DSC_1829
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
High Resolution:
The original Ukrainian signature of the artist: M Глущенко
(Enlarged fragment: The Front View of the Painting)
A knight of mystery and paintbrush
Iryna Hakh
September 17 marks the 115th birthday of Mykola Hlushchenko, a Ukrainian painter and a soviet spy.
“Your religion, Nikolai Petrovich, your most precious and ‘sacred’ thing is material interests… I’m writing to you in Russian. I do that because deep in my heart I don’t see you as a real Ukrainian. You refer to yourself as Ukrainian not as a member of an oppressed community would, but only when and where it fits you.”
A fragment of Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s letter to Hlushchenko from the 1920s
Mykola Hlushchenko is one of the brightest figures in the history of Ukrainian painting of the 20th century, the people’s artist of the USSR and the holder of the Taras Shevchenko Award. Virtually all Ukrainian guidebooks open their entries on Hlushchenko with these phrases. A God-given artist, an unsurpassed colorist, master of the landscape whose brush created over 10,000 works of art.
The past decades, however, revealed another unexpected aspect to the life of the well-known painter. In the 1990s, documents were published pointing to the fact that he was a soviet spy under the code name “Yarema”. He worked in the West successfully, handed over valuable materials about the Third Reich’s preparations for the attack against the Soviet Union to his bosses, obtained secret designs of 250 kinds of weapons, including engines for fighter jets, briefed Moscow on the activities of the leaders of "anti-Soviet nationalistic centers", reported about sentiments amongst the political and artistic elites of France and Germany, and more.
The fans of Hlushchenko’s legacy as an artist struggle to put together this side of his life and his extremely interesting creative activity during his lifetime.
In the 1920s, at an early age, Hlushchenko lived and studied in Germany and received material assistance from Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky and Roman Smal-Stotsky, Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR) Ambassador in Berlin. In 1922, Hlushchenko met Oleksandr Dovzhenko who at that time served as Secretary of the USSR Consulate in Berlin. “He [Dovzhenko – Auth.] met with Ukrainian students of the Berlin Academy of Arts and visited them every night. Then, after he managed to resign from the consulate and to receive a scholarship from the Ukrainian SSR People’s Commissariat, Dovzhenko joined the private art school by Professor Kampf.” One of these evening classes played a significant role in Hlushchenko’s future, his wife later recalled. “I studied at Prof. Kampf’s private studio. Mykola Petrovych [Hlushchenko – Transl.] often replaced him for evening classes. That’s where Hlushchenko painted the portraits of Oleksandr Petrovych [Dovzhenko] and his wife Varvara Semenivna,” she recalls. The portraits were lost. The only remaining thing was a black and white photograph of Dovzhenko by Hlushchenko.
According to historians of art, it was his conversations with Dovzhenko that inspired Hlushchenko to apply for soviet citizenship. He learned that his application was approved in 1923 and gave a self-portrait to Dovzhenko as a gift, with an inscription on the backside saying “Now I know who I am.” We don’t know what the 22-year old artist meant in his address to the Ukrainian colleague, and historic documents don’t reveal anything about it.
According to other sources, Hlushchenko did not receive soviet citizenship in 1923. He then moved to Paris in 1924, so he may have had too little time to go through the citizenship procedure. In 1925, however, the USSR trade representative in France commissioned the design of the soviet pavilion from Hlushchenko at the Lyon Fair. A year later, Hlushchenko had his personal exhibition at Société des Artistes Indépendants, a landmark event in his life as an artist. It was only after this that Hlushchenko reapplied for soviet citizenship and received a USSR passport in 1927.
It was then that, at the end of the 1920s, representatives of soviet foreign intelligence noticed him: a successful young artist who so strongly wanted to be a citizen of the Soviet Union, fully met the criteria of a person who could collaborate with the soviet intelligence. Fluent in French and German and with contacts in Germany and France, he had the necessary freedom and motivation to move around Europe, meanwhile fulfilling the tasks of his new bosses. An art studio at the Volunteers Street in Paris was a popular spot for the local intelligentsia to get together and discuss both art, and politics. Hlushchenko’s talents and contacts thus made him invaluable for the respective soviet authorities.
The first test task came soon: Hlushchenko was required to attend the trial of Samuel Schwartzbard, the murderer of Symon Petliura (Paris, October 18, 1927). Along with all the materials collected from that trial and newspaper reports of it, the headquarters in Moscow received illustrations where artist drew the portraits of the people involved. That put Hlushchenko in the list of “promising” agents of soviet special services.
In the 1920s and 1930s, he had many exhibitions around Europe; shows in famous galleries; the recognition as a promising representative of the young generation of artists, and praise from critics. As a result, his exhibition activity skyrocketed. Hlushchenko was displayed in the best locations around Moscow, Paris, Bucharest and Prague. In those years, many well-known individuals visited the artist in his studio. These included Vasyl Vyshyvany (Archduke Wilhelm von Habsburg), a colonel with the Ukrainian Riflemen; Dmytro Andriyevsky, an engineer and a leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists; Ivan Bunin, a Russian Nobel Prize-winning writer. Hlushchenko was in close contact with the Ukrainian artists who worked or studied in Paris, including Perfetsky, Turyn, Perebyinis, Khmeliuk and Hordynsky.
By the early 1930s, he comes the closest to his Motherland: “After I returned from Lviv to Paris in 1930, I began to organize the exhibition of Paris artists in Lviv. Hlushchenko and Perebyinis helped me a lot with this. They suggested that I display a few pieces by French and Italian painters of the Paris School. It was in the early 1930s that the artist managed to get as close as possible to the Motherland: "After returning from Lviv to Paris in 1930, I began to organize an exhibition of" Parisians "in Lviv. This helped me a lot Hlushchenko and Perebyinis. It was they who submitted the idea of publishing several works of French and Italian artists from the "Paris School". Of course, we couldn’t even think of having the paintings by the genius artists like Picasso, Derain, Chagall or Modigliani. But the witty Hlushchenko somehow got their drawings, engravings or lithographies”, wrote Sviatoslav Hordynskyi, the author of the history of the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists in Lviv, the capital of Halychyna. Together with Hordynskyi and Perebyinis, Hlushchenko was a co-author of the Paris Group’s first exhibition in Lviv.
