Boychukism

Boychukism is a Ukrainian monumental school of the first third of the twentieth century, named after its founder Mykhailo Boychuk and built on a synthesis of national tradition with European modernism. At the heart of the style lies the idea of "neo-Byzantinism": Boychuk and his pupils consciously turned to the artistic language of Byzantine and Old Rus icon painting, the Italian Proto-Renaissance (above all Giotto) and Ukrainian folk art, seeing in them a model of monumental wholeness. The hallmarks of Boychukism are the flatness of the image, a generalized and laconic silhouette, elongated static figures with quiet inner concentration, a restrained earthen color range, and the subordination of figures to the rhythm and architectural plane of the wall. The Boychukists worked chiefly in fresco and tempera, reviving ancient recipes, as well as in graphics, book illustration, carpet-weaving and ceramics, seeking to embrace the whole environment of life. The circle of masters included Tymofiy Boychuk, Ivan Padalka, Vasyl Sedliar, Oksana Pavlenko and Sofiya Nalepynska-Boychuk. The school's largest monumental ensembles — the murals of the Lutsk Barracks, the Peasant Sanatorium in Odesa and the Chervonozavodskyi Theatre in Kharkiv — were destroyed together with most of their works. In 1937 Mykhailo Boychuk and his leading pupils were executed and their works annihilated, so Boychukism became a tragic symbol of the "Executed Renaissance," whose legacy scholars reconstruct only from fragments and photographs.