Art that withstood the destruction!

After the release of the catalogue of the preserved art works of Mykhailo Boichuk from museums and private collections, which features 78 replicas of preserved works and 23 photo replicas of the artist’s lost works, it received many positive reviews in the media. After the release of the lifetime monograph by Kostiantyn Slipko-Moskaltsiv (according to the Academician Mykola Mushynka, “the most comprehensive monograph on Mykhailo Boichuk and his work published yet”), the project manager Taras Lozynsky (from the Institute of Collecting Ukrainian Artistic Heritage in the Taras Shevchenko Scientific Society) was approached by private individuals, who presented ten previously unknown drawings of the artist from Lviv period of his career.

This prompted us to address the subject of preserving the works of the artist once again.

After a triumph appearance of Renovation Byzantine group in Paris at the exhibition of the “Salon of the Independent” in 1910 Boichuk returned to Lviv. On the recommendation of the Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky the artist got accommodated in the building of the Taras Shevchenko Scientific Society on Chernetsky Street (now 26 Vynnychenko Street), where he occupied the studio “just vacated by Ivan Trush.”

Here he spent four years of his career associated with the National Museum, where by the command of Ilarion Svientsitsky he cleaned and “preserved a number of valuable icons from the 15th-16th centuries” and created polychromes in a number of churches (which haven’t been preserved until the present time). In Lviv Boichuk made two of the most interesting icons – The Prophet Elijah and The Lord’s Supper, which are currently preserved at the Andrei Sheptytsky National Museum.

On the floor right under Boichuk’s studio there lived a future artist and student of Boichuk – 16-year-old Yaroslava Stefanovych (Muzyka) with her father and sister.

Art critic Vita Susak wrote about the relationship between Boichuk and Stefanovych and her future hard life: “She often visited his home in the attic of the building and, perhaps, Boichuk asked her to look after the apartment when he had to go away from the city. After the World War I, when he started working as a professor in Kyiv, it became obvious that Boichuk was not going to come back to Lviv. Yaroslava gathered everything that was left in the studio and meticulously preserved it all.”

In 1924 Stefanovych got married to a microbiologist Maksym Muzyka, at that time the vice-rector of the Lviv Underground University. The artist got a job at the restoration department of the National Museum, where she met the curator and restorer of Ukrainian icons Volodymyr Peshchansky, who became her second “most authoritative instructor.”

“…In 1927 she handed over a collection of icons, that belonged to Boichuk, to the National Museum in Lviv and in 1945 she also took his Package of Drawings there.”

“Perhaps, she did not yet know back then that all the murals created by her Teacher on the walls of Lutsk barracks, Peasant Resort, and Chervonozavodsky Theater in the Soviet Ukraine had been destroyed. And as for his easel paintings, under the act of September 8, 1937, the Commission consisting of the instructor of the Cultural and Educational Department of the CC CP(b)U comrade Popeliukha, director of the Museum of Russian Art comrade Raievsky, artists Kodiiev and Pashchenko in the presence of scientific workers of the State Ukrainian Museum Adolf and Reznikov reviewed the works of the enemies of the people Boichuk, Padalka, Sedliar, Hvozdyk, Lipkovsky, Nalepynska-Boichuk, and Dindo, which had been presented for the Commission revision from the special funds of the State Ukrainian Museum decided that these works appear to be harmful due to their controversial Boichukist formalistic method, distort our socialist reality, provide false images of the Soviet people, are of no museum value, and as works of the enemies of people must be destroyed…”

Yaroslava Muzyka was arrested in the summer of 1948 in the Artists House in Hurzuf and on July 18, 1948 she was convicted of “criminal-nationalistic activity to 25 years of hard labor camps.” Sensing the danger for his arrested wife Maksym Muzyka hid the art works of Boichuk and his followers that were kept at their home. He bricked up the pieces of art between the doors leading from their apartment to the apartment of Yaroslava’s sister. The artist served six years until “the famous amnesty for the innocent” and was set free on parole on June 6, 1955.

After returning home, Yaroslava Muzyka continued to hide Boichuk’s heritage being aware of the high risk. In the 1960s she gave two of Boichuk’s paintings to the National Museum in Lviv, in 1967 she presented a portrait of Metropolitan Sheptytsky to the National Museum in Kyiv. Since the mid-1960s art critic Olena Ripko maintained close relationship with the artist. Ripko had an influence on Muzyka’s decision to bequeath her art works and collection to the Lviv Art Gallery.

Boichuk’s drawings had been preserved by Muzyka and during her lifetime she gave them for storing to a private individual. Among the drawings in Muzyka’s collection there are Boichuk’s Tracing from the Poliany Icon signed by the author, sketch of a male figure from a fragment of donor icon, sketch-drawing of the icon Jesus Christ, draft outline of legs of a sitting person, and the drawing Meek Heart in a Crown of Thorns without signature or the date of the creation.

The portrait of Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky painted on identical light brown paper has a signature “drawing by Boichuk” made by Yaroslava Muzyka. The same signature has been preserved on a two-sided drawing depicting female heads. On the front there is a head of a woman drawn by pencil with added strokes of brown and pink spots of watercolor. On the back there is a pencil sketch-drawing of a female head with barely outlined torso and hands. In the bottom there is a signature “Drawing by M.Boichuk.” Both portraits are characterized by elongated noses and wide open prominent eyes in neo-Byzantine style.

Ink drawing Little Shepherd is similar in style to the famous images of a little shepherd created by Boichuk. And the last composition By the Apple Tree is made with tempera on cardboard. This small piece of art with signs of destruction (it was broken or torn in half vertically) is made in the artist’s style of Lviv period and has lots in common with the famous similar compositions created in the period between 1910 and 1914.

Of course, these works require a more careful and thorough research but the place of their origin, attribution, and autographs of Yaroslava Muzyka, style of the drawings and similarity of the sheets of paper, used for creating these drawings, suggest the possibility that they were created by Boichuk during his stay in Lviv and are a part of the Muzyka’s collection, which was transferred to the Lviv Art Gallery after the death of the artist.

Hopefully, these drawings will take their place in the collection of the preserved art works of Boichuk – one of the most interesting artists of the 20th century – destroyed and indestructible artist of the Executed Renaissance.