000803062155
Certificate Of Authenticity of The Painting by Mykola Hlushchenko "Still life with a Glass Jar and a Bottle"
Paris 1920/30
Fauvism | Oil and Gouache on Paper | 11.69 x 16.53 inch
by Art Expert Dmytro Omelyanovich Gorbachev
08/08/2018 20:30:44
The Scan of the Original document
The Front View of the Document
To Bohdan Rodyuk Chekan, son of Olena Chekan
I witness that "Still life with a Glass Jar and a Bottle", 1920-30,
oil and gouache on paper, belongs to the brush of Mykola Hlushchenko and performed in Paris, where Glushchenko belonged to the Parisian group of Ukrainian artists.
The manner of execution - Fauvism. The work is signed by the artist himself. Expert Professor Dmytro Gorbachev, Kyiv, 08/08/2018, Sgd.
The Prophecy of Cubo-Futurism
June 6, 2008 ▪ Communicate: Olena Chekan
Aleksandra Ekster is one of Ukraine's top innovative artists. She painted abstract pieces. But instead of following the style of Wassily Kandinsky or Kazimir Malevich she created her own, Cubo-Futuristic version of abstract art.
Professor Dmytro Horbachov discovered Ukrainian avant-garde three times. First, for himself when he ran across rummaged pieces by "unknon painters" in the basements of the National Art Museum. Then, for Soviet dissidents and intellectuals, when he took them to those basements. Today, Mr. Horbachov is discovering them for Ukraine and the world. He is the most respected expert, author of monographs, curator and consultant in numerous exhibitions. He was not personally involved in the exhibition of Aleksandra Ekster's works opened in 2008. However, The Ukrainian Week asked him to share what he knows about the painter.
Actually, Ekster is one of Ukraine's most outstanding innovative artists. She painted abstract pieces. But instead of following the style of Wassily Kandinsky or Kazimir Malevich, she created her own Cubo-Futuristic version of abstract art. This was an easy task thanks to integration with Ukrainian folk art where the pulse of the ornament, rhytms, movement and nerve are key. This was the prophecy of everything that hapenned in the art of the 20th century...
Aleksandra was born in Bialystok, a city in Belarus, to the family of Belarusian father and Greek mother, both Orthodox. Ekster is the last name of her first husband. He was a well-known lawyer in Kyiv, and of German descent, hence Ekster. In 1918, he died of typhus. Her maiden surname was Hryhorovych. The stress in Ekster is actually on the first syllable, but the French put it on the last vowel so that's how it's pronounced today.
When she was two, her family moved to Smila, a town in Ukraine. Her father was a financier and found a job there. In a year, he got a job at a bank in Kyiv. When Asia got a bit older, she would say she's Kyiv native, so Western art experts thought that she was born in the city. Then, they saw Bialystok somewhere in her personal documents and started writing "Bialystok near Kyiv". Also, she said she was born in 1884. But the geeky archivists found out that she was actually born in 1882. We had long discussions about which year we should use and whether we should make her little lie known to the public. Eventually, we chose the academic approach even if it wasn't very humane towards her. That was our geeky insensitivity.
At the Kyiv Art College she was taught by Mykola Pymonenko. In fact, he also taught Malevich and Bogomazov, although he personally wasn't a fan of avant-garde. But her favorite model was Petro Levchenko from Kharkiv school. He was a sophisticated expressionistic realist. One of her works, a very early one, was in that style. A still life that is close to an Easter one, an anticipation of holiday, so moving and fleeting... Then she left for Paris in 1907 but realized that the teaching there was similar to that in Kyiv and found it dissapointing. Serhiy Yastrebtsov, a Kyiv artist, introduced her to a great French poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, who then introduced her to Pablo Picasso. Ekster was so impressed by his works that she made dozens of photographs and brought them to Kyiv. Burliuk brothers, Oleksandr Bohomazov have never seen anything like this before, so they got carried away and began to follow the style. "Volodenka, do your best to picasso him," David, the older of the Burliuk brothers, would tell his younger brother Volodymyr when he was painting the portrait of Benedict Livshitz, a Jewish-Ukrainian poet and translator. Klyment Redko, a beginner painter from Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, recollected wondering at Picasso's fragmented violins on the bank of the lake in Kytaivska desert. Everyone was thrilled at his inversions of plastics. In fact, if the Bolsheviks had not come to power, Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra would have been painted in Cubism. That was the tradition: when Baroque style was in, the artists there tried to stick to it, when Realism was in – they would stick to that one. It has some brilliant frescoes in Modernism, and was on the verge of getting frescoes in Cubism. At that point, thanks to Ekster, Kyiv had more Cubist artists than any other city could boast.
