Courage not to estrange oneself from native things

Ukrainian research in the field of art reveals many names, phenomena, and works of the world level, which have been “closed” until very recently for culture-artistic, educational establishments and museums. At last sculptor Hryhorii Kruk’s oeuvre came to light, too. On the occasion of his 100th birth anniversary, the Ukrainian Free University in Munich (where Kruk lived most of his life) hosted a presentation of the vast artistic legacy of the Ukrainian sculptor.

On the eve of the exhibit the author succeeded in getting more familiar with Kruk’s personality via his large-scale oeuvre and communication with his colleagues and friends. But the richest information source is the archival documents, periodicals of pre-war and after-war times, diaspora publications, monographs, photo albums, stored in the Ukrainian Free University, which is an oasis of Ukrainian culture in Bavaria.

The famous sculptor was born in Galicia. After graduation from a school in Stanislav he entered the Lviv College of Decorative Arts, sculpture department, where he was taught by professors Jan Juliusz Nalborczyk and Jozef Starzynski. There Hryhorii got acquainted with Serhii Lytvynenko, who “brought” from Paris modern West European trends, embodying them in the Ivan Franko Monument (in Lychakiv Cemetery), and Kruk also took part in the work on this sculpture. In 1934, as a protege of his teacher Lukashevych, Kruk entered the Cracow Academy of Arts, where he was taught by Professor Konstanty Laszczka (Lytvynenko also studied there). Together with his teacher the student carved the side altar for the Ukrainian St. Norbert Church in Krakow (1937). The Polish power took the church away from the Ukrainians and destroyed the iconostasis and liturgical objects. In 1937, having graduated with honors from the Cracow Academy, on the initiative of writer Bohdan Lepky Kruk entered the Berlin Academy of Arts, where his teachers included professors Otto Hitzberger, Alfred Vocke, and August Krantz.

Professor Hitzberger highly assessed the creative potential of the Ukrainian artist and discerned in him the ability to “mark” the identity of his people in a stylized manner. In the Berlin Academy of Arts Kruk made one of the most important acquaintances in his life, with sculptor Professor Fedir Yemets, who for quite a long while had a strong creative and emotional influence on his colleague. In 1942, two years prior to the graduation from the academy, Kruk showed his works for the first time at an academic exhibit, being the only participant of non-German origin.

After moving with his brother Ivan to Munich in 1945, Kruk lived in an attic workshop. Many Ukrainian-German bohemians gathered in his apartment at that time. In the same year, Kruk held his first solo exhibit on the initiative of the French artist Jean Cassou, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Paris, and with the assistance of the German diplomatic office in France, headed by the renowned German art expert Dr. Wilhelm Hausenstein.

A large-scale exhibit of Ukrainian Pictorial Arts in Munich in 1947 was the first time that Kruk presented his works in Germany. Later Jean Cassou shared his impressions on this: “The works are proof of the author’s attempts to simplify the form and make the movement more expressive.” The exhibit’s dominant was the composition A Bandurist. The art expert aptly adds: “He wanted to tear something impossible and endless off a man, making a daring, absurd, controversial attempt to show in this work the relation between the spiritual and physical, the eternal and temporary.”

Overall, Kruk’s works were on display of 52 exhibits in his lifetime: in Munich (1952), Paris (1945, 1954), London, Edinburg (1954), Bonn (1955), New York, Philadelphia (1961), Vienna (1962), Dubrovnik (1970), etc.

As is known, in the early 20th century, in the time of Andrei Sheptytsky, the Galician clergy patronized the Ukrainian artistic bohemia. Following Sheptytsky’s example the clergymen took talented artists under their spiritual and material aegis. Kruk’s spiritual mentor was Bishop Ivan Buchko, Apostolic Visitor for Ukrainians in Western Europe. With his assistance the sculptor obtained a year-long scholarship for studying in Italy. Namely during his Rome studies (1950), when he enriched his experience of Roman Empire’s art, having seen the luxurious museum collections, the artist asserted his plastic style. The national themes continued to prevail in Kruk’s creative work.

Kruk created a gallery of creating creating portraits of Ukrainian outstanding historical personalities, such as Prince Volodymyr the Great, Princess Olha, French Queen Anna Yaroslavna, Taras Shevchenko, Pavlo Skoropadsky, Symon Petliura, etc. The artist also created the images of his contemporaries. An important event was the work on the sculptures of the Patriarch of the Greek-Catholic Church Josyp Slipyj and Pope Paul VI. These works received the first award in the competition in Rome, as well as a Papal Medal.

