Petro Megyk. 1970s(?). The Ukrainian Museum in New York.
Petro Megyk. 1950s (?). From the publication “Monograph of the Artist and Album of Works,” edited by Sviatoslav Hordynsky. Philadelphia. 1992
Thanks to Petro Megyk, Ukrainian contemporary painting has an outstanding artist of European scale, a modern artist who is on a par with the achievements of world art, whose modernism, like all his work, is deeply rooted in the continuity of the traditions of Ukrainian art.
Yevhen Blakytny, art historian
Petro Megyk was a Ukrainian-American artist, teacher, art critic, publisher, founder, and editor of the famous magazine “Ukrainian Art Digest ” (Notatky z mystetstva).
He was born in Bochkivtsi (Chernivtsi region) in 1899. He got his primary education in his native village and later continued his studies in Kamianets-Podilsky. In 1920, he moved to Poland. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in the departments of easel painting and decorative arts (1921-1928). He taught drawing, modeling, and art history at the Warsaw School of Art and Industry and the Warsaw School of Carpentry and Construction (1928-1944). He was an assistant at the University of Warsaw (1925-1939). During World War II, Megyk was taken to Germany for forced labor. He worked at a military-industrial factory in Rothenburg (1944-1945), and from 1945 to 1949, he was in the DP camps. In 1949, he emigrated to Philadelphia (USA), where he headed the local branch of the Ukrainian Artists’ Association in the USA (UAA) and, together with Petro Andrusiv, founded the Ukrainian Art Studio. In 1963, he became one of the founders and editor of the well-known diaspora magazine “Ukrainian Art Digest” (Notatky z mystetstva), published until 1990. In 1981, under the editorship of Megyk, the album “The Book of Works by Ukrainian Artists Outside the Homeland” was published. The artist died in 1992. Today, his “Ukrainian Art Digest” is a unique source for studying the Ukrainian diaspora art.
