Turning the pages back... January 17, 1869 (01/17/99)

Turning the pages back...

January 17, 1869

The name of Ivan Trush is synonymous with western Ukrainian painting, his stature equalled only by Oleksander Novakivsky. His impressionistic landscapes seem at once indescribably familiar and uncannily idiosyncratic.

Trush was born on January 17, 1869, in Vysotske, a village in Brody county about 60 miles east of Lviv. He studied at the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts from 1891 to 1897, then moved to Lviv, where he was active in Ukrainian community life and artistic circles. He married Mykola Drahomanov's daughter, Ariadna, and was a close friend of the writer and scholar Ivan Franko.

His first solo show was held in Lviv in 1899. That year he also participated in the first exhibition organized by the Society for the Advancement of Ruthenian Art, founded in 1898. In 1904, together with the historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, he founded the Society of Friends of Ukrainian Scholarship, Literature and Art, and that summer organized a school for Ukrainians from the Russian Empire. The following year he founded and co-published the first Ukrainian art magazine, Artystychnyi Vistnyk, also serving as its editor.

Trush contributed articles on art and literature to journals such as Literaturno-Naukovyi Vistnyk, Moloda Ukraina and Ukrainische Rundschau, as well as the newspaper Dilo. Trush also travelled widely, visiting Kyiv on several occasions (where he lectured at Mykola Murashko's school in 1901), living briefly in Crimea (1901-1904), sojourning in Italy (1902, 1908) and travelling to Egypt and Palestine (1912).

Trush painted over 6,000 works, noted, according to Sviatoslav Hordynsky, for his original use of color. He is known primarily for his landscapes and genre paintings of folk scenes, but also painted portraits for the Shevchenko Scientific Society, producing likenesses of Volodymyr Antonovych, Mykola Drahomanov, Ivan Franko, Borys Hrinchenko, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Mykola Lysenko, Cardinal Sylvester Sembratovych, Vasyl Stefanyk and Lesia Ukrainka.

Trush died in Lviv on March 22, 1941.

Source: "Trush, Ivan," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 5 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).

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