Vasyl Krychevsky. Kyiv. Late 1930s. Museum of Ukrainian Diaspora
If you imagine the art of a nation as a temple resting on columns, then Vasyl Krychevsky is one of these columns of Ukrainian art.
Sviatoslav Hordynsky, artist, art critic
Vasyl Krychevsky was a prominent Ukrainian architect. He founded the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine and created Ukrainian national modern architecture. Vasyl Krychevsky was the first artist of Ukrainian cinema, an outstanding teacher, collector, and the founder of the Ukrainian artistic dynasty of Krychevsky.
The artist was born on January, 12, 1873, in Vorozhba (now Sumy region) to the family of a medical attendant. In 1889 he left the Kharkiv technical railway vocational school. Vasyl Krychevsky is the founder of the architectural style known as the “national Ukrainian art nouveau”; he is also one of the founders of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts (1917). He designed the State Emblem, the official seal and the banknotes of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR). He based his modern artistic language on the folk pictorial alphabet, and this synthesis was clearly manifested in all the genres in which the artist worked. In particular, in architecture and book graphics, he used and developed the inexhaustible possibilities offered by the rhythm and geometry of the ancient symbolism of Ukrainian ornamentation and Trypillian culture.
In 1943 Vasyl Krychevsky emigrated abroad. From 1948 he and his family lived in Venezuela. He died on November 15, 1952, in Caracas. He is buried at St.Andrew’s Ukrainian cemetery in South-Bound-Brook, New Jersey.