The Ekster-Rabinovich studio of decorative art was active in Kyiv in 1918-1919. Іsaak Rabinovich was her disciple, associate and a brilliant scenographer. She taught his students abstract art, avoiding typical academic practice of painting nude figures altogether. She didn't charge students, but everyone brought her whatever they could afford. Some would bring food – it was in the middle of the civil war. Once, a student, artist Weisblat, brought peas, but it was mixed with buckwheat and some other grains. They didn't hesitate to cook and eat it nevertheless. The students would make some money for the studio as well. For instance, whenever theater or dance performers came to the city (one of them was well-known choreographer Mikhail Mordkin who loved working with her), they always comissioned costumes and stage decorations to her. Ekster would distribute the work between the students.
She worked with children as well in the studio. Children and avant-garde artists had some things in common, she said: laconic style, free coloring, as well as saturated emotion and passion for life. She would first read a story to the children, then give them paper, scissors and paint and told them to cut, glue, color – whatever you do, don't paint a plot and don't restrain yourself. The outcome, she said, was amazing. The children would do things that made grown-up painters jealous.
Her many students included Serhiy Yutkevych, he would later become a film director. I once visited him in Moscow and said that Ekster was a Ukrainian painter. He replied that she was a European one. Eearlier, the stereotype was that something European could not be Ukrainian by default, and anything Ukrainian can't be European. This is wrong. Ekster created a link between Paris and Ukrainian rural background. She was active in a community that was working to revive Ukrainian crafts - embroidery, weaving and pottery. That placed her in the epicenter of Ukrainian nationalism (along with archeologist and ethnographer Mykola Biliashivsky, the family of Hudyma-Levkovych). Picasso was her friend in Paris. In Ukraine, she was friends with Hanna Sobachka, a village-based artist who later gained fame. Hanna embroidered patterns created by Ekster and got inspired by modernist movements through her. In fact, this was mutual artistic enrichment. Hanna borrowed from Aleksandra the dynamism of the futurist composition, while Aleksandra took the range of colors from Hanna and folk art in general. This fusion made Aleksandra Ekster an avant-garde Ukrainian painter. By the way, she arranged the first exhibition of Sobachko's work and delivered an amazing speech at it. She said that Sobachko was a great artist, a folk futurist. That is a rare phenomenon actually: before Hanna Sobachko, there had barely been folk futurists anywhere. Ekster discovered this. She helped many open their potential.
Aleksandra Ekster also reformed scenography. My guess is that scenography in Ukraine is still strong despite the many losses in previous times thanks to her. In 1920, Ukrainian scenography was among the best ones in the world, involving Constructivism, Cubism, Futurism... Ekster adored and understood the theater. She loved going to Mykola Sadovsky's theater to watch plays Martyn Borulia, Natalka Poltavka. Her crucial contribution to the theater reform was in that she introduced the use of the stage as a cube rather than as the vertical dimension of the floor alone (the latter was the common approach before her). She wondered why so much space was left unused and suggested that it should be played with; then she began to make platforms and staircases on stage, 3D constructions, and instantly that added a new feel to the theater.
In 1918, Ekster convened the First Pan-Ukrainian Conference of Culture. Her speech there focused on scenography, proving that the team of play directors should include people responsible for the installation of light in addition to the director proper and the costume and stage director, since light was an integral component of the stage artistry. Before her, light had been thought of as light proper that made things visible. She made a point about introducing light scripts. Today, the world is using her approaches without realizing that Ekster was the pioneer. When asked then what would make Ukrainian theater flourish, Ekster said: "As much creativity as possible, and as little provincial feel as possible." She realized that Ukraine had a huge layer of provincialism. When I read all those records of things she said, I think that if only Petliura and Skoropadsky had reached an agreement back in the day for the sake of Ukraine, life here would be completely different today. Back then, Ukraine saw a huge rise of its culture...
