The Ternopil Regional Art Museum hosted the presentation of the book Bohdan Lepky’s Pictorial Heritage. The authors of the book are senior researcher of the Bohdan Lepky Museum in Berezhany Natalia Strilets and Ternopil-based art historian and artist Natalia Sobkovych. Strilets noted that the publication was also a collective work of all employees of the Lepky Museum. As she told The Day, the bulk of the work was done in 2015, but the idea originated in 2012 when Sobkovych collaborated with the museum to publish a collection of fairy-tales by Lepky. “Sobkovych illustrated that book and the first director of the museum Nadia Dyrda came up with the idea of compiling this catalogue back then. We started to collect and organize materials. We did a lot of work on paintings themselves. We unframed every artwork, studied in detail all the damage, all authorial signatures, inscriptions made by Lepky’s nephew – doctor of medicine, public and cultural figure, philanthropist and member of the Ukrainian diaspora in the US Roman Smyk, who donated these artworks to the museum. The lack of authorial notes was a major difficulty, so we had to rely on MD Smyk’s notes. At the same time, we were looking for contacts in the diaspora who would have provided more recent, interesting information, still not available to the public and scholars,” Strilets told us.
She continued by saying that the museum planned an expanded study: “This catalogue covers only our museum’s collection, that is, 81 artworks by Lepky. But we know that some of them are kept in the National Museum in Kolomyia and a US private collection. A lot of questions are yet to be answered, and we want to do it.”
