Василь Кричевський

Activity: Culture
Date of birth: January 12, 1873
Date of death: November 15, 1952
Navigator: World Wars

Artist, architect, author of the state coat of arms of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, one of the creators and most prominent representatives of Ukrainian architectural modernism. He was also among the first artists of Ukrainian cinematography—in particular, in 1927, he designed the film Zvenyhora by Oleksandr Dovzhenko.

Vasyl Krychevsky was born on January 12, 1873, in the village of Vorozhba, Kharkiv Governorate (now Sumy Oblast), into the family of a county paramedic, Hryhor Krychevsky, and a housewife, Paraska Krychevska. He was the eldest child in the family and had seven more brothers and sisters.
A passion for art awakened in him early. While studying at a two-grade school in a neighboring village, in the house of a landlady where his parents rented lodgings for him, Vasyl came across an art album—and, amazed, began to copy the illustrations. Already as an adult, he saw the works of Taras Shevchenko and realized what kind of drawings had fallen into his hands back then. But, unfortunately, Krychevsky was never able to find that album from his childhood.
In 1885, he began his studies at the Kharkiv Technical Railway School, and earned a living by drafting facades. These first attempts caught the eye of the architect Serhiy Zahoskin, who in those years taught at the Technological Institute in Kharkiv. He took Krychevsky as a technical assistant and even settled him in his own home. He assisted in his education and later arranged for his first place of work in the city administration. Matters were going well for the young architect, because already in a few years he built his own house in Kharkiv, where he settled with his first wife Varvara and two sons. Architecture, however, did not limit his creativity: Krychevsky painted watercolor sketches from nature in Kharkiv and Vorozhba.
His painting was greatly influenced by the landscapes of Crimea, particularly Alushta. In 1897, it was from there that Krychevsky arrived with a series of watercolor landscapes, which he exhibited in Kharkiv in 1898. He tried to enter the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, but he was advised against it: his professional level already exceeded what it could offer.
In 1903, having won the competition for the project of the Poltava Governorate Zemstvo building, Krychevsky moved to Poltava for the period of construction—however, due to corruption schemes, he slammed the door and, taking all the drawings, departed for Kyiv. He was, however, persuaded to complete the project after all.
In Kyiv, the artist was friends with the painter Mykola Sadovsky and the historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky. He designed the facade of the six-story house of the Hrushevsky family, built in 1909, and later settled in its attic. Looking ahead, we note that this house was destroyed in February 1918 by a fire set by the Bolsheviks while storming Kyiv. At that time, Krychevsky barely escaped, running out into the street with a newborn daughter in his arms, with his wife and son. But his works burned in the fire.
Having settled in Kyiv, Krychevsky wrote art history articles for magazines, created book graphics, and demonstrated his watercolor and oil paintings at exhibitions of the “Kyiv Painters” group. In 1912–1913, he managed the carpet workshop of Varvara Khanenko and generally collaborated with the spouses of patrons-collectors Khanenko. His passion was collecting folk art objects; in the field of this hobby, Krychevsky met the artist and ethnographer Yevheniya Shcherbakivska, who became his second wife in 1912.
After the revolutionary events of 1917, Krychevsky was elected rector of the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts, which opened in Kyiv on December 18, 1917. It was on this very day that the Central Rada adopted the Law on the regulation of the Academy’s activities.
After the already mentioned fire, the Krychevsky family had to settle in the basement of the Historical Museum. This greatly affected the moral state of Vasyl Hryhorovych himself—he barely went out in public, withdrew into himself. A commission from Hrushevsky helped to overcome this depression: Krychevsky was tasked with urgently, within a week, developing sketches of the state symbols of the UNR—the large and small coats of arms, projects of seals and ratification charters. Such a responsible task brought the artist back to life. He designed the trident, which is relevant in modern Ukrainian heraldry as well, and developed sketches of UNR banknotes—but only one of them, the two-hryvnia note, managed to see the light of day.
After the Bolshevik invasion of 1919, Krychevsky taught at the Art and Ceramics Institute in Poltava. He was arrested several times and they were even going to shoot him, but the students stood up for their teacher. Later, in the 1920s, Professor Krychevsky moved to Kyiv, where he lived until 1941. Due to his wife’s illness, he did not go into evacuation with the start of the Soviet-German war, but remained in Kyiv (according to other data, he himself was in a serious condition, so he simply would not have survived the journey). In 1943, the artist managed to get out to Lviv, then—to one of his sons in Paris. In 1948, Vasyl Hryhorovych and Yevheniya Mykhailivna settled in Caracas (Venezuela), where they lived out their days: they chose the country because of the warm climate that Krychevsky loved so much.
The name of Vasyl Krychevsky is primarily associated with the building of the Poltava Governorate Zemstvo. But even before that, he already had a rich architectural experience: as early as 15–16 years old, he completed over 200 building projects, with which entire streets on the outskirts of Kharkiv were built up. The first large-scale architectural work of Krychevsky is considered to be the Trading Rows in the center of Kharkiv, created during 1892–1893. By the end of the 19th century, he designed a number of railway and freight stations, residential buildings for railway staff, railway workshops and depots; he also worked on projects of houses for bankers, entrepreneurs, and generally wealthy people, executing facades in Renaissance and Moorish styles. In the style of Ukrainian architectural modernism at the beginning of the 20th century, he developed the Narodnyi Dim in Lokhvytsia (Poltava region), houses for Mykola Dmytriiev and Dmytro Myloradovych in the village of Yaresky (Poltava region), the facade for the house of Ivan Shchitkivsky (Kyiv), and several schools in various localities. During the First World War, he worked closer to the classical style. In the interwar years, he partially moved away from architecture and over three decades designed only seven buildings, five of which continued the traditions of Ukrainian architectural modernism.
The scientific activity of the artist was connected with art history, archaeological, and ethnographic research. Krychevsky was a member of various institutions, societies, and commissions of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, and belonged to the Ukrainian Free Academy of Sciences in emigration. To his pen belongs the first textbook on folk art in Ukraine (it was not published due to the Second World War).
By the all-encompassing nature of his talent, Vasyl Krychevsky can be boldly compared to the titans of the Renaissance: landscape painter, designer, graphic artist, innovative architect, scientist, educator, collector. The main sources of his creative inspiration were Ukrainian artistic traditions, impressionism, the art of China and Japan, and the works of Italian masters of the 14th–15th centuries.

Author: Oksana Smorzhevska