Mykola Azovsky was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 1903, into a privileged
family. He was the grandson of the prominent nineteenth-century Russian
painter Vasily Vereshchagin and the son of a distinguished army officer
of Ukrainian Cossack descent. Azovsky began to study painting and
applied arts at the Kyiv State Art Institute in the 1920s and graduated
in 1928. During his academic years Azovsky’s main teachers were
Mykhailo Boichuk and Fedir Krychevsky, and he closely associated with
great contemporaries such as Ivan Padalka, Mykola Rokytsky, and Vasyl
Sedliar. Azovsky’s oeuvre of portrait, landscape, and monumental works
of art combined a Modernist view of the monumentalist tradition of icon
painting with expressionist motifs. The artist enjoyed working in stage
design and particularly excelled in tapestry making which from the
1920s through the 1930s was reinterpreted as a modern art form in
Ukraine. Azovsky's tapestry technique expanded both the West European
tapestry tradition and the use of textiles in Ukrainian folk art.
Azovsky
was presented along with Boichuk, Padalka, Rokytsky, Sedliar and other
prominent Ukrainian artists, at the national exhibition of applied arts
in Ukraine in 1936. The exhibition received international acclaim but
the fate of the *Boichuk School rapidly deteriorated. By late 1936, the
atmosphere of Stalin’s terror worsened and Boichuk, Padalka, Sedliar,
and several other masters were arrested. In 1937, they were all
executed, accused of participating in a “terrorist organization”
fabricated by Stalin’s henchmen. Azovsky was fortunate in having his
life spared as he had moved from Kyiv to the Donbas area of Ukraine. He
went on to became one of the rare Ukrainian artists whose work was
featured at the Soviet pavilion of the 1937 World Fair in Paris and at
the Venice Biennale.
In 1939, when western Ukraine was annexed
to the Soviet Union, Azovsky moved again to Lviv, the regional capital
of that part of Ukraine. He made the daring transit along with Mykola
Nedilko and Mykhailo Dmytrenko, both prominent representatives of
neo-impressionism in Ukrainian art. Azovsky went on to become an
important member of the vibrant artistic community of Lviv for several
years.
Azovsky witnessed first-hand the horrors of Stalinist
terror. Like many other important Ukrainian artists and intellectuals,
he lost close friends and loved ones to it. He emigrated to the West a
few years later during World War II, along with many other prominent
members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia. The journey to the west was
often perilous and tragic. While trying to reach Western Europe,
Azovsky was arrested by the Gestapo and spent four months in a Nazi
prison in Vienna. He was released upon the intervention of Ukrainian
Greek-Catholic Church hierarchs in Rome and moved to Italy in 1945 with
his young daughter, the only surviving member of his family. The years
in Italy were among the most fruitful in his artistic career. By 1947,
Azovsky made his last journey with his daughter and immigrated to
Argentina. Sadly, he passed away two weeks after their arrival in
Buenos Aires. Azovsky’s work has been exhibited internationally since
1930, and in 1977, a major posthumous retrospective of his work took
place.
*From 1910 through the early 1930s, the Boichuk School
was the most influential group of modernist painters in Ukraine. It was
named after its founder and leader, the prominent artist Mykhailo
Boichuk (1882–1937). Boichuk’s work reflected his extensive art
training in Paris and incorporated Byzantine icon painting tradition
and Ukrainian folk art. Boichuk’s friends, associates, and students,
who came to be known collectively as the Boichuk School, created an
original movement in art by uniting elements of monumentalism and
expressionism. The works rivaled that of great masters of their time
such as Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and Clemente Orozco. The Boichuk
School artists received high acclaim both in the USSR and
internationally. Their aesthetic independence quickly proved
undesirable to the Bolshevik regime and as a result most of the members
of the Boichuk School perished during the Stalinist terror in the late
1930s. The overwhelming majority of their masterful works, especially
murals and oil paintings, were physically destroyed.
*No part
of this text may be reprinted, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form, by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission from
the gallery.