This organization started working at a Lviv museum with the First Exhibition of the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists Featuring French, Italian and Belgian Artists in 1931. The organizers of this huge art project wanted to present the works by a young generation of Ukrainian artists living and working in Paris, and to show the West European painting culture of the early 20th century alongside the artists from Halychyna.
The opening of the show started a new page in the history of Ukrainian art of the first half of the 20th century. The show at the National Museum of Lviv was hugely successful. “Sviatoslav Hordynskyi, Hlushchenko and Perebyinis deserve warm appreciation for organizing the participants from Paris for the show of the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists in March and April,” Ilarion Svencicki, the museum director, said to the press. “The organizers have made is possible for four thousand visitors to see the living trends in the art of Ukrainian painters in the context of contemporary art in the West. These exhibitions will remain for many years a real accomplishment of the National Museum’s cultural work. The guests had an opportunity to see contemporary accomplishments of Ukrainian art and compare them to the eternal values of the past epochs. Therefore, the Museum administration is willing to provide space for similar retrospective, comprehensive, individual and comparable shows in the future.”
As a member of the Paris Group, Hlushchenko was actively involved in the organization of the First Exhibition, as well as further work of the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists. He displayed his works in collective exhibitions of the Association that took place annually in Lviv between 1931 and 1935, and was praised by art critics as “elegant, simple, authentic and sincere.”
Members of the Association, too, appreciated Hlushchenko’s work. In 1934, it published a presentable and solid monograph of his art in Ukrainian and French. The hardback book with the portrait of the well-known Parisian artist of Ukrainian original was complete with 32 illustrations and a color lithography insert. “This monograph, first in the series of such planned publications, tries to briefly and competently introduce the wider audience of art lovers to the life and art of this interesting painter…. Halychyna has not yet had an art monograph that would cover the art of individual painters in such light and beautiful form. So we should warmly greet the appearance of art monographs on our book market,” the introduction by P. Kovzhun and S. Hordynskyi said.
The following year, Hlushchenko had his personal exhibition in Lviv. He had been negotiating it with Ilarion Svencicky since 1933. He displayed nearly a hundred of his works, including paintings and drawings. His artistic work got critical acclaim in the press, with an accent on the links between Lviv and Paris art. Colleagues praised him too. V. Lasovsky wrote with admiration: “Hlushchenko’s art is the cause of sentiment, love for color, the first impression and the negation of reason in favor of a more sophisticated color palette, in favor of the general tone of the texture that would underline the quality of the paint rather than convey the material structure of the object painted.”
This personal show was successful both artistically and financially. Many works were bought by the fans of Hlushchenko’s art right from display, and some works made it into the collection of the National Museum.
Despite this huge success, the admiration of the Lviv audience and of his fellow artists, Hlushchenko never joined the massive exhibition for the 20th anniversary of the National Museum in Lviv that involved all members of the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists. His works were absent from the following annual exhibitions of the Association that took place in Lviv up until 1939.
In 1936, the Hlushchenko family moved to Moscow. The famous artist whose works were displayed alongside France’s top impressionists ended up in a room of 9 sq m in a communal flat. The following year, the family managed to move to Kyiv.
Ever since, Hlushchenko worked and lived in the Soviet Union, displaying his works in the galleries of soviet cities, including Kyiv, Moscow, Odesa and Kharkiv – once again, to the admiration of the audience and open floors from any well-known museums and halls.
In 1940, Hlushchenko is sent to Berlin where the exhibition of soviet decorative art was to take place. IT is hard to say now why the artists agreed to join yet another task from the intelligence. But he did fulfill it and received a gift at the exhibition – an album of watercolor paintings by Adolf Hitler which he handed over to Stalin after his return back to the Soviet Union. Hlushchenko continued to display his works during the war in the galleries of Moscow (1941, 1942, 1943) and Kyiv (1944).
After 1944, Hlushchenko lived in Kyiv. His studio was on the uppermost floor of the Moscow Building at Khreshchatyk, the main street of Kyiv. He was accepted as member of the Union of Soviet Artists of Ukraine that same year.
After the war, Hlushchenko worked and displayed his art a lot in the capitals of the Soviet Union republics. As one of the Soviet Union’s top artists, he represented art intelligentsia in exhibitions in Poland (1954), Great Britain (1966), Canada (1968), Germany (1971) and Japan (1971). His trip to Belgium in 1958 was allowed. Such approvals of participation in international exhibitions in the Soviet Union were only granted to the artists who were super loyal and favored by those in power, and represented zero threat to the ideological propaganda of socialist soviet art in “hostile” capitalist states.
In 1976, Hlushchenko was awarded the title of the People’s Artist of the Soviet Union. During his lifetime, he saw the publication of several albums with his works and many articles about his accomplishments in art – although many facts of his biography were silenced while his life abroad in the interwar period was presented from a perspective that fit the overall narrative. Hlushchenko lived a beautiful wealthy life of a soviet artist who worked a lot, was in touch with the Communist Party elite and travelled abroad for exhibitions. He was admired by fellow artists. The Soviet Union was proud of him.
On October 31, 1977, Hlushchenko died and was buried at the Baikove Cemetery in Kyiv.