She moved to Moscow in 1920 and worked at the Chamber Theater run by the Poltava-born Oleksandr Tairov. That was where Anatoliy Lunacharsky, the first Soviet People's Commisar of education and culture, also born in Poltava, noticed her. He was referred to as intelligentsia amongst Bolsheviks and a Bolshevik amongst intelligentsia. He knew contemporary culture well, unlike Vladimir Lenin who never went beyond Nekrasov's poems about "people's sorrows" while not even thinking of, say, Vladimir Mayakovski as a poet. "Lunacharski should be flogged for Futurism..." Lenin used to write. It was Lunacharski who offered Ekster to go to Venice and organize a bienniale there as a Soviet representative. That was in 1924. Later, she was asked to help organize a show in Paris in 1925. That's how she stayed there, doing artwork for books, interior designs, publishing bibliophile books, i.e. writing texts and doing artwork for them, as well as teaching at Fernand Léger's Academy of Modern Art. In fact, Léger would keep telling her when she first came to Paris, "how come you paint it this way, we are futurists so we should use monochrome, and you do it all so colorfully." Aleksandra tried to do monochrome, but whenever she came to Kyiv she headed straight to villages with all of their flamboyance, bloom and fragrances. That drove her to paint all these dimensions in colors. Léger reacted to this and started adding bright color in his work.
Aleksandra had many students from all over the world. One, Pavlo Chelishchev who once lived in Kyiv, wrote in his diary later: "Ekster is a brilliant teacher. The only thing that bothers my and other students is that she mentions Ukraine which nobody knows too often." Meanwhile, Ekster couldn't help it because she was drawn to Ukraine. Actress Alisa Koonen and her husband were friends with Ekster. Koonen used to say that both in Paris and in Moscow they were impressed by how Ekster managed to combine Ukrainian everyday life culture with European art: she had Georges Braque, Picasso and Léger hanging next to Ukrainian embroidered rushnyky, carpets and pottery. Even the food she ate and served was Ukrainian. Ekster brought Nastia, a woman helping her in the household, anywhere she went. Everyone remembered Nastia for her treats of varenyky in clay bowls, and borshch. Many French artists, including Picasso and Léger, learned to eat and make varenyky. According to Koonen, Nastia did not speak French but that did not bother her: she believed that Parisian traders knew Ukrainian. "I tell them and point at things, and they understand me!" she would say.
After the war, Ekster was already very ill and used some drugs because she felt very lonely. Her second husband, a Moscow-born actor Georgi Nekrasov, had died by then. Nastia had died before him. "How is Kyiv, how is Moscow?" Aleksandra would write to sculptor Vera Mukhina, her student and friend. Vera later recollected Ekster's comment on her Worker and the Kolhoz Woman sculpture: "No, this art is very rough, where is your Cubism, your Abstractionism, where are your notes from Paris?" Joseph Stalin was grateful to Mukhina for the Worker and the Kolhoz Woman sculpture and allowed her to go to Paris whenever she desired. She also had a bank account opened for her in Paris so she could help out Ekster financially.
Aleksandra Ekster is buried at Fontenay-aux-Roses in suburban Paris. There had once been a monument on the grave, but nobody paid for the grave so someone else was buried there 30 years later. All of Ekster's pieces were inherited by her French housekeeper. Gallerist Jean Chauvelin then bought them from her. He displayed them for the first time in 1968 and the works became a sensation instantly and have become more and more popular ever since. Everyone realized how great of an artist she was... Ekster's works are displayed in Ukraine as well – at the Theatre Museum, the National Art Museum, the Dnipropetrovsk Museum and in private collections.
Translated by © Anna Korbut
Copyright © Ukrainian Week LLC. All rights reserved.
