Whimsical model

Ukrainian artists started actively using the topic of spring in late 19th century. This was the heyday of landscape painting. The curator of Ukraine’s National Museum of Art, Anna Prykhodko, has told The Day about this.

At the time a number of outstanding landscape painters emerged who dedicated their entire creative path to a single genre, landscape, and could feel well the nature’s moods and catch the transition states of this whimsical model. These masters included Volodymyr Orlovsky, Serhii Vasylkivsky, Serhii Sviatoslavsky, Petro Levchenko, and others. Precisely these masters gave the impetus to the further development of landscape painting in Ukraine, in particular the spring theme. In the 20th century, part of the artists diverged from the exclusively realistic traditions of landscape painting and started to resolve purely artistic tasks within the framework of this genre influenced by the new tendencies in European art. But even in these pictures, which are far from realistic, one can easily see the spirit of spring, which consists in the foretaste of changes and spiritual renewal.

The pictures are provided by Ukraine’s National Museum of Art