“Every Autumn I blossom anew"

“Welcome Autumn!” Eduard Bagritsky, Autumn

A presentation of Grygoriy Shyshko for the forthcoming Modern Impressionism exhibition at United Nations Office - Geneva, Palais des Nations 1st – 19th October 2007

Annela Twitchin, Art Historian, 2007

As related by his daughter Tatyana in her poignant reminisces of her father, of all the seasons of the year, Grygoriy Shyshko especially loved Autumn. Over the decades of his artistic activity, many of his landscaped paintings testified to his own personal and autumnal renewal of creative response. Some of these paintings can be seen in this, the first exhibition of his work in Switzerland.

A favourite motif of the artist was the rotunda, and he painted many seasonally changed views of it. In Rotunda, Autumn the elegant edifice is seen above slender trees that stand as sentinels around it. The Autumn leaves seem to continue their silent fall, carpeting the scene in a glowing yet mysterious light. Rotunda, Autumn presents a place for private reverie. In Autumn Colours , Crossing the Bridge, one of many works painted in and around his home town, Kryvyi Rih, another mood is evoked. We do not register the features of the figures on the bridge – that is their shared intimacy. However, they still serve to remind us of an important aspect of Shyshko's response to nature, to the seasonal changes in his surroundings. Always, his landscapes are affirmations of the relationship to the natural world achieved through his poetic orchestration of colour.

In Autumnal View of the Terricons this is clearly evidenced. Countryside and construction site are blended together not just through the compositional structure but through colour, and a poetic intimacy is thereby forged between them. The richness of orchestrated colour is even more striking in Shyshko's industrial landscapes. The discovery of rich deposits of mineral ore in the region of Kryvyi Rih led to the establishment of many iron ore minefields. These, in turn, became a dominant feature of his work. As Ann Kodicek has observed, just like Mt. St. Victoire for Cezanne, the iron works for Shyshko, in all seasons, became the source of inspiration for some of his most original works.

To see some of these works, so rooted in their own environment, here in Switzerland, in Geneva, enables one to see anew their striking originality. Switzerland has also produced its share of great artists. These include Holbein, Fuseli, Bocklin and Klee, all artists of international repute. However, Switzerland has one artist, Hodler, who, like Shyshko for Ukraine, created in his landscapes a defining image of Swiss Alpine scenery.

The monumental majesty, the restrained cool intensity of his Alpine landscapes, compare and contrast well with the warmth of the industrial landscapes by Shyshko. For example, Mineshaft in Pink Colours conveys, like Hodler's Alpine mountains, a sense of compositional majesty in its elevation against the skyline, as do Mine Gigant and Iron Ore Mining, Evening. With little variation in subject matter, Shyshko, like Hodler, creates differentiated effects through sensitive response to the colouration of changing light. In the final months of his life, confined to his flat in Geneva, Hodler continued his compulsion with painting Lake Geneva and Mt. Blanc. Invalided, he painted more than a dozen and a half views from his bedroom window. The view itself, of course, scarcely varied, but the effects of light did, like those of Shyshko's. Both artists have shown themselves to have been incomparable masters at capturing and conveying the genius loci of the scenes depicted.

Grygoriy Shyshko was born on the 15th April 1923, and he graduated from the Odessa College of Art in 1953. It is Tatyana, again, who provides us with information and insight into her father's earliest artistic inclinations. His first childhood drawing was of a bird on a branch, viewed from a window of the family cottage. Once the family had moved from village life to the town of Kryvyi Rih, the young schoolboy was also able to attend art classes. It was at Kryvyi Rih, whilst still a schoolboy, that his destined vocation was decided. Returning home from school one day, he stopped to watch some people painting by the bank of a stream. The sight of the landscape emerging on canvas – produced by brushwork and paint – acted as a catalyst on him. He knew then that he had to paint. This decision was placed in abeyance by the Second World War. He was eventually able to enroll at the Odessa Art College in 1948. But the many hardships he had to endure from childhood onwards – Ukraine's famines, war, the difficulties associated with the completion of his course – all had serious repercussions on his health.

The year he successfully completed his course, 1953, was also the year of Stalin's death, and of his own return to Kryvyi Rih, in many ways his most important muse and inspiration. The death of Stalin brought about a temporary thaw, a cultural relaxation, although the prevailing artistic ideology continued. Whatever the latitudes, artists were still expected to produce ‘truthful, historically concrete representations of reality'. This ‘objective reality', to which all artists were to conform, was in turn to serve in ‘educating' the people; a continuing utilitarian view of art, in which self expression was highly suspect!

But, as this exhibition reveals, Shyshko's sensitive metaphorical response to his landscapes meant that, for him, landscape could never be a socialist realist fact. Even his industrial landscape scenes – ideologically favoured as celebrations of the beauty of labouring life in service of the state – do not, in Shyshko's hands, serve as vehicles for propaganda, or a utilitarian view of art. Shyshko received official recognition in 1964, when he was invited to join the Association of Artists of the USSR. But even officially commissioned works, such as Miners: Strength of the Industry still maintained a surprising stance against the State's requirements. Compared with Mikhail A. Kostin's In the Stalin Factory (1949), which despite a tonal and facture freedom, still insists on the Stakhanovite ideal of Soviet labour, Shyshko's painting, on the other hand, continues his poetics whereby production is perceived as an orchestration of colour that blends man, the man-made site, and the natural resources, as one.