Who was painter Mykola Hlushchenko in reality? He was probably the only person who could actually answer that question. He personally valued his early period while describing the later stage as forced celebration of soviet life. Shortly before his death, Hlushchenko selected 250 paintings created in the 1950s and asked his wife to burn them. That request was never fulfilled: the paintings were found at his studio after his death and handed over to the Ministry of Culture for preservation without the right to display them.
In 1971, Hlushchenko visited Lviv (his first show there took place in 1957) with a personal exhibition that turned out to be the last one in his lifetime in the city. Handsome, fit, joyful and loud, Hlushchenko entered the museum with a group of Lviv Oblast Executive Committee employees and people from the Ministry of Culture. He saw a museum employee by the entrance to the main hall where his exhibition was to open officially and stopped:
- Do you recognize me?, Hlushchenko asked the elderly man. The man turned his head and looked into the direction from which the familiar voice came with the eyes that were almost blind.
– Oh, that’s Mr. Hlushchenko, Mr. Flunt replied with a typical accent on the letter e in the name. Yaroslav Flunt was a long-time employee of the National Museum in Lviv, and a fighter with the Ukrainian Riflemen who lost his eyesight in the Liberation Struggle. Ilarion Svencicky employed him. This elderly man was personally acquainted with Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky and an eyewitness of remarkable events in the development of Ukrainian art in the early 20th century. He surely remembered those good days when young French artists of Ukrainian origin had triumphantly presented their works at the museum back in the 1930s. He remembered that joyful and carefree Hlushchenko who delivered the works of Picasso, Derain, Chagall and Modigliani through the border from France, without proper documentation.
Everyone noticed tears in Hlushchenko’s eyes at that moment.
17.09.2016
© 2018 zbruc.eu
Translated by © Anna Korbut
Reprint and any other use of materials published on the website is allowed with a reference/hyperlink to zbruc.eu.
Igor Bugaenko. Mykola Hlushchenko: Biographical sketch
en.uartlib.org/mykola-hlushchenko-best-picture-not-create...
Mykola Hlushchenko: My best picture has not been created yet
Jan 22, 2015 | © Library of Ukrainian Art
For many connoisseurs the one-man retrospective of the noted Ukrainian artist Mykola Hlushchenko, mounted in September 1971 to mark his 70th jubilee, held quite a few surprises. This was especially so as regards Hlushchenko’s productions of the last few years. Those who admired the exhibits were impressed by their telling expressiveness, vivacity of color, and a fresh and original apprehension of the world around us. The show covered fifty years in the career of the artist, and every one of the canvases was a distinctive page in his biography.
One of his earliest creations, a self-portrait painted at the age of twenty-two, is done in Italian Renaissance-derived style. Its wide range of soft pastel browns, as well as the conventional architectural background and the well-modeled features of the face emanate an unusual tranquillity. And only the tense expression of the young man’s eyes distorts the inner classical balance of the portrait, revealing the true identity and thoughts of the person it represents.
When Mykola Hlushchenko was five years old, his father died. Together with his mother, he moved from his native town of Novomoskovsk to the Ukrainian village of Borisovka in Kursk Province. There he experienced the first excitement of a would-be artist while watching the local icon painters at work. The urge to paint has never left him since then. He attended classes in drawing at a commercial school in Yuzovka (now Donetsk) and was especially fond of Repin and Vasil-kivsky. The copying of paintings and scenery pieces for workers’ clubs were Hlushchenko’s first independent steps in his career as an artist.
Then followed the hard days of confinement in a prisoners-of-war camp in Poland, from which he made a daring escape to Germany. Jobless, hungry, deprived of decent lodgings, Hlushchenko nonetheless pursued his career, studying at the private studio of Hans Baluschek in Berlin.
The different schools and trends in art, which alternately coexisted with or negated and influenced each other in those days, left his artistic individuality unscathed. His best paintings he did then had a new quality of a distinction which was not drowned in the kaleidoscope of prevalent artistic inventions.
During his studies at the Berlin Academy Hlushchenko fell under the spell of symbolism which dominated the German art of the time. He had a special fondness of the famous Swedish artist Anders Zorn, whose work, realistic as it was, bore some definite marks of impressionism. This is evident in the refined feeling of plastic form, opulent brushwork and conceptual unrestrained in Hlushchenko’s pictures.
His quest for different forms of plastic imagery took him to the museums, galleries and exhibitions in Berlin, where he found many interesting works by his contemporaries and masters of the past. As an advocate of realism he was attracted by the severity and clarity of the canvases of the German and Flemish Renaissance (Dürer, Hans Holbein the Younger, Jan van Eyk, and Lucas Cranach the Elder). Hlushchenko endeavored to convey the innermost motives of his soul, and for him the image of man and the eternal theme of feminine beauty seemed to be the best vehicles of expression in this respect.
Reviewing Hlushchenko’s entries in the 1924 exhibition at the Kasper Art Gallery in Berlin, the critics noted the high culture and technical perfection of his canvases. This success opened to him the doors of the exhibition of the Neue Sachlichkeit group, which featured works by German, French, Swiss and Italian artists (in Jstern, Dresden, and Erfurt).
In 1925, Hlushchenko moved to Paris. From here the lame of Courbet, Millet, Corot, the impressionists Manet, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, and Matisse, Picasso, Léger, Derain and Rouault spread throughout the world. Without these names the history of world art would be incomplete. “The vitality of Paris, the play of color and the illustrious achievements of the impressionists captured me,” he would later recall.
Heated disputes, criticism of the reactionary dogmas of academism whose advocates were already in a spiritual impasse but still dominated the official salons, attendances of the famous salons of Tuileries and those of the “Indépendants,” visits to dozens of private galleries and improvised shows — these were the main interests of the young artist in Paris. The rapidly changing tastes of the time notwithstanding, Hlushchenko’s personality was not lost in the colorful crowd of artists from Montmartre and Montparnasse. Apart from the works by formalistic experimentalists, which were devoid of deep content and figurative idiom, the Parisian exhibitions also displayed canvases whose subjects were closely related to life, and among them were Hlushchenko’s productions — fresh and distinct in their own right.
