Федір Кричевський

Activity: Culture
Date of birth: May 22, 1879
Date of death: July 30, 1947
Navigator: World Wars

Artist, educator, one of the founders (and the first rector) of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts.

Fedir Krychevsky was born on May 22, 1879, into the family of Hryhor and Paraska Krychevsky. Fedir’s childhood was spent in the village of Vorozhba in the Sumy region; here, in 1895, he graduated from a four-year school. In the neighboring village of Mezhyrich, a well-known pottery center, the boy studied drawing and modeling, which he had been fond of since early childhood. But his artistic formation was not limited to this. At the fairs in Romny, Sumy, Poltava, and Okhtyrka, Krychevsky listened to folk dumas performed by kobzars and examined a wide variety of pottery products. All of this inspired Krychevsky himself to model, draw, and paint the stove in the house together with his older brother Vasyl, who also became a famous artist.
Together with his father, a paramedic, Fedir visited the estates of the Kapnists and Myloradovyches, where he was fascinated by paintings and sculptures. Invited for the summer to the village of Mykhailivka to the Kapnist family, he received the opportunity to copy drawings from art albums, as well as to paint portraits of anyone interested.
In 1896, Krychevsky entered the painting department of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. His graduation project “Noah with his Sons in the Vineyard”—a grotesque interpretation of a biblical subject depicted as a scene from peasant life—became a response to the fashionable “Peredvizhniki” (itinerants) of that time, whose ideas and creative style the artist did not share.
After his studies, Krychevsky traveled extensively through Ukraine, and during these journeys, he drew from nature—in particular, peasants who willingly posed for him. During 1904–1907, he repeatedly visited Poltava, where his brother Vasyl was working on the Poltava Governorate Zemstvo building, stayed at Volodymyr Korolenko’s dacha on the Psel River, and especially loved open-air painting (plein air) in the town of Shyshaky.
At the end of 1905, Krychevsky married Lidiia Starytska. He tried to get a job as a teacher at the Myrhorod Art and Industrial School, but there was no vacancy for him—so in 1907, the artist returned to study at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. He still spent his vacations, however, in Shyshaky, sketching various types of peasants. Until 1910, Krychevsky collected material on Ukrainian wedding rituals for his graduation competition painting “The Bride” and, based on them, created an epic canvas—210 by 292 centimeters—in a modern style. A peasant girl Khrystia Skubii—tall, beautiful, and willful—posed for him as the bride; the images of the bridesmaids were also found among local peasant women. This work, which is currently kept in the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv, brought Krychevsky the official title of artist and a foreign study trip.
During these journeys, a special impression on him was made by the works of the artists of the Italian Renaissance and the Impressionists. Having returned to Shyshaky, Krychevsky set about creating a style inspired by European aesthetics but distinctly Ukrainian, based on folk art. At this time, iconic paintings appeared—true treasures of Ukrainian painting: “Mother,” “Grandfather’s Tale,” “Native Land,” “Autumn,” “Twilight,” “Sunny Morning in Shyshaky.” The artist’s talent was best revealed in portrait painting.
Until 1917, Krychevsky headed the Kyiv Art School, during 1917–1922 he was a professor at the Ukrainian Academy of Arts, then until 1941 (with a short break)—a professor at the Kyiv Art Institute. He became the first Doctor of Art History in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian Academy of Arts—the first higher education institution in the Ukrainian People’s Republic—was an important part of his life. Vasyl Krychevsky, who was unanimously elected to the post of the first rector of the academy, did not have a great inclination for administrative work, so he asked to be relieved of such duties. Then Fedir Krychevsky was proposed for the position. When Heorhiy Narbut became rector a year later, Krychevsky continued to direct the workshop of historical and everyday genre, etching, and carving. Students remembered him as a philosopher confident in the victory of good over evil.
In 1927, Krychevsky wrote one of his most famous works—the triptych “Life.” It was exhibited in Ukraine, at exhibitions in Chicago and New York. The “Family” part of the triptych caused a sensation at the Venice Biennale; the “Return” part of the triptych was exhibited in Warsaw and Copenhagen.
In the early 1930s, he moved to Kharkiv to teach for a short time. In 1939, Fedir and Vasyl Krychevsky received the degrees of Doctors of Art History, and in May 1940—the title of Honored Art Workers of the Ukrainian SSR. But recognition did not protect the artist from persecution. When the hostilities of the Soviet-German war began, he returned to Kyiv, evading forced evacuation to Ufa. He survived the German occupation either in Kyiv or in Shyshaky, and was seriously ill. In 1943, he managed to escape with his family to Königsberg, where his brother was, and got a job as a draftsman at one of the factories. But he was captured after the “liberation” of the city. Krychevsky was in Soviet imprisonment and suffered torture. He managed to return to Kyiv, where he was arrested again—but due to illness, he was released from custody. The artist was stripped of all titles. The apartment was destroyed, the dacha in Shyshaky burned down, so he and his wife had nowhere to live. For some time, they huddled in Kurenivka at the home of friends, but the Soviet authorities evicted them from there to Irpin, under close supervision. The artist was starving—but continued to work. He painted the canvas “Flowering Ukraine” and directed postgraduate studies at the Research Institute of Monumental Painting and Sculpture under the Academy of Architecture. And when Nikita Khrushchev offered him to paint a portrait of Stalin in exchange for the “forgiveness of all sins,” Krychevsky refused.
The artist died of hunger on July 30, 1947, working at his easel until his last breath. In that terrible year for himself, he painted the canvas “Children Flying a Kite,” full of light and even optimism.
In 1965, Krychevsky was reburied in Kyiv at the Lukyanivka Cemetery.

Author: Oksana Smorzhevska