Yuri Lutskevych

Yuri Lutskevych was a Ukrainian artist of the 1960s generation (shistdsiatnyky) who belonged to the Kyiv school of painting but did not have dissident inclinations. He was one of the first artists in Ukraine to embrace the neo-baroque trend, but not in the postmodern terms favored by most Ukrainian neo-baroque painters of the late twentieth century. Working primarily in a postimpressionist manner, he often gravitated toward magical realism.

Lutskevych’s maternal grandfather was a protoiereus (Christian Orthodox archpriest) who was executed in 1937 during the Stalinist purge in Kirovo (now Kropyvnytsky). In 1944 the artist lost his father, also a painter, in World War II. Despite these hardships and his grandfather’s connection to religion, Lutskevych had a model career as a Soviet artist. He began in Kirovohrad art school with guidance from Borys Vintenko (1927–2002) and attended the famous Taras Shevchenko Kyiv Secondary Art School for gifted children (1951–53), graduating with honors. From 1953 to 1959, he studied at the Kyiv Fine Arts Institute under Heorhiy Melikhov (1908–1985) and Viktor Puzyrkov (1918–1999). Both were exemplary socialist realist painters, though Puzyrkov was a student of Fedir Krychevsky (1879–1947) and therefore connected to the Ukrainian avant-garde. [1] During these years Lutskevych painted large-scale and ideologically correct canvases such as Юрій Гагарін з піонерами в Криму [Yuri Gagarin z pioneramy v Krymu,. Yuri Gagarin Meeting with Children in Crimea] (1959). From 1959 to 1962, he taught painting and drawing at the Kyiv College of Applied Arts and Painting (now Boychuk State Academy of Decorative and Applied Arts), and from 1962 to 1965 he continued his studies as a painter at the Soviet Academy of Arts in Kyiv, in the workshop of Serhiy Heorhiev (1910–1988), another esteemed socialist realist artist who was twice awarded the Stalin Prize. After Lutksevych became a member of the Soviet Union of Artists in 1966, he worked only as an artist, frequently exhibiting and receiving state commissions.

Lutksevych belonged to the socially minded generation of the 1960s, whose members believed, as ideological pressures eased following the death of Stalin in 1953, that they could transform Soviet society by participating in various committees. Lutskevych joined the Communist Party in 1959, intending to make a change from within, and was a member of the Soviet Union of Artists of Ukraine from 1966. (After 1970 he was not active politically.) While he did not embrace the severe style per se, he shared some of the life choices characteristic of its practitioners, such as traveling to Siberia and polar regions to document the harsh realities of life and work in distant and scarcely populated Soviet locations.

Beginning in the 1960s, even in his state-commissioned and officially approved paintings, Lutskevych started to slowly deviate from the strict realism and academicism of his training. His oil technique displayed a shimmering quality, and his use of white impasto created an effect of immateriality even in traditional genre scenes, landscapes, and portraits. His color became more decorative than descriptive, and his forms more simplified, such as circular, rhythmic elements resembling swirls of air. Canvases including Український театр [Ukrainian Theater] (1963) reveal his interest in Ukrainian folk art, shared by many in the 1960s generation. The bold color contrasts of red and green of some canvases from the period also betray his covert fauvist affinities. [2]

In the 1970s, during the period of stagnation associated with Leonid Brezhnev’s rule (1964–82), Lutskevych was interested in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, particularly his ideas about the importance of nature for the education and spiritual betterment of people. In Автопортрет [Self-Portrait] (1975), Lutskevych depicted himself barefoot and accompanied by a spirit of nature, perhaps a satyr. In 1980 he made an ironic genre painting, Жан-Жак Руссо та ми [Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Us], in which Rousseau is shown preaching his ideas to the members of the artist’s family, who largely ignore the philosopher. According to the writer and researcher Anatoly Makarov, this appearance of the French philosopher among the living endows the canvas with a baroque spirit that aims to materialize abstract notions. Makarov states that the figure of Rousseau “symbolizes the presence of a higher, timeless meaning in the relationships between the depicted individuals.” [3]

The 1970s–80s was the artist’s mature and most prominent period, when he completely abandoned any social and political activities for the sake of his hermetic and historicist art. This was the time when his neo-baroque style became fully fledged. In the Soviet Union, the 1970s were generally characterized by delving deeper into past art history and, according to the Ukrainian art historian Halyna Sklyarenko, frequent quoting from old masters. For Sklyarenko, this trend was a marker of late Soviet times and was mainly caused by disillusionment with the ideals of the Khrushchev Thaw. No longer seeking sincerity, and losing faith in the possibility of effecting change in society, many artists created art purposely withdrawn from current life, often with a theatrical or staged quality reflecting the double life that many of them led. [4]