His compositions Les Joueurs de cartes, Les Joueurs d’échecs, La Procession, and Un Couple d’amoureux were exhibited in the Salon d’automne, Salon des Indépendants, and the Salon des Tuileries. They bore yet marks of severity and certain asceticism typical of the Berlin school. But his subsequent works — Femme assise and Femme à sa toilette — are imbued with a vitality sustained by a laconic and expressive draughtsmanship. During the Parisian period Hlushchenko also took an active part in public life. He popularized the economic and cultural achievements of the Soviet Union. In 1925, he designed the Soviet exhibition at the Lyon Fair. As chief artist of the USSR trade-industrial exhibitions, he took an active part in organizing the Soviet departments at expos held in Brussels, Milan, Paris and Marseille. Due to his efforts, a number of shows of Soviet artists were organized in Paris, such as the widely spoken about exhibition of Petr Konchalovsky.
Hlushchenko’s achievements in composition, drawing, and psychological treatment, and his broadened spiritual horizons were especially clearly projected in his portraits of the 1930s — those of Romain Rolland, Henri Barbusse, Paul Signac, and Victor Margueritte. The portrait of Henri Barbusse. in particular, produces an unforgettable impression by its dramatism and exceptional authenticity. The inner world of the subiect. a passionate fighter against fascism, is happily conveyed through original expedients which are skillfully made use of. The portrait is rightfully recognized as one of the best in the Soviet Ukrainian visual arts of the prewar period.
From 1925 to 1936 Hlushchenko’s one-man shows were mounted in many cities of Europe — in Paris. Berlin, Ostend, Milan, Stockholm, Rome, as well as in the USA.
As the political atmosphere changed for the worse, Hlushchenko could not stand aloof of the problems agitating the public mind of the world. During a visit to Spain in 1934 he did the painting Execution of Revolutionary, which he barely managed to slip through the customs.
At all stages of his career Hlushchenko’s creations have been distinguished for their telling civic message which corresponded to the best features of the art of socialist realism.
In 1936 Hlushchenko returned to his homeland.
At the outbreak of the Second World War he resided in Moscow. The press often carried his poignant graphic works indicting the crimes of the German fascists. His series Defense of Moscow is highly patriotic and revealing. Hlushchenko frequently visited the frontline and reproduced his impressions in Death of General Dovator, in the Wake of the Enemy. These and some other of his works, particularly a number of landscapes permeated with love of Russian nature, were displayed at the artist’s one-man exhibition held in Moscow in 1943.
Ukrainian art-lovers also took great interest in Hlushchenko’s creative work. The exhibition of his pictrures organized in the Kiev House of Writers drew the attention of many prominent figures in Ukrainian culture and arts.
After the liberation of Kiev, in 1944, Hlushchenko moved to Ukraine. Since then his art is closely related to his country of birth. Its colorful natural beauties and the poesy of creativity of Soviet man are the underlying sources of his inspiration. Thematically, Hlushchenko’s landscapes range from intimately lyrical to epic and monumental pieces, e. g. the pictorially refined Birches in March, the spacious Fields of a Collective Farm, the fresh Morning by the Sea, the solemnly restrained and dramatic Vishgorod Bridgehead, the elegiac Autumn in Kiev, and the grand Ukraine. In his sketches and studies he has skilfully captured the changeableness of nature and the ecstasy man derives from his immediate contact with it.
Hlushchenko’s temperament has made him one of the most traveled artists in Ukraine. For him the studio is only a temporary place of creation, where he transplants his impressions onto the canvas to be admired at exhibitions invariably following his many travels throughout the Soviet Union and abroad.
In the 1960s, as many critics have noted, Hlushchenko’s artistic conceptions suddenly took on a new form. His brushwork became broad and vigorous and his colors pure, and there appeared a marked decorativeness in his paintings.
At first sight, this was something of a surprise to many of his admirers. But on closer inspection of his previous works one would hardly leave unnoticed those subtle elements which led to such a change, viz. his keen sensitivity to the surrounding environment, unexceptionable feci in it of rhythm, and fondness of decorative folk art. His palette became richer and his choice of color freer. He sees the world in constant movement to which he subordinates both form and color. However, the decorativeness which results therefrom only enhances the feeling of harmony.
When we look at Hlushchenko’s beautiful still-lifes with flowers, we perceive them as something live and not as something created by the sheer fantasy of the artist. His works are a happy combination of fantasy and reality, e.g. Still-life (1971). with its dynamic red, yellow and lilac colors; Still-life in Blue (1971), a dreamily sensitive and bright canvas; and The Dance (1967), conveying the expressive movements of a Hutsul dance. He does not merely contemplate nature, but reproduces its eternal process of renovation. His pictures are results not of stratagem, but of spontaneity. Yet there is no trace of superficiality in them, for he is a man of exceptional talent, great experience and profound erudition in his craft.
Hlushchenko excels in many mediums. After visiting the places connected with Lenin’s life and revolutionary activities abroad (England, Italy, France, Switzerland, Sweden, and Czechoslovakia) he made a series of drawings in colored felt-pointed pens, pastels, and monotypes which are as consummate as his picturesque oils. His water colors merit the same praise.
Advanced in years as he is, Hlushchenko’s youthful energy is more than admirable. His pictures vividly reflect the wisdom of immense experience, the maturity of chiseled craftsmanship and unfading talent which until now has retained its freshness, strength and the daring of an innovator’s searchings. Says the artist: “My best picture has not been created yet. I am still seeking that fire-bird which evades my grasp.”