000803062155
Certificate Of Authenticity of The Painting by Mykola Hlushchenko "Still life with a Glass Jar and a Bottle"
Paris 1920/30
Fauvism | Oil and Gouache on Paper | 11.69 x 16.53 inch
by Art Expert Dmytro Omelyanovich Gorbachev
08/08/2018 20:30:44
The Scan of the Original document
The Front View of the Document
To Bohdan Rodyuk Chekan, son of Olena Chekan
I witness that "Still life with a Glass Jar and a Bottle", 1920-30,
oil and gouache on paper, belongs to the brush of Mykola Hlushchenko and performed in Paris, where Glushchenko belonged to the Parisian group of Ukrainian artists.
The manner of execution - Fauvism. The work is signed by the artist himself. Expert Professor Dmytro Gorbachev, Kyiv, 08/08/2018, Sgd.
The Prophecy of Cubo-Futurism
June 6, 2008 ▪ Communicate: Olena Chekan
Aleksandra Ekster is one of Ukraine's top innovative artists. She painted abstract pieces. But instead of following the style of Wassily Kandinsky or Kazimir Malevich she created her own, Cubo-Futuristic version of abstract art.
Professor Dmytro Horbachov discovered Ukrainian avant-garde three times. First, for himself when he ran across rummaged pieces by "unknon painters" in the basements of the National Art Museum. Then, for Soviet dissidents and intellectuals, when he took them to those basements. Today, Mr. Horbachov is discovering them for Ukraine and the world. He is the most respected expert, author of monographs, curator and consultant in numerous exhibitions. He was not personally involved in the exhibition of Aleksandra Ekster's works opened in 2008. However, The Ukrainian Week asked him to share what he knows about the painter.
Actually, Ekster is one of Ukraine's most outstanding innovative artists. She painted abstract pieces. But instead of following the style of Wassily Kandinsky or Kazimir Malevich, she created her own Cubo-Futuristic version of abstract art. This was an easy task thanks to integration with Ukrainian folk art where the pulse of the ornament, rhytms, movement and nerve are key. This was the prophecy of everything that hapenned in the art of the 20th century...
Aleksandra was born in Bialystok, a city in Belarus, to the family of Belarusian father and Greek mother, both Orthodox. Ekster is the last name of her first husband. He was a well-known lawyer in Kyiv, and of German descent, hence Ekster. In 1918, he died of typhus. Her maiden surname was Hryhorovych. The stress in Ekster is actually on the first syllable, but the French put it on the last vowel so that's how it's pronounced today.
When she was two, her family moved to Smila, a town in Ukraine. Her father was a financier and found a job there. In a year, he got a job at a bank in Kyiv. When Asia got a bit older, she would say she's Kyiv native, so Western art experts thought that she was born in the city. Then, they saw Bialystok somewhere in her personal documents and started writing "Bialystok near Kyiv". Also, she said she was born in 1884. But the geeky archivists found out that she was actually born in 1882. We had long discussions about which year we should use and whether we should make her little lie known to the public. Eventually, we chose the academic approach even if it wasn't very humane towards her. That was our geeky insensitivity.
At the Kyiv Art College she was taught by Mykola Pymonenko. In fact, he also taught Malevich and Bogomazov, although he personally wasn't a fan of avant-garde. But her favorite model was Petro Levchenko from Kharkiv school. He was a sophisticated expressionistic realist. One of her works, a very early one, was in that style. A still life that is close to an Easter one, an anticipation of holiday, so moving and fleeting... Then she left for Paris in 1907 but realized that the teaching there was similar to that in Kyiv and found it dissapointing. Serhiy Yastrebtsov, a Kyiv artist, introduced her to a great French poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, who then introduced her to Pablo Picasso. Ekster was so impressed by his works that she made dozens of photographs and brought them to Kyiv. Burliuk brothers, Oleksandr Bohomazov have never seen anything like this before, so they got carried away and began to follow the style. "Volodenka, do your best to picasso him," David, the older of the Burliuk brothers, would tell his younger brother Volodymyr when he was painting the portrait of Benedict Livshitz, a Jewish-Ukrainian poet and translator. Klyment Redko, a beginner painter from Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, recollected wondering at Picasso's fragmented violins on the bank of the lake in Kytaivska desert. Everyone was thrilled at his inversions of plastics. In fact, if the Bolsheviks had not come to power, Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra would have been painted in Cubism. That was the tradition: when Baroque style was in, the artists there tried to stick to it, when Realism was in – they would stick to that one. It has some brilliant frescoes in Modernism, and was on the verge of getting frescoes in Cubism. At that point, thanks to Ekster, Kyiv had more Cubist artists than any other city could boast.
