Alexis Gritchenko

Gritchenko Ukrainian painter and theorist. He studied philology and biology at the universities of Kiev, St Petersburg and Moscow before turning to art. He studied painting in Moscow and established close ties with the collectors Sergey Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. In 1911 he visited Paris where he became an enthusiast of Cubist painting, which, after a trip to Italy in 1913-14, he blended with his study of early Italian Renaissance painters, creating a style that brought together the cosmopolitan and urbane with the orthodoxy of the Byzantine legacy of sacred art. Hryshchenko devoted his theoretical work to the subject of Byzantine art and its links with modern art (1912) and to an analysis of the formal and stylistic properties of Byzantine painting in terms of modernist tendencies and practice (1916). After the 1917 revolution he became a professor at the Free Art Studios (Svomas) in Moscow and a member of the Commission for the Preservation of Historic Monuments. In 1919 he left Russia by way of the Crimea for Constantinople and Greece, which marked the beginning of a distinctive and inspired period of watercolour painting. In 1921, when he arrived in Paris, 12 paintings of Constantinople were included in the Salon d'Automne. A subsequent trip to Greece resulted in works that brought him into contact with renowned dealers and distinguished collectors (L?opold Zborowski, Albert C. Barnes). After 1924 Hryshchenko lived in southern France where he painted in muted, controlled and diaphanously transparent tones. In 1937 a one-man exhibition was held at the Museum of Ukrainian Art in L'vov (now L'viv). Later, the works that had been housed in the L'viv museum were branded as 'formalist' and destroyed during the Stalinist years. To preserve his artistic legacy the Alexis Gritchenko Foundation was formed in New York in 1958.

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Alexis Gritchenko (the French spelling of the Ukrainian Oleksa Hryshchenko) was born in Krolevets, Northern Ukraine, on April 2, 1883. While studying philology and biology at the Kyiv, St. Petersburg and Moscow universities, he became interested in painting and went to study at the Moscow Art School. There he played a significant role in the modern art movement, and had close ties with the important art collectors, Stchukin and Morozoff.

In 1911 he traveled to Paris where he met Andre Lothe, Alexander Archipenko and Le Fauconnier, and became an enthusiast of modern painting, especially cubism. In 1913-1914 he studied in Italy concentrating on Italian primitives. He published several books and articles, the most important of which were his studies on the icon in relation to Western art, and also took part in contemporary discussions on various aspects of modern art.

During the Russian Revolution, Hryshchenko became professor at the State Art Studios in Moscow and a member of the Commission for the Protection of Historic Monuments. He was offered the directorship of the Tretiakov Gallery, but in 1919, not wishing to became a state functionary, he escaped by way of Crimea to Constantinople, leaving all his paintings and other possessions in Moscow.

In the Turkish capital, he lived a life of extreme poverty, but never ceased to paint and his drawings and watercolors of that period soon made his name famous in the art world of the twenties.

In 1921, when he came to Paris, 12 of his Constantinople paintings were accepted by the Salon d`Automne, and Fernand Leger placed them next to his own works. After his second trip to Greece in 1923 and an exhibit at the Byzantine Museum in Athens, the art dealer Paul Guillaume introduced him to Dr. Barnes Zborovsky, another well-known Paris dealer, and Dr. Barnes acquired 17 of Hryshchenko`s paintings for his collection, now the Barnes Museum in Merion near Philadelphia.

After 1924, Hryshchenko lived in France. After the exhibition at the Bing Gallery, 1926, Louis Vauxcelles wrote that: "the young Ukrainian colorist conquered Paris." Katia Granoff acquired 24 of his oils and exhibited them in her gallery. Hryshchenko made frequent trips to Spain, Purtugal, England and Scandinavian countries, and the paintings he brought from these places he exhibited in leading Paris galleries: Paul, Guillaume, Bing, Granoff, Druet, De l`Elysse, Weil, Bernheim-Jeune, and in the large Salons, especially the Tuileries and d`Automne (member since 1930).

In 1937 he had a one-man show at the Ukrainian Museum in Lviv (Lvov), then under Polish rule, where his first Ukrainian-French monograph appeared. Hryshchenko`s works are found in various museum and private collections, more than three hundred of them in USA and Canadian collections. At the beginning of the sixties it became known that Hryshchenko`s paintings which had been in the collections of the Ukrainian Lviv Museum were destroyed as creations of `bourgeois formalism`, together with works of Archipenko, Boichuk and Narbut.

This induced him to bequeath a collection of 70 oils and watercolors to the Alexis Gritchenko Foundation in New York with the provision that they be transferred some day to the museums of a free Ukraine. After 1958, Hryshchenko held three more exhibits in New York and Philadelphia, the last taking place in 1967 at the Peter Deitsch Gallery in New York.

Hryshchenko died in Vence, France on January 28, 1977.