Igor Bugaenko,1973
Copyright © Library Of Ukrainian Art
DSC_1829
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
High Resolution:
The original Ukrainian signature of the artist: M Глущенко
(Enlarged fragment: The Front View of the Painting)
A knight of mystery and paintbrush
Iryna Hakh
September 17 marks the 115th birthday of Mykola Hlushchenko, a Ukrainian painter and a soviet spy.
“Your religion, Nikolai Petrovich, your most precious and ‘sacred’ thing is material interests… I’m writing to you in Russian. I do that because deep in my heart I don’t see you as a real Ukrainian. You refer to yourself as Ukrainian not as a member of an oppressed community would, but only when and where it fits you.”
A fragment of Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s letter to Hlushchenko from the 1920s
Mykola Hlushchenko is one of the brightest figures in the history of Ukrainian painting of the 20th century, the people’s artist of the USSR and the holder of the Taras Shevchenko Award. Virtually all Ukrainian guidebooks open their entries on Hlushchenko with these phrases. A God-given artist, an unsurpassed colorist, master of the landscape whose brush created over 10,000 works of art.
The past decades, however, revealed another unexpected aspect to the life of the well-known painter. In the 1990s, documents were published pointing to the fact that he was a soviet spy under the code name “Yarema”. He worked in the West successfully, handed over valuable materials about the Third Reich’s preparations for the attack against the Soviet Union to his bosses, obtained secret designs of 250 kinds of weapons, including engines for fighter jets, briefed Moscow on the activities of the leaders of "anti-Soviet nationalistic centers", reported about sentiments amongst the political and artistic elites of France and Germany, and more.
The fans of Hlushchenko’s legacy as an artist struggle to put together this side of his life and his extremely interesting creative activity during his lifetime.
In the 1920s, at an early age, Hlushchenko lived and studied in Germany and received material assistance from Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky and Roman Smal-Stotsky, Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR) Ambassador in Berlin. In 1922, Hlushchenko met Oleksandr Dovzhenko who at that time served as Secretary of the USSR Consulate in Berlin. “He [Dovzhenko – Auth.] met with Ukrainian students of the Berlin Academy of Arts and visited them every night. Then, after he managed to resign from the consulate and to receive a scholarship from the Ukrainian SSR People’s Commissariat, Dovzhenko joined the private art school by Professor Kampf.” One of these evening classes played a significant role in Hlushchenko’s future, his wife later recalled. “I studied at Prof. Kampf’s private studio. Mykola Petrovych [Hlushchenko – Transl.] often replaced him for evening classes. That’s where Hlushchenko painted the portraits of Oleksandr Petrovych [Dovzhenko] and his wife Varvara Semenivna,” she recalls. The portraits were lost. The only remaining thing was a black and white photograph of Dovzhenko by Hlushchenko.
According to historians of art, it was his conversations with Dovzhenko that inspired Hlushchenko to apply for soviet citizenship. He learned that his application was approved in 1923 and gave a self-portrait to Dovzhenko as a gift, with an inscription on the backside saying “Now I know who I am.” We don’t know what the 22-year old artist meant in his address to the Ukrainian colleague, and historic documents don’t reveal anything about it.
According to other sources, Hlushchenko did not receive soviet citizenship in 1923. He then moved to Paris in 1924, so he may have had too little time to go through the citizenship procedure. In 1925, however, the USSR trade representative in France commissioned the design of the soviet pavilion from Hlushchenko at the Lyon Fair. A year later, Hlushchenko had his personal exhibition at Société des Artistes Indépendants, a landmark event in his life as an artist. It was only after this that Hlushchenko reapplied for soviet citizenship and received a USSR passport in 1927.
It was then that, at the end of the 1920s, representatives of soviet foreign intelligence noticed him: a successful young artist who so strongly wanted to be a citizen of the Soviet Union, fully met the criteria of a person who could collaborate with the soviet intelligence. Fluent in French and German and with contacts in Germany and France, he had the necessary freedom and motivation to move around Europe, meanwhile fulfilling the tasks of his new bosses. An art studio at the Volunteers Street in Paris was a popular spot for the local intelligentsia to get together and discuss both art, and politics. Hlushchenko’s talents and contacts thus made him invaluable for the respective soviet authorities.
The first test task came soon: Hlushchenko was required to attend the trial of Samuel Schwartzbard, the murderer of Symon Petliura (Paris, October 18, 1927). Along with all the materials collected from that trial and newspaper reports of it, the headquarters in Moscow received illustrations where artist drew the portraits of the people involved. That put Hlushchenko in the list of “promising” agents of soviet special services.
In the 1920s and 1930s, he had many exhibitions around Europe; shows in famous galleries; the recognition as a promising representative of the young generation of artists, and praise from critics. As a result, his exhibition activity skyrocketed. Hlushchenko was displayed in the best locations around Moscow, Paris, Bucharest and Prague. In those years, many well-known individuals visited the artist in his studio. These included Vasyl Vyshyvany (Archduke Wilhelm von Habsburg), a colonel with the Ukrainian Riflemen; Dmytro Andriyevsky, an engineer and a leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists; Ivan Bunin, a Russian Nobel Prize-winning writer. Hlushchenko was in close contact with the Ukrainian artists who worked or studied in Paris, including Perfetsky, Turyn, Perebyinis, Khmeliuk and Hordynsky.
