Artist Arcadia Olenska-Petryshyn found dead; husband is charged (05/12/96)

Artist Arcadia Olenska-Petryshyn found dead; husband is charged

JERSEY CITY, N.J. - Arcadia Olenska-Petryshyn, 61, noted painter and critic, was found dead in her bedroom in the early morning hours of May 6. She had been beaten over the head with a claw hammer, said New Brunswick police officials.

Police have arrested her husband, Walter Petryshyn, a pioneering researcher and renowned mathematician, and charged him with killing his wife after the two had apparently argued.

At least one long-time close acquaintance of Prof. Petryshyn suggested that the academician was suffering from deep depression and was on the "brink of insanity," reported the Newark Star-Ledger on May 7. Bohdan Boychuk said that Mr. Petryshyn had become increasingly despondent and remote after he discovered an error in a 1995 math textbook he had published.

Ms. Petryshyn, who was born in Zbarazh, Halychyna, emigrated with her parents to the United States in 1950. She completed her studies at Hunter College in New York and the University of Chicago. She worked mostly with lithographs, graphics and oils, most recently doing paintings of cacti and prints of plants and trees. She exhibited at numerous art shows, including ones in New York, Toronto, Brussels, Shenyang, China, Kyiv and Lviv. She also served as art editor for the Ukrainian publication Suchasnist.

Mr. Petryshyn, who is a professor at Rutgers University, is known for his development of "A-proper mapping," a theory in the field of non-linear functional analysis. He was born in 1929 in Liashky Murovani in Lviv Oblast and emigrated to the United States in 1950.

Ms. Olenska-Petryshyn was to be interred on May 11 at St. Andrew the First-Called Ukrainian Orthodox Cemetary in South Bound Brook, N.J., following liturgical services at St. George Ukrainian Catholic Church in New York.

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