Remembering a friend (11/03/02)

Remembering a friend

Below are excerpts of a personal statement by Taras Hunczak, professor of history at Rutgers University, former editor-in-chief of Suchasnist, and friend and colleague of Bohdan Pevny.

The recent death of Bohdan Pevny, a great loss to the world of Ukrainian culture, is also a great loss to me on a personal level.

My acquaintance with Bohdan dates back to 1953, the year I moved from Buffalo to New York. We soon discovered that we had much in common. We were both students at the time. Bohdan, who was a year older than I, knew clearly what he wanted to do in life - he wanted to be an artist.

Bohdan's formal education was supplemented by informal meetings with the leading Ukrainian émigré artists and poets of the day of the previous generation. It was these meetings that brought us together. The meetings would usually take place on weekends at the Lys Mykyta in downtown New York, where such prominent figures as theater director and actor Josyf Hirniak, poets and editors Yevhen Malaniuk and Bohdan Krawciw, artists Mychailo Moroz and Sviatoslav Hordynsky, and writer Ivan Kernytky, to cite a few, would gather for informal discussions over a glass of wine or beer. Bohdan and I referred to these gatherings as weekend seminars in Ukrainian culture.

Upon completion of our studies we pursued our respective careers. For his part, apart from painting, book design and illustration, Bohdan began to display, rather early in his career, a predilection for art writing and criticism. Indeed, those were the areas to which he made the greatest contribution in the field of Ukrainian culture. His essays and articles appeared in various journals and newspapers. Bohdan was also an art critic, performing a thankless, yet most important and necessary, function for artists and a community interested in art.

Bohdan's most popular, and best-known work in Ukraine, was a rendering of Taras Shevchenko with the admonishing subtext: "Do your children speak my language?" The Rukh Fund made 5,000 reproductions of the painting as posters, and Bohdan and I took them to Ukraine. Subsequently, I would come upon these posters at numerous public gatherings.

Bohdan was an active member of the Ukrainian Artists' Association, serving in various capacities of its governing body. As a member of UAA, he was instrumental in organizing the exhibit "Contemporary Graphic Art of Ukraine" that was held in New York in 1971, and, jointly with Roman Voronka and me, the "13 Artists from Ukraine" exhibit, which was held at the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York in 1988.

When I became editor-in-chief of Suchasnist in 1984, I invited Bohdan to become the journal's arts editor. He worked in that capacity until 1996 when, together with Ivan Dzyuba, he became co-editor of Suchasnist. He worked tirelessly and with complete dedication to the journal, which he considered a major forum and vehicle for Ukrainian culture.

Working with Bohdan all these years was a pleasure and a rewarding experience. I shall miss him.

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