By the early 1930s, he comes the closest to his Motherland: “After I returned from Lviv to Paris in 1930, I began to organize the exhibition of Paris artists in Lviv. Hlushchenko and Perebyinis helped me a lot with this. They suggested that I display a few pieces by French and Italian painters of the Paris School. It was in the early 1930s that the artist managed to get as close as possible to the Motherland: "After returning from Lviv to Paris in 1930, I began to organize an exhibition of" Parisians "in Lviv. This helped me a lot Hlushchenko and Perebyinis. It was they who submitted the idea of publishing several works of French and Italian artists from the "Paris School". Of course, we couldn’t even think of having the paintings by the genius artists like Picasso, Derain, Chagall or Modigliani. But the witty Hlushchenko somehow got their drawings, engravings or lithographies”, wrote Sviatoslav Hordynskyi, the author of the history of the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists in Lviv, the capital of Halychyna. Together with Hordynskyi and Perebyinis, Hlushchenko was a co-author of the Paris Group’s first exhibition in Lviv.
This organization started working at a Lviv museum with the First Exhibition of the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists Featuring French, Italian and Belgian Artists in 1931. The organizers of this huge art project wanted to present the works by a young generation of Ukrainian artists living and working in Paris, and to show the West European painting culture of the early 20th century alongside the artists from Halychyna.
The opening of the show started a new page in the history of Ukrainian art of the first half of the 20th century. The show at the National Museum of Lviv was hugely successful. “Sviatoslav Hordynskyi, Hlushchenko and Perebyinis deserve warm appreciation for organizing the participants from Paris for the show of the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists in March and April,” Ilarion Svencicki, the museum director, said to the press. “The organizers have made is possible for four thousand visitors to see the living trends in the art of Ukrainian painters in the context of contemporary art in the West. These exhibitions will remain for many years a real accomplishment of the National Museum’s cultural work. The guests had an opportunity to see contemporary accomplishments of Ukrainian art and compare them to the eternal values of the past epochs. Therefore, the Museum administration is willing to provide space for similar retrospective, comprehensive, individual and comparable shows in the future.”
As a member of the Paris Group, Hlushchenko was actively involved in the organization of the First Exhibition, as well as further work of the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists. He displayed his works in collective exhibitions of the Association that took place annually in Lviv between 1931 and 1935, and was praised by art critics as “elegant, simple, authentic and sincere.”
Members of the Association, too, appreciated Hlushchenko’s work. In 1934, it published a presentable and solid monograph of his art in Ukrainian and French. The hardback book with the portrait of the well-known Parisian artist of Ukrainian original was complete with 32 illustrations and a color lithography insert. “This monograph, first in the series of such planned publications, tries to briefly and competently introduce the wider audience of art lovers to the life and art of this interesting painter…. Halychyna has not yet had an art monograph that would cover the art of individual painters in such light and beautiful form. So we should warmly greet the appearance of art monographs on our book market,” the introduction by P. Kovzhun and S. Hordynskyi said.
The following year, Hlushchenko had his personal exhibition in Lviv. He had been negotiating it with Ilarion Svencicky since 1933. He displayed nearly a hundred of his works, including paintings and drawings. His artistic work got critical acclaim in the press, with an accent on the links between Lviv and Paris art. Colleagues praised him too. V. Lasovsky wrote with admiration: “Hlushchenko’s art is the cause of sentiment, love for color, the first impression and the negation of reason in favor of a more sophisticated color palette, in favor of the general tone of the texture that would underline the quality of the paint rather than convey the material structure of the object painted.”
This personal show was successful both artistically and financially. Many works were bought by the fans of Hlushchenko’s art right from display, and some works made it into the collection of the National Museum.
Despite this huge success, the admiration of the Lviv audience and of his fellow artists, Hlushchenko never joined the massive exhibition for the 20th anniversary of the National Museum in Lviv that involved all members of the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists. His works were absent from the following annual exhibitions of the Association that took place in Lviv up until 1939.
In 1936, the Hlushchenko family moved to Moscow. The famous artist whose works were displayed alongside France’s top impressionists ended up in a room of 9 sq m in a communal flat. The following year, the family managed to move to Kyiv.
Ever since, Hlushchenko worked and lived in the Soviet Union, displaying his works in the galleries of soviet cities, including Kyiv, Moscow, Odesa and Kharkiv – once again, to the admiration of the audience and open floors from any well-known museums and halls.
In 1940, Hlushchenko is sent to Berlin where the exhibition of soviet decorative art was to take place. IT is hard to say now why the artists agreed to join yet another task from the intelligence. But he did fulfill it and received a gift at the exhibition – an album of watercolor paintings by Adolf Hitler which he handed over to Stalin after his return back to the Soviet Union. Hlushchenko continued to display his works during the war in the galleries of Moscow (1941, 1942, 1943) and Kyiv (1944).
After 1944, Hlushchenko lived in Kyiv. His studio was on the uppermost floor of the Moscow Building at Khreshchatyk, the main street of Kyiv. He was accepted as member of the Union of Soviet Artists of Ukraine that same year.
After the war, Hlushchenko worked and displayed his art a lot in the capitals of the Soviet Union republics. As one of the Soviet Union’s top artists, he represented art intelligentsia in exhibitions in Poland (1954), Great Britain (1966), Canada (1968), Germany (1971) and Japan (1971). His trip to Belgium in 1958 was allowed. Such approvals of participation in international exhibitions in the Soviet Union were only granted to the artists who were super loyal and favored by those in power, and represented zero threat to the ideological propaganda of socialist soviet art in “hostile” capitalist states.
In 1976, Hlushchenko was awarded the title of the People’s Artist of the Soviet Union. During his lifetime, he saw the publication of several albums with his works and many articles about his accomplishments in art – although many facts of his biography were silenced while his life abroad in the interwar period was presented from a perspective that fit the overall narrative. Hlushchenko lived a beautiful wealthy life of a soviet artist who worked a lot, was in touch with the Communist Party elite and travelled abroad for exhibitions. He was admired by fellow artists. The Soviet Union was proud of him.
On October 31, 1977, Hlushchenko died and was buried at the Baikove Cemetery in Kyiv.
