Turning the pages back... September 27, 1992 (09/26/99)

Turning the pages back...

September 27, 1992

This year marks the seventh anniversary of the death of Mykhailo Moroz - a Ukrainian impressionistic/expressionistic painter and a vibrant character in the post-war émigré scene. He lives on, immortalized not only by his paintings, but also in countless anecdotes of his friends and visitors to Hunter, N.Y. (a summer enclave in the Catskill Mountains reminiscent of Ukraine's Carpathians, once enlivened by such luminaries as the late caricaturist/satirist Edward Kozak and the Ukrainian popular singer Anton Derbish.)

Born in Plikhiv, Berezhany County, in Halychyna (about 100 miles southeast of Lviv), on July 7, 1904, Moroz was accepted into the Novakivsky Art School in Lviv in 1923, and became a favorite student of the renowned painter and portraitist Oleksa Novakivsky. Beginning in 1925, Moroz took part in various group exhibitions and often spent time at the artist's retreat in Kosmach, in the Hutsul region, painting landscapes and Hutsul figures.

Upon graduating in 1927, he received a stipend from Ukrainian Catholic Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky to study in Paris at the Academie Julien and the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers.

There he met not only such Ukrainian artists as Alexis Gritchenko, Mykhailo Hlushchenko and Vasyl Khmeliuk, who were developing a Ukrainian version of the expressionist style, but also a giant in 20th century modern art, Henri Matisse. In 1929 he painted, an impression of Normandy's La Manche, an image that would reverberate through later works.

In 1930 Moroz returned to Lviv and served as Novakivsky's assistant at this school and as a portraitist (creating a number of images of his patron, Metropolitan Sheptytsky, among others), and participated in the group shows of the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists. A post-war refugee in Germany, he emigrated to the United States in 1949, settling first in New York City, and then on Staten Island.

Over the course of the ensuing decades, Moroz exhibited extensively in the United States and Canada, with three one-man shows at New York's Panoras Gallery.

In 1961 Moroz received the Prix de Paris from the Galeries Raymond Duncan. In 1973 Cardinal Josyf Slipyj invited him to paint and teach for a year at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Rome, and a collection of his works remains in the "Eternal City," in a special room dedicated to his works at the Ukrainian Museum. In 1980 he was awarded a Gold Medal by the Parma-based Accademia Italia delle Arti e del Lavoro.

He traveled throughout North America, but his favorite spots were Hunter and the coast of Maine (the former reminiscent of the Hutsul highlands, the latter of French beaches).

In 1990 Moroz's last retrospective was held at The Ukrainian Museum in New York, and it featured a creative treasure trove that spanned six decades of artistic endeavor - from the 1920s to the 1980s. His paintings of which he created over 3,000 - hang in private collections throughout the diaspora, but also in the White House in Washington, and the state museums in Kyiv and Lviv.

Mykhailo Moroz died on Staten Island, N.Y., on September 27, 1992. In 1994 a memorial exhibition of his works was held by the Lviv National Gallery.

Sources: "Moroz, Mykhailo" Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); "Renowned Artist Mykhailo Moroz dead at 88," The Ukrainian Weekly, No. 40, Vol. 60 (October 4, 1992).

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