The sculptor was fond of creating children’s portraits. Kruk formed his own image of a man with vivid psychological entity, like individual spiritual attributes. Patience, tiredness, and painful labor make the core of Kruk’s creative work. The “severe moral code” of the Ukrainian village, which paves its way on earth in hard everyday labor, is vivid in his sculptures. The sculptor was among the first to bring the rural plots – the Ukrainian realities – into the world art.

As a young man, travelling across artistic capitals of Europe, Kruk studied the art of the leading schools, and enriched his creative experience with the most progressive trends. He carefully followed the achievements of other people, artistic processes, and cultural context. He sought to be knowledgeable in the artistic state of affairs. He said: “It is enough for me to be oversaturated with the things of other people, know all the controversies of the ‘high’ art, study all the pros and cons in the prospects of art’s development, with an aim to get convinced once again what my own calling is.”

Kruk aimed to strengthen the Ukrainian things, reflecting the colors and uniqueness of the beautiful sex as a strong and hardworking Ukrainian woman.

It was easy for Kruk to follow others: he had many authoritative teachers who tried to leave a mark of their style on his works. However, unlike them and other fellow artists, Hryhorii did not follow the modern trends, synthesizing the European styles in his creative manner. He found his own source of inspiration. That was the realistic recreation of the image of Ukrainian peasant, without hyperbolizing the forms and details, in somewhat generalized, monumentalized format, yet with preserving of “dynamical static” and emotionality of the image.

The Ukrainian artist was clearly a European, due to his civilization taste and aesthetic reasonability. He kept to the artistic norms he built himself, yet the world trends are also episodically present in Kruk’s sculptures. The sculptor borrowed from the European schools the courage not to get estranged from his native things, be guided by the desire and ability to realize his real emotion, not the one reflected in one’s face, but hidden deep in the image’s soul.

As a young man Hryhorii got interested with the wooden folk sculpture, as well as the silhouettes of prehistoric matriarchal stones (babas). He was fond of those stone statues with their massive forms that are simple, yet depict the inner world. As an emigre, Kruk took interest in the sculpture of ancient Eastern and European civilizations. In Paris he got interested in the impressionistic sculptures of Auguste Rodin and expressionistic works of Edgar Degas. There is an artistic parallel: Kruk borrowed the pose and dynamics from Degas, adding it to their massive silhouettes of women.

We can see that Kruk’s sculptures bear similarity with the creative work of the Spanish sculptor Antonio Campillo, who depicts in a generalized and somewhat exaggerated manner the figures of Spanish Galician women in the same way Kruk shows the women from Ukrainian Galicia. There are analogies in approach to the choice of topic and technique. The paths of the sculptors could have crossed in Roman Academy of Arts, where they both had creative studies while Kruk was staying in Rome. There is also a kind of conceptual similarity between Kruk’s artistic worldview and the works of Columbian artist Francesco Bottero. Kruk had an opportunity to see the Columbian’s works in Munich.

However, the originality and authenticity of the Ukrainian sculptor are beyond doubt. Kruk confirmed once again the productivity of routine labor, making emphasis not on the festivity, but the topicality of the needs of the enslaved people. Like Vasyl Stefanyk conveys “hard,” “hardened” characters in prose, Kruk creates images of strong Ukrainians by means of sculpture.

However, Kruk’s images have never lost their ironic-patriotic mood, which freed them from the folkways fuss. The sense of humor, which helped the Ukrainian common people to preserve its unbreakable spirit and high decency, is prevailing in many of his works.

Kruk perceived the Ukrainian peasantry as a whole spiritual organism with an integral image. The artist went up along the stairs of the family memory of his Ukrainian childhood and adolescence to the general human aesthetic and ethic ideals.

Today Ukrainians, especially in the artistic circles, badly need to see the creative legacy of Hryhorii Kruk with their own eyes. We have had several opportunities to see the samples of Kruk’s sculptures (in spring 2010, during the Sculpture Salon, a small exhibit of Kruk’s works was held in Lviv). However, it would have been especially appropriate to organize solo, retrospective, large-scale exhibits of the Ukrainian sculpture of the world level in the centers of artistic life, where the largest educational establishments on art are located, i.e., in Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, and Odesa. This is the only way to bring the artist back to Ukraine.