Who was painter Mykola Hlushchenko in reality? He was probably the only person who could actually answer that question. He personally valued his early period while describing the later stage as forced celebration of soviet life. Shortly before his death, Hlushchenko selected 250 paintings created in the 1950s and asked his wife to burn them. That request was never fulfilled: the paintings were found at his studio after his death and handed over to the Ministry of Culture for preservation without the right to display them.
In 1971, Hlushchenko visited Lviv (his first show there took place in 1957) with a personal exhibition that turned out to be the last one in his lifetime in the city. Handsome, fit, joyful and loud, Hlushchenko entered the museum with a group of Lviv Oblast Executive Committee employees and people from the Ministry of Culture. He saw a museum employee by the entrance to the main hall where his exhibition was to open officially and stopped:
- Do you recognize me?, Hlushchenko asked the elderly man. The man turned his head and looked into the direction from which the familiar voice came with the eyes that were almost blind.
– Oh, that’s Mr. Hlushchenko, Mr. Flunt replied with a typical accent on the letter e in the name. Yaroslav Flunt was a long-time employee of the National Museum in Lviv, and a fighter with the Ukrainian Riflemen who lost his eyesight in the Liberation Struggle. Ilarion Svencicky employed him. This elderly man was personally acquainted with Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky and an eyewitness of remarkable events in the development of Ukrainian art in the early 20th century. He surely remembered those good days when young French artists of Ukrainian origin had triumphantly presented their works at the museum back in the 1930s. He remembered that joyful and carefree Hlushchenko who delivered the works of Picasso, Derain, Chagall and Modigliani through the border from France, without proper documentation.
Everyone noticed tears in Hlushchenko’s eyes at that moment.
17.09.2016
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Translated by © Anna Korbut
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Igor Bugaenko. Mykola Hlushchenko: Biographical sketch
en.uartlib.org/mykola-hlushchenko-best-picture-not-create...
Mykola Hlushchenko: My best picture has not been created yet
Jan 22, 2015 | © Library of Ukrainian Art
For many connoisseurs the one-man retrospective of the noted Ukrainian artist Mykola Hlushchenko, mounted in September 1971 to mark his 70th jubilee, held quite a few surprises. This was especially so as regards Hlushchenko’s productions of the last few years. Those who admired the exhibits were impressed by their telling expressiveness, vivacity of color, and a fresh and original apprehension of the world around us. The show covered fifty years in the career of the artist, and every one of the canvases was a distinctive page in his biography.
One of his earliest creations, a self-portrait painted at the age of twenty-two, is done in Italian Renaissance-derived style. Its wide range of soft pastel browns, as well as the conventional architectural background and the well-modeled features of the face emanate an unusual tranquillity. And only the tense expression of the young man’s eyes distorts the inner classical balance of the portrait, revealing the true identity and thoughts of the person it represents.
When Mykola Hlushchenko was five years old, his father died. Together with his mother, he moved from his native town of Novomoskovsk to the Ukrainian village of Borisovka in Kursk Province. There he experienced the first excitement of a would-be artist while watching the local icon painters at work. The urge to paint has never left him since then. He attended classes in drawing at a commercial school in Yuzovka (now Donetsk) and was especially fond of Repin and Vasil-kivsky. The copying of paintings and scenery pieces for workers’ clubs were Hlushchenko’s first independent steps in his career as an artist.
Then followed the hard days of confinement in a prisoners-of-war camp in Poland, from which he made a daring escape to Germany. Jobless, hungry, deprived of decent lodgings, Hlushchenko nonetheless pursued his career, studying at the private studio of Hans Baluschek in Berlin.
The different schools and trends in art, which alternately coexisted with or negated and influenced each other in those days, left his artistic individuality unscathed. His best paintings he did then had a new quality of a distinction which was not drowned in the kaleidoscope of prevalent artistic inventions.
During his studies at the Berlin Academy Hlushchenko fell under the spell of symbolism which dominated the German art of the time. He had a special fondness of the famous Swedish artist Anders Zorn, whose work, realistic as it was, bore some definite marks of impressionism. This is evident in the refined feeling of plastic form, opulent brushwork and conceptual unrestrained in Hlushchenko’s pictures.
His quest for different forms of plastic imagery took him to the museums, galleries and exhibitions in Berlin, where he found many interesting works by his contemporaries and masters of the past. As an advocate of realism he was attracted by the severity and clarity of the canvases of the German and Flemish Renaissance (Dürer, Hans Holbein the Younger, Jan van Eyk, and Lucas Cranach the Elder). Hlushchenko endeavored to convey the innermost motives of his soul, and for him the image of man and the eternal theme of feminine beauty seemed to be the best vehicles of expression in this respect.
Reviewing Hlushchenko’s entries in the 1924 exhibition at the Kasper Art Gallery in Berlin, the critics noted the high culture and technical perfection of his canvases. This success opened to him the doors of the exhibition of the Neue Sachlichkeit group, which featured works by German, French, Swiss and Italian artists (in Jstern, Dresden, and Erfurt).
In 1925, Hlushchenko moved to Paris. From here the lame of Courbet, Millet, Corot, the impressionists Manet, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, and Matisse, Picasso, Léger, Derain and Rouault spread throughout the world. Without these names the history of world art would be incomplete. “The vitality of Paris, the play of color and the illustrious achievements of the impressionists captured me,” he would later recall.
Heated disputes, criticism of the reactionary dogmas of academism whose advocates were already in a spiritual impasse but still dominated the official salons, attendances of the famous salons of Tuileries and those of the “Indépendants,” visits to dozens of private galleries and improvised shows — these were the main interests of the young artist in Paris. The rapidly changing tastes of the time notwithstanding, Hlushchenko’s personality was not lost in the colorful crowd of artists from Montmartre and Montparnasse. Apart from the works by formalistic experimentalists, which were devoid of deep content and figurative idiom, the Parisian exhibitions also displayed canvases whose subjects were closely related to life, and among them were Hlushchenko’s productions — fresh and distinct in their own right.
