5 dimensions of Ivan Honchar

There are certainly many dimensions to Ivan Honchar’s heritage. But the organizers of the exhibit, recently opened at the National Center of Folk Culture “Ivan Honchar Museum,” emphasized actually five aspects: big sculpture, small plastic art, realistic and decorative painting, and ethnographic research.

“CANNOT BUT ADMIRE THIS PURITY OF COLOR!”

Honchar’s melancholic landscapes are indeed a sight for the sore eyes now, with all the snow and slush around. Kyiv’s outskirts, Subarpathia, Vinnytsia, Podillia make up a painted Ukrainian patchwork. “Looking at these landscapes, I envy my father’s mastery and skills. However, it is sheer delight rather than envy,” smiles Petro Honchar, general director at the Ivan Honchar Museum and the artist’s son. “Ivan Honchar learned painting only at school. Yet what a purity of color! Even academic education will not guarantee it.” Some of the landscapes exist today only in Honchar’s paintings or old photographs: a part of the villages from his pictures were later flooded, when artificial “seas” were created.

The exhibit “Ivan Honchar: Heritage” includes around a hundred of the master’s works dating back to 1950s-1980s. So, we could follow his artistic evolution.

“Ivan Honchar began as a realist, and he was also a professional sculptor. As time went by, his artistic manner completely changed,” tells Lidia DUBYKIVSKA-KALNENKO, director of the archives at the Ivan Honchar Museum. “From realism with a noticeable touch of impressionism he turned to painting traditional characters. This is two-dimensional, decorative painting and sculpture replicating traditional toys.”

PAINTING AS RESEARCH MATERIAL

A separate page (or rather a full volume) in Honchar’s heritage is represented by the historical and ethnographic art album Ukraine and Ukrainians. At the exhibit several pages of the album were presented. All in all, the master created 18 volumes of Ukraine and Ukrainians, four of which have been now published. According to Petro Honchar, the next in turn are volumes about Cherkasy oblast and Podillia.

Honchar’s paintings tell a lot of interesting things about Ukrainian traditions. Here is Parubotska Rada na Kolodakh (“Young Men Holding Council on Logs”): three youngsters in bright clothes are engaged in a conversation. The picture illustrates the youth initiation rites in the fall. As the cold season came, they could no longer hang out outside. So, boys’ and girls’ communities chose their leaders and found venues where they could meet and party.

“As a student I would visit Ivan Honchar at his place, it was necessary for my paper. I asked him why he had switched over to decorative painting,” recalls Tetiana POSHYVAILO, deputy general director of the Ivan Honchar Museum. “He explained that he chose this manner of painting on purpose, in order to show what kinds of clothes were worn, and how exactly. Because everything is slipping away, and traditions are lost and forgotten. In a decade or two we will look up to these paintings as a source of research material.”

“WHEN ONE LOVES ONE’S ART”

Young Taras Shevchenko. This statue, the author’s gypsum replica of the original of 1949, is one of the central pieces of the exposition. Honchar was the first to create the image of a young, dandyish poet who had just graduated from the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts. The original, in white marble, is now preserved in the store rooms of the Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow). In 1950-51 the gallery held a big exhibit, where Honchar took part. The Young Taras Shevchenko was exhibited too, and it is then that the Tretyakov purchased the sculpture.

The wreckage of the bust of Maksym Zalizniak, also exhibited, remind about the persecutions of the 1970s. The Soviet regime tried to force Honchar to donate his collection to state-owned museums, he was expelled from the Communist Party, his atelier was set on fire, unidentified men wrecked the sculptures that stood in the garden outside his home. The bust of Zalizniak was one of them.

“They would come and say, look, we will bring in a bulldozer and raze the museum to the ground. ‘Come and tear it down, together with me,’ Honchar would say. This man had nerved himself to defend the collection,” shares Dubykivska-Kalnenko. “Honchar was eventually simply driven to isolation. Till the late 1960s he was famous, he was constantly interviewed, the media wrote about him. He was ambitious and knew what he was worth. And suddenly, since 1972, there is a void. It lasted into the mid-1980s. It was excruciating. Yet he lived the life of a hermit and worked a lot. He never gave up. His great love for his art helped him overcome. And the love for Ukraine, even if it sounds bombastic.”

The exhibition “Ivan Honchar: Heritage” will be open through February 29.