The National Art Museum of Ukraine started its autumn season extremely powerfully. Only a few days have passed since the closure of the exhibition of paintings of the famous poet, art expert and artist Maximilian Voloshin, dedicated to the centennial of the House of the poet, and on October 4 admirers of fine art were invited to the opening exhibition of Vasyl Krychevsky “Between vanguard and tradition”.
Vasyl Krychevsky ( 31.12.1872 ( 01.12.1873 ) - 15.11. 1952) is known in Ukraine as a prominent architect. He became the founder of a new national style in architecture - Ukrainian architectural modernism. It should be noted that V. Krychevsky was a designer of the House for Kyiv writers which in the style of 30ties of the last century had its own name “Rolit” (it means "the worker of the literature "), the construction manager of which was the first editor of the newspaper “Kyiv Polyteсhniс”, a graduate of the KPI, a famous writer Ivan Le.
However, any architect is, or at least should be, an artist. Vasyl Krychevsky was an outstanding artist. But the current generation of Kiev got the opportunity to see it firsthand only now – the last exhibition occurring during his lifetime in the capital of Ukraine took place in 1940. 1,055 works were exhibited there. However, only a small part of artist’s legacy came up to these days, many works were lost during the Second World War and later during wandering of his family abroad. This is due to the tragic events of his biography – because of a number of circumstances 60 years old artist and his family stayed on the occupied territories, eventually, worrying about the fate of his daughter, whose husband was from the family of Baltic Germans, and the son, who came back home from the environment, he left the country, lived in Paris, and spent his last years in Caracas (Venezuela). In 2003, his descendants donated to Ukraine more than 300 of his works that had enlarged the collection of many Ukrainian museums, including the National Art Museum. So at the current exhibition viewers can see about 70 paintings and graphical works from the collection of the National Art Museum of Ukraine.
It should be mentioned that Vasyl Krychevsky was not only a talented architect and painter, a master of book graphics and set designer, but also an unsurpassed expert and researcher of folk art. Just Ukrainian folk art was nutrient soil for his works and was rethought in his own works that became a model of harmonious combination of vanguard and tradition. Moreover he was the first rector of the State academy of art in Kyiv (now National academy of art and architecture) and later the professor of the Institutes of Art and Architecture (by the way among his students there was Olexandr Dovzhenko) and the first artist of Ukrainian cinematography. And one of his designing works is known to everyone – Vasyl Krychevsky designed Large and Small emblems of Ukrainian people’s republic where he used familiar to everyone modern graphical image of ancient princely sign – a trident. So the pictures and graphical pages, exhibited in the National Art Museum of Ukraine, are interesting because of the fact that they open the peculiar conception of the world by a person of renaissance’s scale.