The Ekster-Rabinovich studio of decorative art was active in Kyiv in 1918-1919. Іsaak Rabinovich was her disciple, associate and a brilliant scenographer. She taught his students abstract art, avoiding typical academic practice of painting nude figures altogether. She didn't charge students, but everyone brought her whatever they could afford. Some would bring food – it was in the middle of the civil war. Once, a student, artist Weisblat, brought peas, but it was mixed with buckwheat and some other grains. They didn't hesitate to cook and eat it nevertheless. The students would make some money for the studio as well. For instance, whenever theater or dance performers came to the city (one of them was well-known choreographer Mikhail Mordkin who loved working with her), they always comissioned costumes and stage decorations to her. Ekster would distribute the work between the students.
She worked with children as well in the studio. Children and avant-garde artists had some things in common, she said: laconic style, free coloring, as well as saturated emotion and passion for life. She would first read a story to the children, then give them paper, scissors and paint and told them to cut, glue, color – whatever you do, don't paint a plot and don't restrain yourself. The outcome, she said, was amazing. The children would do things that made grown-up painters jealous.
Her many students included Serhiy Yutkevych, he would later become a film director. I once visited him in Moscow and said that Ekster was a Ukrainian painter. He replied that she was a European one. Eearlier, the stereotype was that something European could not be Ukrainian by default, and anything Ukrainian can't be European. This is wrong. Ekster created a link between Paris and Ukrainian rural background. She was active in a community that was working to revive Ukrainian crafts - embroidery, weaving and pottery. That placed her in the epicenter of Ukrainian nationalism (along with archeologist and ethnographer Mykola Biliashivsky, the family of Hudyma-Levkovych). Picasso was her friend in Paris. In Ukraine, she was friends with Hanna Sobachka, a village-based artist who later gained fame. Hanna embroidered patterns created by Ekster and got inspired by modernist movements through her. In fact, this was mutual artistic enrichment. Hanna borrowed from Aleksandra the dynamism of the futurist composition, while Aleksandra took the range of colors from Hanna and folk art in general. This fusion made Aleksandra Ekster an avant-garde Ukrainian painter. By the way, she arranged the first exhibition of Sobachko's work and delivered an amazing speech at it. She said that Sobachko was a great artist, a folk futurist. That is a rare phenomenon actually: before Hanna Sobachko, there had barely been folk futurists anywhere. Ekster discovered this. She helped many open their potential.
Aleksandra Ekster also reformed scenography. My guess is that scenography in Ukraine is still strong despite the many losses in previous times thanks to her. In 1920, Ukrainian scenography was among the best ones in the world, involving Constructivism, Cubism, Futurism... Ekster adored and understood the theater. She loved going to Mykola Sadovsky's theater to watch plays Martyn Borulia, Natalka Poltavka. Her crucial contribution to the theater reform was in that she introduced the use of the stage as a cube rather than as the vertical dimension of the floor alone (the latter was the common approach before her). She wondered why so much space was left unused and suggested that it should be played with; then she began to make platforms and staircases on stage, 3D constructions, and instantly that added a new feel to the theater.
In 1918, Ekster convened the First Pan-Ukrainian Conference of Culture. Her speech there focused on scenography, proving that the team of play directors should include people responsible for the installation of light in addition to the director proper and the costume and stage director, since light was an integral component of the stage artistry. Before her, light had been thought of as light proper that made things visible. She made a point about introducing light scripts. Today, the world is using her approaches without realizing that Ekster was the pioneer. When asked then what would make Ukrainian theater flourish, Ekster said: "As much creativity as possible, and as little provincial feel as possible." She realized that Ukraine had a huge layer of provincialism. When I read all those records of things she said, I think that if only Petliura and Skoropadsky had reached an agreement back in the day for the sake of Ukraine, life here would be completely different today. Back then, Ukraine saw a huge rise of its culture...
