The art of Halyna Mazepa on view at The Ukrainian Museum (09/03/00)

The art of Halyna Mazepa on view at The Ukrainian Museum

by Marta Baczynsky

NEW YORK - An exhibition of works by the late Halyna Mazepa will open at The Ukrainian Museum on Sunday, September 17, with the opening reception scheduled for 2 p.m. The exhibition will be on view through November 26. An illustrated, bilingual catalogue with an essay by Bohdan Pevny on the life and work of the artist will be available.

The works on display are from the collection of Ilarion and Sviltana Cholhan, supplemented with works from Bohdan Koval, the son of the artist, and his family, and from Bohdanna Tytla.

Two years ago the museum began a series of exhibitions acknowledging the important role collectors have played in the building of significant collections. In the past many collectors have chosen to share their art bounty with a wide audience, through loans or outright gifts to cultural institutions. This philanthropic gesture has provided the general public with unbounded opportunities for education, enrichment and enjoyment of the arts.

Mazepa was an artist whose work embodies the ideas and ideals of her time. The seed of national awareness and the search for a national form in Ukrainian literature and the arts, which spilled over from the naturalistic perception of the 19th century into the modernist movement of the 20th, found fertile ground in the creative expressions of the artist.

Ms. Mazepa was born in 1910 in St. Petersburg, Russia. Her Ukrainian parents, Isaac Mazepa, an agronomist by profession, who became a noted Ukrainian political activist and leader, and Natalia Singalevych Mazepa, a bacteriologist and teacher, took note of their daughter's inclination to draw and paint from an early age and greatly encouraged the development of her budding talent.

Through her formative years Mazepa studied with several art teachers. Mykola Pohribniak and Yurii Mahalevsky, respectively, introduced her to the unique style of the Kozak era and to the majesty of Byzantine icon painting. Many years later, Sviatoslav Hordynsky in a 1982 essay said that the "faultlessly balanced" line in Mazepa's paintings "is the dominant feature in her art and can be traced directly to the icon - not the rigidly stylized Byzantine form, but the Ukrainian variant that developed from distant Byzantine tradition and living folk art."

The turbulence of World War I and the encroachment of the Soviets prompted the Mazepa family to leave Ukraine and settle in Prague. Here the young artist finished high school and continued at the State School for Applied Art, where she studied the art of illustration. Her work soon reached the consumer market - she illustrated children's books and was a much-in-demand provider of art work for magazines and newspapers, both Czech and Ukrainian.

Volodymyr Popovych, in an essay about the artist in the monograph says that while attending classes at the Ukrainian Studio of Visual Art in Prague, Mazepa met many young people who later made names for themselves in the Ukrainian literary and artistic spheres, among them Mykola Krychevsky and Sophia Zarytska. She threw herself wholeheartedly into the cultural life of the Ukrainian community of that city, designing costumes for stage productions and dance groups, and illustrating books for Ukrainian writers and poets, among them the plays of poet Oleksander Oles. She also created series of postcards - one of Ukrainian national dress, the other featuring Ukrainian mythology. The Ukrainian Scientific Institute in Warsaw commissioned her to paint portraits of noted individuals on the political and cultural scene.

The year 1933 saw Mazepa as a mature artist. That year she visited Paris for the first time. There, as Mr. Pevny points out in his essay in the exhibition catalogue, she met artist Vasyl Diadyniuk, whose neo-Byzantine style, coupled with his method of introducing icon painting elements into secular art, had a great influence on her own style. That year Mazepa also participated in large group exhibitions in Berlin and Prague.

Following this international debut, the artist took part in the Retrospective Exhibition of Ukrainian Art at the National Museum in Lviv in 1935. She created a sensation with her painting of nude girls with a hockey stick, titled "After the Hockey Game," shown at an exhibition organized by the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists in Lviv in 1936.

Because of the almost exclusive utilization of Ukrainian folklore and historical themes in her paintings, Mazepa was considered to belong to the group of National Modernists, proponents of which were, among others, Anatol Petrytsky, the revolutionary stage set and costume designer, and Mykola Butovych, graphic designer and artist. However, Mazepa's style was quite unique and identifiable as her own. The simplicity of line and composition, coupled with bold contracts in color stood out among the work of her contemporaries. The media she utilized in her paintings for the most part were oil, gouache and tempera.

Notwithstanding her successes, tragedy struck the life of the artist. She and her husband, Volodymyr Koval, lost their two sons and her mother in a bomb raid in 1945 shortly before the end of the war. Deeply distraught by the personal tragedy and frightened by the approaching Soviet army, the couple fled to Germany, leaving behind Mazepa's cache of 15 years of work, personal documents and photographs.

In 1947 Mazepa, her husband and a new baby son named Bohdan immigrated to Venezuela (another son, Ivan, was born in Venezuela). Here, in the subtropical environment filled with wondrous sounds, colors and people, the artist resumed her work. Although this cacophony of exotica impressed her and appealed to her, and she made use of its many attributes, she also held on to the Ukrainian folk themes featured so prominently in her paintings. In 1948 she showed her work in a solo exhibition in the Caracas Museo del Bellas Artes.

Hordynsky says that in the 1950s Mazepa's style crystallized. "Her faces, normally shown in profile, became increasingly geometric in form, with a separation between planes of light and shadow by distinct black outlines. She uses color in clearly defined planes reminiscent of stained glass. Her figures stand out distinctly, defined by firm but fluid, almost musical lines."

He went to say that, "Despite the sometimes seemingly chaotic diversity of contemporary art trends, Ms. Mazepa, always sensitive and innovative, has created her own form of artistic expression. A national style is judged by its contributions to world art; Ms. Mazepa, whose work is in the mainstream of international ideas, deserves to be included among the foremost Ukrainian artists."

Ms. Mazepa died in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1995, leaving a legacy of work that is cherished in many museums and private collections around the world.

The Ukrainian Museum is open to the public on Wednesday through Sunday, 1-5 p.m.; phone, (212) 228-0110; fax, (212) 228-1947; e-mail, [email protected]; webpage, www.ukrainianmuseum.org.

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