Ivano-Frankivsk resident was International Man of the Year in 1992
It was not until Myroslav Aronets published a monograph about the master painter Denys Ivantsev that his Ukrainian compatriots learned that Cambridge University had bestowed its highest award on him.
This is not the first time Ukrainians learn about famous people living right next door to them only after they have attained international renown.
The Ivano-Frankivsk artist Denys Ivantsev was fortunate to attain fame in the twilight of his difficult life — it “fell” upon him he was 82 years old. In late November 1992 the International Biographical Center (IBC) in Cambridge, England, awarded the honorary title of International Man of the Year to this wonderful master painter, who joined the list of world-famous individuals whose achievements are of great importance to global culture. Cambridge bestowed this exalted title on the USSR’s last communist leader Mikhail Gorbachev and the emigre poet Iosif Brodsky.
Who is this outstanding artist who so belatedly came to the attention of his fellow countrymen from the Carpathian region and the rest of Ukraine? One can read about him in the fascinating monograph Denys-Lev Ivantsev: Life and Works. Written by Myroslav Aronets, who researched the artist’s personal archive and memoiristic literature, it was published recently by the Hrani-T Publishers. Aronets’s work spotlights the artist’s life against the background of the complex political events during the second half of the 20th century and analyzes his oeuvre, which is rich in genres and themes and reflects contemporary trends in European art of the time.
The artist had a wonderful life that spanned 93 years. He was born on March 5, 1910, in the village of Deleva, Tlumak district, into a priest’s family. After graduating from high school, Ivantsev enrolled in the painting department of the Cracow Academy of Arts, where Yulian Pankevych, Modest Sosenko, and Ivan Trush also studied, and then completed a teacher-training course at the Warsaw Institute of Practical Knowledge. He was one of the founders and chairmen of the Lviv-based Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists and a friend of the outstanding Ukrainian writer Bohdan Lepky whom he dubbed “the Ukrainian Demosthenes.”
Ivantsev spent the second period of his life in the Carpathian region. He took part in numerous exhibits of avant-garde artists, and in 1938 he was awarded first prize for his painting The Baptism of Ukraine. He held a variety of jobs painting churches, researched the theory of art (he even invented a new trend called statism), achieved success in ceramics, and taught in the Deleva school. But in 1940 the Soviet “liberators” dismissed him from his job because he was a priest’s son. His father, who refused to convert to Orthodoxy, was persecuted, and the family was about to be deported to Siberia. What saved him was the fact that there was nobody left to teach, so Ivantsev became the principal, vice-principal, and teacher of five or six subjects.
Yet he never stopped painting. He had to camouflage most of his pictures with tooth powder and hide them. They are by far the finest of his works: Christ’s Lamentations over a Ukrainian Village, Our Golgotha, and the composition We symbolize the fact that it is impossible to destroy the land, strength, and fertility of the nation.
Ivantsev worked as a schoolteacher in his native village for 31years until he retired in 1970; so many lessons taught, the birth of five children, and hundreds of children’s destinies. But as the press noted, “in the conditions of so-called socialist realism, i.e., Moscow-style naturalism, in which the artist must glorify his ‘elder brother,’ Denys Ivantsev’s works were not very known to the public at large.” Because of his national and patriotic convictions and his European vision of the role and aim of art, for a long time the artist was deliberately isolated from the art world.
Ivantsev painted hundreds of superb canvasses, such as The Winter Expedition of the Galician Army, The Baptism of Ukraine, Grotesco, Objects, Black and White, Panta Rey, Moses, The Ruler of the Blue Carpathians, The Stonemasons, The Eternal Revolutionary, a series of Dnister River landscapes called Autumn in a Dnister Ravine, Summer on the Dnister, and The Elements, which define the painter as one of the leading Ukrainian landscape artists of the mid-20th-century.
The artist’s works are known abroad and have also been acquired by the museums of Lviv, Kyiv, and Ivano-Frankivsk. A large part of his legacy remained in Poland, and the artist’s name was included in the Encyclopedia of Ukrainian Studies published in 1957 in Paris and New York.
Denys Ivantsev lived the last 33 years of his life in Ivano- Frankivsk, where he died in 2003. Under the Soviets he had no place to work — he was even denied the right to share a studio — and his works were never shown in Kyiv galleries. He was a persona non grata beset by domestic problems. Although he resolutely refused to join the Union of Artists of Ukraine during perestroika, he wholeheartedly welcomed Ukraine’s independence.
Recognition, respect, and honors came to the artist a second time. One of his true friends was the artist Opanas Zalyvakha, who wrote the foreword to the book about Ivantsev: “...he lived his whole life doing good. He did not engage in mindless soul-searching. Fate kept him from becoming sullied by so-called social realism...The nation’s pain was his pain, too. He translated the Christian commandments into things of art, which created our national culture.”
The great master executed his paintings in his own abstract philosophical vein, combining the concrete with the imaginary and the real with the unreal, deeply and wisely reconsidering historical events and the pressing problems of humanity. That is why such wondrous magic emanates from his canvases.
In addition to Aronets’s text, the Hrani-T publication includes Ivantsev’s theoretical articles, reminiscences of his relatives and friends, reviews of his works, interviews with the artists, and a number of articles about him. The many reproductions of the artist’s works will help readers form a true picture of this Renaissance-style figure.