She moved to Moscow in 1920 and worked at the Chamber Theater run by the Poltava-born Oleksandr Tairov. That was where Anatoliy Lunacharsky, the first Soviet People's Commisar of education and culture, also born in Poltava, noticed her. He was referred to as intelligentsia amongst Bolsheviks and a Bolshevik amongst intelligentsia. He knew contemporary culture well, unlike Vladimir Lenin who never went beyond Nekrasov's poems about "people's sorrows" while not even thinking of, say, Vladimir Mayakovski as a poet. "Lunacharski should be flogged for Futurism..." Lenin used to write. It was Lunacharski who offered Ekster to go to Venice and organize a bienniale there as a Soviet representative. That was in 1924. Later, she was asked to help organize a show in Paris in 1925. That's how she stayed there, doing artwork for books, interior designs, publishing bibliophile books, i.e. writing texts and doing artwork for them, as well as teaching at Fernand Léger's Academy of Modern Art. In fact, Léger would keep telling her when she first came to Paris, "how come you paint it this way, we are futurists so we should use monochrome, and you do it all so colorfully." Aleksandra tried to do monochrome, but whenever she came to Kyiv she headed straight to villages with all of their flamboyance, bloom and fragrances. That drove her to paint all these dimensions in colors. Léger reacted to this and started adding bright color in his work.
Aleksandra had many students from all over the world. One, Pavlo Chelishchev who once lived in Kyiv, wrote in his diary later: "Ekster is a brilliant teacher. The only thing that bothers my and other students is that she mentions Ukraine which nobody knows too often." Meanwhile, Ekster couldn't help it because she was drawn to Ukraine. Actress Alisa Koonen and her husband were friends with Ekster. Koonen used to say that both in Paris and in Moscow they were impressed by how Ekster managed to combine Ukrainian everyday life culture with European art: she had Georges Braque, Picasso and Léger hanging next to Ukrainian embroidered rushnyky, carpets and pottery. Even the food she ate and served was Ukrainian. Ekster brought Nastia, a woman helping her in the household, anywhere she went. Everyone remembered Nastia for her treats of varenyky in clay bowls, and borshch. Many French artists, including Picasso and Léger, learned to eat and make varenyky. According to Koonen, Nastia did not speak French but that did not bother her: she believed that Parisian traders knew Ukrainian. "I tell them and point at things, and they understand me!" she would say.
After the war, Ekster was already very ill and used some drugs because she felt very lonely. Her second husband, a Moscow-born actor Georgi Nekrasov, had died by then. Nastia had died before him. "How is Kyiv, how is Moscow?" Aleksandra would write to sculptor Vera Mukhina, her student and friend. Vera later recollected Ekster's comment on her Worker and the Kolhoz Woman sculpture: "No, this art is very rough, where is your Cubism, your Abstractionism, where are your notes from Paris?" Joseph Stalin was grateful to Mukhina for the Worker and the Kolhoz Woman sculpture and allowed her to go to Paris whenever she desired. She also had a bank account opened for her in Paris so she could help out Ekster financially.
Aleksandra Ekster is buried at Fontenay-aux-Roses in suburban Paris. There had once been a monument on the grave, but nobody paid for the grave so someone else was buried there 30 years later. All of Ekster's pieces were inherited by her French housekeeper. Gallerist Jean Chauvelin then bought them from her. He displayed them for the first time in 1968 and the works became a sensation instantly and have become more and more popular ever since. Everyone realized how great of an artist she was... Ekster's works are displayed in Ukraine as well – at the Theatre Museum, the National Art Museum, the Dnipropetrovsk Museum and in private collections.
Translated by © Anna Korbut
Copyright © Ukrainian Week LLC. All rights reserved.