Born in Kherson on June 22, 1886, in the city which gave to the Ukrainian avant-garde art a plethora of prominent figures, including David and Wladimir Burliuk, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Mikhail Larionov, and Vsevolod Meyerhold, Yevhen Sahaidachny moved to St. Petersburg when still a child. After graduating from the city’s Gymnasium No. 1, the young man entered the law faculty of the university, but soon left it. Having taken a cabin boy job on a trading ship, he visited Cairo, Constantinople, and Naples, using the opportunity to get acquainted with the Egyptian, Byzantine and Renaissance art, as well as modern European trends of Cubism and Futurism. Painting and sculpture became his vocation; however, the Academy of Fine Arts with its “dry academism” did not attract Sahaidachny. He trained at private studios of professors of painting Dmitry Kardovsky and Jan Ciaglinski, popular with the younger generation of the capital’s artistic milieu. The artist also attended classes at the Stieglitz College for a while, where research in the field of folk art was actively promoted.
Infatuated with the avant-garde, the young Sahaidachny joined David Burliuk’s group Crown and Nikolai Kulbin’s Triangle, where he exhibited his works in 1909-10. November 1909 saw the young artistic forces of St. Petersburg creating the Art Association Union of the Young, in which Sahaidachny played a major role. The first exhibition of the newly formed group was held in March 1910 in St. Petersburg and Riga. Sahaidachny exhibited his avant-garde compositions Medallion and At the Dawn Hour. That same year, the artist exhibited his works in Moscow, at the exhibition of Russia’s most radical avant-garde group, called the Jack of Diamonds.
Having tried a variety of directions in the avant-garde art, the artist, together with Cezaria Baudouin de Courtenay who had been a student of Mykhailo Boichuk in Paris and Mikhail Le Dentu who had the honor of discovering the legacy of Georgian primitivist Niko Pirosmani, promoted “the idea of primitive and folk tradition’s primacy in the art” at the Union’s exhibitions.
A STREET
On the advice of Baudouin de Courtenay, Sahaidachny went to Lviv in 1911, where Boichuk-led Neo-Byzantines were preparing to create fresco paintings at the prayer room of the Greek Catholic Primary School Teachers Seminary’s dormitory. Boichuk taught Sahaidachny technique and revealed the secrets of egg tempera painting, familiarized him with basic principles of his Neo-Byzantine style. It is difficult to determine which paintings at the prayer room were done by the artist, but by taking part in this project, Sahaidachny combined into a single integrated system the Ukrainian avant-garde art that was developing on both sides of the border.
On his return to Russia, the artist, as well as artists Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova, both primitivists, exhibited their works in the leftist artists’ association “The Donkey Tail.” The works of this period – Turks in Boats, A Street in Turkey, Porters, A Mule, and Horses – can be defined as “Neo-Impressionist Primitivism,” based on their stylistic features. The subsequent years saw Sahaidachny lost among the colorful atmosphere of uncertainty, engulfing artistic life of Moscow and St. Petersburg then.
The artist moved to Kyiv in the fall of 1917, working for theaters of the city. The Ukrainian Academy of Fine Arts sent him to Nizhyn in 1919 to improve art education in the local workshops. He then joined the faculty of Myrhorod Ceramic College, where he taught drawing, painting, and sculpture.
A SELF-PORTRAIT
The Revolutionary Art Association of Ukraine was established in 1925, and Sahaidachny was among its founders along with David Burliuk, Anatolii Petrytsky, Mykhailo Boichuk, Vasyl Sedliar, and Ivan Vrona.
In addition to painting, creative and stylistic quest of Sahaidachny extended to sculpture as well, and his style there can be roughly described as the Cubist-Futurist Boichukism. However, his plastic compositions – A Worker with a Hammer, A Kneeling Woman, A Woman Wearing Plakhta, A Woman in Prayer – are only known from the literature: they were all destroyed during the Soviet government’s “campaign against alien formalism.” Due to the start of wholesale persecution of Ukrainian culture figures, Sahaidachny had to move to the proletarian city of Luhansk in 1932, finding a job here teaching art courses at a rabfak [university preparatory school for workers. – Translator] to prepare its graduates for entering the reorganized Kyiv Institute of Proletarian Artistic Culture. He taught the prospective students to paint murals and make tempera paint on their own, mixing natural pigments with egg yolk. Concurrently, he taught drawing and painting at the art colleges of Luhansk (1932-36) and Dnipropetrovsk (1936-37). After participating in official exhibitions in Luhansk (1934) and Stalino (1935), the artist’s works were tarred as “formalist.” However, all attempts to accuse one of the founders of the Russian avant-garde of being a “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist” failed, saving Sahaidachny’s life in the tragic 1937...
Along with Boichukists Serhii Kolos of Kyiv and Okhrim Kravchenko of Lviv, Sahaidachny initiated trips to picturesque open air scenes of Yavoriv, Yaseniv, Richka, Brusne, and Pistyn in the mid-1950s. Lviv artists of Roman Selsky and Hryhorii Smolsky’s circle liked Carpathian seasons in Dzembronia and Kosmach better, which had been introduced by Kazimierz Sichulski back in his time. This period saw Sahaidachny creating such works as Verbovets (1956), The Road to Pistyn (1957), The Road to Javoriv (1958), Smodne (1959), and Outskirts of Kosiv (1960).
On a hot August morning, Sahaidachny was starting his regular journey with his favorite sketchbook into the mountains. However, the 75-year-old artist’s heart could not stand the long journey anymore... The posthumous exhibition of Sahaidachny was held in Lviv in 1969.
