwork: the interior design of the Polechko-Pole café, which for many years served as an outstanding example of Kharkiv monumentalism. In the 1970s Bezpalyi became associated with the circle of artists at the Kharkiv Art School, where he taught in the art and design department, created murals for the interiors of the school’s dormitory, and participated in the festive decoration of the city. During his time at the school, he developed and implemented an original methodology for teaching the discipline of composition at the design department.

In 1986 he attended a creative seminar at the Senezh All-Union House of Creativity in the Moscow Region (Russia) organized by the Union of Artists of the USSR. There, under the guidance of the leading Soviet designer, artist, and art theorist Mark Konik (1938–2012), he participated in the project of landscaping the Garden Ring in Moscow. From 1964 to 1991, Konik, who headed the workshop of environmental design at the Central Educational and Experimental Studio of the Union of Artists of the USSR (known as the Senezh studio), played a key role in the development of a new methodology of creativity, which had an impact on Bezpalyi’s own artistic and pedagogical practice. As a painter, Bezpalyi was also greatly influenced by the works of Paul Klee and Kazimir Malevich. It is highly likely that the young artist, while still studying in Leningrad, was already familiar with the ideas of the Senezh studio, founded in 1964 in the Senezh All-Union House of Creativity near Moscow by Evgeny Rosenblum (1919–2000) and Karl Kantor (1922–2008). This studio played an important role in the development of the theory, practice, and pedagogy of artistic design of industrial and public interiors, museum and exhibition expositions, and other spaces. It was this concept of “artistic design” that combined construction with philosophical reflection to create a holistic artistic space suitable for all aspects of creative activity. It can be assumed that from the first years of his independent work, Bezpalyi was guided by the ideological and methodological foundations of this studio.

The 1980s saw the creation of the artist’s most mature work. According to the memoirs of his younger colleagues, the artist was a recognized luminary in the field of monumental art and fabric painting and set the tone in the art and design plant, influencing young people and setting trends for the use of artistic fabrics in public spaces. By this time Bezpalyi had found his own recognizable style of decorative composition. Curtain paintings using the batik technique with aniline paints became his passion and life’s work and defined his individual creative style. At that time, natural fabrics (silk and its varieties such as crepe de chine and satin) decorated with aniline paints needed to be steamed in autoclaves and then washed with vinegar, which gave them a plasticity and smoothness, as well as enhancing the color saturation of the paints. This technology was spread throughout the region thanks to the artist’s work. One of the largest examples is in the Komunar boarding house in Kharkiv, where the artist painted about ten window curtains in the dining room, lobby, and dormitory. The large size of the curtains allowed him to depict narrative and decorative compositions for Курячий цирк [Chicken Circus], Усі по місцях [Everyone to Their Places], Еквілібр [Equilibrist], Театр тіней [Shadow Theater], Театр захоплень [Theater of Delights], Парад-але [Grand Entrance], Яма з оркестром [Pit with Orchestra], and other works.

Through his use of curtain paintings, Bezpalyi tried to distance himself from ideological officialdom in art. Although his artworks do not contain protest or national images, his artistic style reflected poetic and lyrical tones associated with spiritual insight and creative uplift. His references to nature, space, art, medicine, the theater, the circus, and holidays were meant to examine the natural, sensual, emotional, and philosophical dimensions of human existence. For example, the curtains for the dormitory assembly hall of the Institute of Culture were based on the themes of Nature, Space, Music, and Theater.

The artist found his own plastic language for each of his artworks, with its own emotional range, color palette, sense of composition, and metaphor, all of which corresponded to the theme and purpose of the murals. His professional education and experience as an interior designer had a direct impact on his approach to creating compositions integrated with the architectural environment. He combined evocative forms, silhouettes, figurative motifs, abstract color accents, and decorative floral elements with an expressive graphic language. As a result, the composition emerged as a unified and dynamic rhythmic image, incorporating spatial illusions and visual ruptures of the pictorial plane.

The artist’s works in the Dodge Collection date back to the early and mid-1980s and reflect his style during the most mature and productive period of his career. They are also representative of the Kharkiv school of monumentalism in the last decade of the USSR. Three of his drawings for curtain paintings (ZAM, D10499, D10500, D10501) indicate Bezpalyi’s baroque approach with their flowers, collage, focus on detail, silhouettes, extremely layered composition, spatial illusion, and air of celebratory exaltation. In two of the works, God (1981, D10499) and Earth (1981, D10500), the artist modernizes the traditions of European baroque tapestry with its detailed floral ornamentation while also using the trompe-l’oeil effect of “torn space” extending into infinity, which gives a feeling of spatial illusion. The third work, Shadow Theater (1985, D10501), weaves the horizontal movement of masses of birds, figures, and flowers into the arcade structure. The rhythm created by the arms raised upward creates a sense of elevation and joy. The artist uses paint to create the effect of collage, while the silhouettes of barely visible figures hide new figurative and geometric images, giving a sense of infinite depth. This series of formal artistic strategies, marked by a rejection of narrative in favor of associative and decorative solutions, testifies to the artist’s use of modernist approaches and techniques that make his work, to this day, strikingly multidimensional and contemporary.

By the time Bezpalyi joined the Kharkiv organization of the Union of Soviet Artists of Ukraine in 1987, he had completed more than forty architectural artworks and participated in two all-union exhibitions in Moscow (1981, 1982), one republican exhibition in Kyiv (1987), and numerous regional art exhibitions.

The collapse of the USSR and the Art Fund of the Ukrainian SSR, and the resulting dropoff in art orders, combined with the crisis of the 1990s in Ukraine, drastically altered the coordinates of the artist’s life and creativity. His connection with his homeland was severed after his immigration to the United States in 1996. This, compounded by his death in 2002, prevented art historians and critics from thoroughly studying Bezpalyi’s work, which in the 1970s and 1980s had defined artistic trends in the monumental art of Kharkiv and beyond.

Eugeny Kotlyar

Translated from Ukrainian by Nathan Jeffers