Іван Падалка

Activity: Culture
Date of birth: November 15, 1894
Date of death: July 13, 1937, Kyiv
Navigator: World Wars

Born on November 15, 1894, in the Cherkasy region. Executed on July 13, 1937, in Kyiv. Painter, educator, and art theorist, member of the Boychukist art group. Representative of the Executed Renaissance.

Ivan Padalka was born into a large family of a grain grower from a Cossack lineage. His father loved to read and instilled this love in his children from an early age. Having received his primary education at a church-parish school, Ivan went to Myrhorod and entered the art and industrial school, where a local nobleman secured a scholarship for the gifted young man.
In Myrhorod, the painter and ethnographer Opanas Slastion became Padalka’s teacher, significantly influencing the formation and development of his talent. Padalka’s works were shown to other students as a model and were exhibited at annual exhibitions. However, talent did not save the young man from censorship: in 1913, he was expelled from school for participating in an anti-tsarist demonstration and distributing the Ukrainian press.
Thanks to Slastion’s patronage, Padalka managed to find a job at the Poltava Ethnographic Museum. There, he made copies of Ukrainian carpets for a weaving workshop owned by the collector and patron Bohdan Khanenko. His earnings allowed him to enter the Kyiv Art School, where Padalka joined the workshop of Mykhailo Boychuk—and soon became one of his favorite students and associates. “Do everything like your mother’s carpets,” the master taught him. In Kyiv, Padalka’s talent revealed itself to the fullest: at first, he worked as a designer of festive columns, clubs, propaganda steamboats and train cars, and later—as an illustrator of children’s collections.
In 1919, Padalka joined a group of monumental artists who, led by Mykhailo Boychuk, painted the Lutsk barracks in Kyiv. After graduating from the academy, he was sent to teaching work at the Myrhorod, and later—Mezhyhiria ceramic technical school. In 1922, he married the artist Mariia Pasko, who gave birth to his son Yevhen, but the family had to live apart until 1925, when Padalka began working at the Kharkiv Art and Industrial Institute. There, he gained great popularity due to his good nature and oratorical skills: “Do not limit Padalka by the regulations, let him speak! Listening to him is a pure pleasure!” people shouted from the hall during disputes when he took the floor.
In the late 1920s, the family received their dreamed-of cooperative housing—it was the infamous “Slovo” (Word) building, which during the years of Stalinist terror became a deadly trap for Ukrainian artists. “Padalka had a wife who was slightly shorter than him in height, and she was the main model for almost all his paintings, especially the frescoes well-known in those days on the walls of the Krasnozavodsky Theater, for which Padalka and Sedliar were shot. Padalka was tall, with a haircut styled like a student [spudei], of an extremely cheerful disposition, sociable, and a kind father of an only son,” recalled Volodymyr Kulish, the son of the repressed playwright Mykola Kulish.
In the early 1930s, the works of Ivan Padalka participated in European exhibitions of Soviet art, particularly in Stockholm and Paris, where they received the highest evaluations. However, after the declaration of the doctrine of socialist realism in 1934, the art of the Boychukists was recognized as deeply hostile to the socialist system and ruthlessly destroyed, and the artists themselves were repressed.
In 1936, the NKVD authorities abducted Ivan Padalka and took him to a Kyiv prison, where he was subjected to torture. He was accused of participating in a “national-fascist terrorist organization aimed at the detachment of Ukraine from the USSR and the restoration of capitalism” and was sentenced to death. The sentence was carried out on the day of its pronouncement: July 13, 1937. Together with Ivan Padalka, his teacher Mykhailo Boychuk was also shot.
After Padalka was shot, the NKVD arrested his wife, Mariia Pasko. Their 14-year-old son, Yevhen, was taken to an orphanage, and his tracks were lost. After 21 years of imprisonment in the camps of Kolyma, the mother tried to find her son, but until her own death in 1991, she never heard anything about him again.

Author: Olha Herasymenko