His compositions Les Joueurs de cartes, Les Joueurs d’échecs, La Procession, and Un Couple d’amoureux were exhibited in the Salon d’automne, Salon des Indépendants, and the Salon des Tuileries. They bore yet marks of severity and certain asceticism typical of the Berlin school. But his subsequent works — Femme assise and Femme à sa toilette — are imbued with a vitality sustained by a laconic and expressive draughtsmanship. During the Parisian period Hlushchenko also took an active part in public life. He popularized the economic and cultural achievements of the Soviet Union. In 1925, he designed the Soviet exhibition at the Lyon Fair. As chief artist of the USSR trade-industrial exhibitions, he took an active part in organizing the Soviet departments at expos held in Brussels, Milan, Paris and Marseille. Due to his efforts, a number of shows of Soviet artists were organized in Paris, such as the widely spoken about exhibition of Petr Konchalovsky.
Hlushchenko’s achievements in composition, drawing, and psychological treatment, and his broadened spiritual horizons were especially clearly projected in his portraits of the 1930s — those of Romain Rolland, Henri Barbusse, Paul Signac, and Victor Margueritte. The portrait of Henri Barbusse. in particular, produces an unforgettable impression by its dramatism and exceptional authenticity. The inner world of the subiect. a passionate fighter against fascism, is happily conveyed through original expedients which are skillfully made use of. The portrait is rightfully recognized as one of the best in the Soviet Ukrainian visual arts of the prewar period.
From 1925 to 1936 Hlushchenko’s one-man shows were mounted in many cities of Europe — in Paris. Berlin, Ostend, Milan, Stockholm, Rome, as well as in the USA.
As the political atmosphere changed for the worse, Hlushchenko could not stand aloof of the problems agitating the public mind of the world. During a visit to Spain in 1934 he did the painting Execution of Revolutionary, which he barely managed to slip through the customs.
At all stages of his career Hlushchenko’s creations have been distinguished for their telling civic message which corresponded to the best features of the art of socialist realism.
In 1936 Hlushchenko returned to his homeland.
At the outbreak of the Second World War he resided in Moscow. The press often carried his poignant graphic works indicting the crimes of the German fascists. His series Defense of Moscow is highly patriotic and revealing. Hlushchenko frequently visited the frontline and reproduced his impressions in Death of General Dovator, in the Wake of the Enemy. These and some other of his works, particularly a number of landscapes permeated with love of Russian nature, were displayed at the artist’s one-man exhibition held in Moscow in 1943.
Ukrainian art-lovers also took great interest in Hlushchenko’s creative work. The exhibition of his pictrures organized in the Kiev House of Writers drew the attention of many prominent figures in Ukrainian culture and arts.
After the liberation of Kiev, in 1944, Hlushchenko moved to Ukraine. Since then his art is closely related to his country of birth. Its colorful natural beauties and the poesy of creativity of Soviet man are the underlying sources of his inspiration. Thematically, Hlushchenko’s landscapes range from intimately lyrical to epic and monumental pieces, e. g. the pictorially refined Birches in March, the spacious Fields of a Collective Farm, the fresh Morning by the Sea, the solemnly restrained and dramatic Vishgorod Bridgehead, the elegiac Autumn in Kiev, and the grand Ukraine. In his sketches and studies he has skilfully captured the changeableness of nature and the ecstasy man derives from his immediate contact with it.
Hlushchenko’s temperament has made him one of the most traveled artists in Ukraine. For him the studio is only a temporary place of creation, where he transplants his impressions onto the canvas to be admired at exhibitions invariably following his many travels throughout the Soviet Union and abroad.
In the 1960s, as many critics have noted, Hlushchenko’s artistic conceptions suddenly took on a new form. His brushwork became broad and vigorous and his colors pure, and there appeared a marked decorativeness in his paintings.
At first sight, this was something of a surprise to many of his admirers. But on closer inspection of his previous works one would hardly leave unnoticed those subtle elements which led to such a change, viz. his keen sensitivity to the surrounding environment, unexceptionable feci in it of rhythm, and fondness of decorative folk art. His palette became richer and his choice of color freer. He sees the world in constant movement to which he subordinates both form and color. However, the decorativeness which results therefrom only enhances the feeling of harmony.
When we look at Hlushchenko’s beautiful still-lifes with flowers, we perceive them as something live and not as something created by the sheer fantasy of the artist. His works are a happy combination of fantasy and reality, e.g. Still-life (1971). with its dynamic red, yellow and lilac colors; Still-life in Blue (1971), a dreamily sensitive and bright canvas; and The Dance (1967), conveying the expressive movements of a Hutsul dance. He does not merely contemplate nature, but reproduces its eternal process of renovation. His pictures are results not of stratagem, but of spontaneity. Yet there is no trace of superficiality in them, for he is a man of exceptional talent, great experience and profound erudition in his craft.
Hlushchenko excels in many mediums. After visiting the places connected with Lenin’s life and revolutionary activities abroad (England, Italy, France, Switzerland, Sweden, and Czechoslovakia) he made a series of drawings in colored felt-pointed pens, pastels, and monotypes which are as consummate as his picturesque oils. His water colors merit the same praise.
Advanced in years as he is, Hlushchenko’s youthful energy is more than admirable. His pictures vividly reflect the wisdom of immense experience, the maturity of chiseled craftsmanship and unfading talent which until now has retained its freshness, strength and the daring of an innovator’s searchings. Says the artist: “My best picture has not been created yet. I am still seeking that fire-bird which evades my grasp.”
Igor Bugaenko,1973
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