Lutskevych selected baroque art as a source for his intense dialogue with the past because of its importance to Ukrainian art and tradition, but also because of the philosophy that it represented for him. The baroque’s enhancement of materiality and spirituality complemented his own objective of creating realistic yet poetic and fantastic paintings. In his canvases of the 1970s and ’80s, a proclivity toward allegory, mystery, and the supernatural meets sensual materiality. As Makarov observed, "In the person of Yurii Lutskevych, Ukrainian painting once again embarks on a path of neo-Baroque exploration, which lends it a mysterious charm of metaphysical reflection, metaphorical allegory, and the beauty of lush and excessive decorativeness.” [5]

The painting Madrigal (1972, ZAM D10539) from the Zimmerli collection belongs to the artist’s mature period and embodies the height of his neo-baroque style. The art critic Oleksandr Soloviov noted that the work “gravitated toward organic painterly texture, based on the beauty of limited, nuanced color scheme.” For Soloviov, the white flashes of canvas left untouched by the brush are the key to understanding the painting’s baroque nature: “They enhance the sense of naturalness, fluidity, and a specifically artistic incompleteness . . . [and] a feeling of tangibility combined with a poetic phantomlike quality.” [6] The madrigal, a form of secular polyphonic music popular during the Renaissance and baroque periods in Italy, underwent a revival in the late nineteenth century and became synonymous with a poetic or musical composition. Lutskevych purposefully selected a title that transports his viewers away from the drab realities of the Soviet stagnation era and depicted female figures in classical attire next to a row of Corinthian columns and singers from a celestial choir, accompanied by angels playing musical instruments directly in the sky above them. White swirls envelop the figures and almost seem to pulse with a musical rhythm. It is a testament to the complexity of late Soviet official painting that this work, with its fantastical content and highly decorative style, is purged of any traces of socialist realism yet was not perceived as a threat by authorities and condemned.

In his later years Lutskevych added even more phantasmagorical elements to his cityscapes, making his paintings allegorical and sensual at the same time. With his baroque-inspired investigation of the divine spark in the human psyche, his religious themes became more pronounced as he continued his Madrigal series in the 1990s. His love of nature also endured; while painting en plein air, he died of a heart attack in 2001.

Lutskevych’s major influence on the generation of the New Wave painting in Ukraine was noted by Soloviov in 1992. [7] His measured yet perceptive foray into baroque aesthetics anticipated the New Wave’s postmodernist engagement with the Ukrainian baroque legacy, situated within the broader context of global transavantgarde movements. His early explorations played a foundational role in shaping the trajectory of Ukrainian contemporary art in the early twentieth century.

Lutskevych was married to the artist Zoia Lerman (1934–2014) and then to Halyna Horodnicheva (b. 1947), also an artist. His son (with Lerman) is the artist Alex Lerman (né Oleksandr Lutskevych in 1960).

Olena Martynyuk and Anna Luhovska

Portrait source: https://art-nostalgie.com.ua/Lutskevich.html

Notes:

1. Among Puzyrkov’s students are other prominent Ukrainian artists Anatoly Kryvolap, Ada Rybachuk, and Viktor Ryzhykh.

2. Halyna Sklyarenko, Ukrainski khudozhnyky: Z vidlyhy do Nezalezhnosti [Ukrainian artists: From the thaw to independence], vol. 2 (Kyiv: Huss, 2020), 16.

3. Anatoly Makarov, “Spivrozmovnyk velykykh do 70-richchia vydatnoho ukrainskoho khudozhnyka Yuriia Lutskevycha“ [Interlocutor of the greats to the 70th anniversary of the outstanding Ukrainian artist Yuriy Lutskevych], Dzerkalo tyzhnia, June 11, 2004.

4. Sklyarenko, Ukrainski khudozhnyky, 18.

5. Anatoly Makarov, foreword to Yury Lutskevych, Painting (n.p., n.d.), unpag.

6. Oleksandr Soloviov, ed., Lutskevych, Yuryi. Kataloh vystavky: Zhyvopys. Hrafyka [Exhibition catalogue: Painting, graphics] (Kyiv: Soiuz khudozhnykov Ukrainy [Union of Artists of Ukraine], 1992), 2–3.

7. Soloviov, Lutskevych, Yuryi,1.