Ukrainian artists’ masterpieces finally in Ukraine
The Day was the first to tell the public about the unique collection donated to Ukraine when on Feb. 24, 2009, it carried an article by Yurii Savchuk, head of the State Service for Monitoring Passage of Cultural Valuables across the State Border of Ukraine. At that time the negotiations with Halyna Horun-Levytsky, a Canadian-born Ukrainian collector, were underway.
It took the Ministry for Culture and Tourism almost two years to bring to Ukraine 119 paintings by outstanding Ukrainian artists whose value is estimated at USD 850,000. The process took so long only because the necessary documents for transferring the values over the boarder had to be processed. There was no resistance on the part of the collector because she has spent all her life looking for Ukrainian diaspora artists’ 20th-century works to be donated at a later point to Ukraine. The President of Ukraine has recently awarded Horun-Levytsky the Order of Princess Olha (3rd class) for preserving Ukrainian artistic and cultural heritage.
Today the canvases by Vasyl Hryhorovych, Liuboslav Hutsaliuk, Myron Levytsky (Halyna’s husband), Vasyl Khmeliuk, and other artists are on display in the Ukrainian Home. From there the exhibition will travel to other museums in Ukraine. It will finally come to the Sheptytsky National Museum in Lviv where it will stay permanently.
“All the artists whose works are now brought to Ukraine started to work in Ukraine but had to leave and displayed their talent abroad,” said Ihor Kozhan, the director of the Sheptytsky National Museum in Lviv. “Halyna Horun-Levytsky assembled this collection purposefully. The choice of the works and the painters was not accidental. She collected the works of the artists who were banned in Ukraine from the 1950s through the 1980s, and their names were crossed out from literature on art criticism. In 1952 over 4,000 works by famous Ukrainian artists were removed from the stocks of the Lviv National Museum and [many of them were] destroyed. Some of them are now back in Ukraine.”
This unique collection features the creative legacy of 20 noted Ukrainian artists, representatives of different creative trends, techniques, and themes (landscapes, still lifes, and portraits). Among the oldest pictures is Alushta, the Crimea created by the outstanding Ukrainian artist Vasyl Krychevsky back in 1924. Among the rarities is Yakiv Hnizdovsky’s oil Flower (1974). All those artists worked and won professional recognition in Europe, the Americas, and Australia. However, the canvases by Myron Levytsky are a kind of the focus of the collection — 77 of his works have been brought to Ukraine.
“The most famous canvas by Levytsky Oxen at Sunset (1960) was executed in Toronto. This picture followed a composition that had won the artist his name and award at the Gallery Ror Volmar Paris (1958). I should also mention his well-known Mother of God (1964) praised by critics as one the masterpieces of Levytsky and contemporary Ukrainian icon-painting,” said Savchuk. “Halyna Levytsky purchased the best works by Ukrainian artists and only those she liked. The first step on the way of bringing the collection to Ukraine was the publication of the album Collection by Halyna Horun-Levytsky in 2006. That is how we found out about this collection. Then we went to Canada to personally meet the collector. If it had not been for her love to her small homeland, which she had to leave when she was 18, we would not have succeeded.”
