Lviv school of art textiles
The circle of artists shaped by the art textile department of the Lviv Institute of Applied and Decorative Art (now the Lviv National Academy of Arts); its graduates initiated the renewal of Ukrainian tapestry in the late 1950s and the 1960s.
A tapestry (hobelen) is a hand-woven picture-carpet; another Ukrainian name for such works is shpalera. Tapestry weaving has been known in Ukraine since at least the seventeenth century (the Brody manufactory); in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it was practised in estate workshops. Production declined in the late nineteenth century and revived in the 1920s and 1930s.
The art textile department dates from 1946, when a higher art school, the Lviv State Institute of Applied and Decorative Art, began work in the city. It was graduates of that institute who, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, led the renewal of Ukrainian tapestry, moving from imitation of painting to a decorative language of its own, with new materials and techniques. The encyclopedia names Ye. Fashchenko, E. Medvetska-Lutak, M. Tokar and N. Pauk among them, and O. Krypiakevych among later artists. The school's history has been studied by, among others, the art historian and artist Halyna Kusko, who teaches in the department.
On the name: the sources consulted use the established phrases «Lviv textile school» (the department's own wording) and «Art Textiles. The Lviv School» (the title of a collective volume published in 1998). The phrases «Lviv school of tapestry» or «Lviv shpalera school» do not occur in them as a term. The subject is therefore a school of art textiles in which tapestry is the leading but not the only genre: it also covers hand weaving, fabric painting, and three-dimensional and experimental textiles.
The school should not be confused with the folk carpet weaving of the Lviv region (for example, that of Hlyniany): it is professional, authored art tied to higher art education.
