This year we celebrate the centenary of the birth of the renowned Ukrainian artist, the master of portrait and landscape painting Serhii Hryhoriev. The artist’s name is primarily associated with genre paintings on Soviet themes, for which he received awards and recognition. But there was also another Hryhoriev, a lyrical creator of graphic art works, watercolors, drawings and landscape sketches, portraits of friends and relatives which constituted the master’s intimate world and are known only to a narrow circle of specialists and relatives.
Hryhoriev was born in 1910 in Luhansk, but lived and worked in Kyiv. In 1932 he graduated from the Kyiv Fine Arts Institute (now the National Academy of Visual Arts and Architecture). The Day was told by the National Fine Arts Museum’s researcher Liudmyla Kovalska that Hryhoriev had been one of the most favored and most talented students of the institute’s rector — the renowned artist and teacher Fedir Krychevsky. It was Krychevsky, and later his pupil, that kept the traditions and principles of academic painting of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts alive through their work.
In Kyiv, Hryhoriev created a whole new school of painting. For nearly thirty years he led the genre painting workshop, and for five years he headed the Kyiv Arts Institute.
“The distinctive feature of Hryhoriev’s works is his skillfulness and ability to recreate his time, its main characters and the corresponding nuances. By the way, while we mainly know Hryhoriev as a master of landscape and portrait painting, he was an excellent draftsman, too,” says Kovalska.
On October 22, a major retrospective exhibition “Serhii Hryhoriev (1910-1988). Painting. Graphics” opened at the National Fine Arts Museum. The formal pretext for the exhibition is the centenary of the birth of the painter. At the same time, the exhibition’s organizers seek to reveal the artist’s complex inner world, by showing not just his achievements as a famous Soviet painter, but also the artist’s lyrical side, which was much less visible at the time. After all, the National Fine Arts Museum holds more than a hundred works by Hryhoriev, many of which will be shown for the first time. Works from the family collection and from the Kharkiv Fine Arts Museum will be an interesting addition as well. As part of the project, Hryhoriev’s illustrated Book of Memories will be presented. It gives a mixed picture of artistic life in Moscow, Kyiv, and Kharkiv in the 1920s and 1930s, and contains verbal portraits of his teachers and associates, such as Kostiantyn Yeleva, Anatolii Petrytsky and other great masters of Ukrainian art.
Photo replicas provided by the National Fine Arts Museum of Ukraine