His paintings of Shevshenko continue this personal pursuit. This preeminent Ukrainian - the man, his life and his works - was of immense importance for Shyshko. Taras Shevshenko was born into a serf family in 1814 in a village in the Tcherkassy region of the Russian Empire. His owner, aware of his artistic talents, was instrumental in setting up for him several apprenticeships with artists, culminating in one in St. Petersburg. The outcome for Shevshenko, through his association with Petersburg artists, especially with Briulov, was that in 1838 his freedom was purchased. In the same year, he started as a student in the Academy of Fine Arts in the workshop of Briulov and was awarded by the Petersburg Council of the Academy of Arts the title of ‘artist' in 1845. He had also started writing poetry while still a serf, and his first collection was published in Petersburg in 1840. Whilst residing in Petersburg, he made three return visits to Ukraine: in 1843, 1845, and 1846. The constrained conditions under which his fellow countrymen lived had a profound and significant impact on him as both poet and painter. His poetic work 'The Dream', criticising Imperial rule, was considered inflammatory, and he was sent to prison and then into exile. Not until 1859 did he receive permission to return to Ukraine, his homeland where he intended to settle. Within a few months, he was arrested again but released and ordered to Petersburg. The last years of his life, he worked on his poetry, paintings and engravings, but died in exile in 1861. First buried in the Smolensk Cemetery in Petersburg, his remains were returned to his native land by his friends. Thus, his wish to be buried in Ukraine, as expressed in his poem ‘Testament', was fulfilled. Ironically, it was Soviet ideology that made it acceptable for Ukrainian artists to paint his image.

Officially commissioned to paint pictures of literary, scientific and political figures, the difference between Shyshko's paintings of contemporary dignitaries and those of his historical depictions of Shevshenko are astonishing. His portrait of Ivan Kazimir, celebrating his role in the Kryvorozhstal Metallurgical Plant, is a subtle study in be-medaled formality and of the sitter's invincible satisfaction in his service to the State. By contrast, the images of Shevshenko both before and after his fall from favour do not exactly illustrate the ideologically acceptable Soviet image of an anti-Tsarist hero. The sense of isolation, desolation in Shevshenko in Exile, exhibited here, is a demonstration, poignantly painted, of Shyshko's response to exile from Ukraine – be it a past or more immediate experience. The tonality and the fragile fluidity of the brushwork in this painting combine to create a pervasive melancholy of mood as Shevshenko's silhouetted figure faces out to the sea and beyond. The calm of the sea contrasts with the wind that blows from behind him, bellowing his coattails seaward while he stands like a ship becalmed. Shevshenko in Exile, like the seascapes Shyshko painted at Odessa in the early 1950s, have led many art historians to see affinities with the work of the French Impressionists. Looking at these particular works of Shyshko, it is the work of Leonid Pasternak that comes to my mind in terms of affinity.

Born in Odessa in 1862 and dying in Oxford in 1945, Leonid Pasternak was a leading painter, illustrator and academician, and one of the most respected artists of his generation. He has also often been called a 'Russian Impressionist', and affinities are evident – a loose, free style and brushwork, certain compositional devices and a lighter palette. In other words, aspects of technique were adopted.

There is, of course, no denying the impact and importance of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism on late 19th and early 20th century art across not only Europe, but America and Russia too. However, one still has to remember that Russian Impressionism like that of other countries developed within, and was influenced by, its own national tradition. Russian Impression was more an approach to art than a specific movement. If one were to compare the works of Pasternak with that of the French Impressionists, differences become more apparent. His works are more of mood. French Impressionists concentrated more on the play of light and the sparkle of colour.

When we look at Shyshko's seascapes at Odessa, we can see that they have the same concentration on mood as Pasternak's small, informal Black Sea at Odessa oil sketches. They have the same meditative quality. As the art historian Vladim Lenyahsin has observed, the French word 'impression' retains all the energy of the 'impress' or ‘imprint'. The Russian word for impression, 'vpechatleniye', echoes the word for sorrow 'pechal'. Russian Impression is more directed at the heart than the eye.

When we look at the diversity of works here on view – landscapes, seascapes, industrial landscapes seen seasonally, and at varying times of day and night – we are made aware of the inadequacy of our need for art historical labeling. Impressionist? Post Impressionist? Soviet Impressionist? Modernist Impressionist? There are of course affinities in Shyshko's works to aspects of Impressionism, as to Pasternak, Post Impressionism, and to Kandinsky at Murnau.

Despite hardships and horrors endured that would have deflected a man of lesser gifts, Shyshko's commitment to his own creative individuality was such that, even during the period of official constraint, his creative individuality continued to burgeon. Thus, his works are remarkably free from the imposition of either a socialist, or any other systematic style on his work. Rather, his personal, poetic orchestrations of colour communicate what was at the heart of his existence – the celebration on canvas of his Ukraine. What better way to conclude than with the words of a fellow Ukrainian:

“Painting – exalted, beautiful like Autumn in its rich adornment, flashing through the window's sash, entwined with vine, as peaceful and spacious as the universe, radiant music of the eyes – how beautiful you are.” Gogol.