Artist Myroslav Radysh is focus of exhibit in New York (12/03/06)

Artist Myroslav Radysh is focus of exhibit in New York

by Alexander J. Motyl

NEW YORK - One of the post-war Ukrainian emigration's most talented artists, Myroslav Radysh, died 50 years ago in 1956 at the age of 46. Forty-two of his paintings, a folder of his sketches and studies, and a collection of programs, photographs and other memorabilia associated with his life and work in Ukraine, Germany and the United States are currently on display at the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences (UVAN) in New York. The exhibit was organized by his widow, Oksana Radysh.

Radysh was a handsome man, with intense eyes and a shock of flowing dark hair combed back in the style favored by inter-war Halychyna's young men. The photographs of him on his passport and identification cards suggest that, like so many of his generation, he was a hungry young man, a man in a hurry, a man with big ideas and big plans - for himself, for art and, of course, for Ukraine.

It is a testimony to the remarkably robust nature of Ukrainian civil society in inter-war Poland that Radysh could make the move from the village of Ilyntsi to the Poznan School of Art. Like his contemporaries, he was obviously quite capable of functioning in Polish society and retaining his Ukrainian identity.

Who knows what would have become of him - and of so many of his generation - had not Hitler and Stalin colluded to destroy Poland in 1939? In 1940 Radysh became the chief set designer at the Lviv Opera, a position he occupied until his flight westward in 1944. The photographs at the UVAN exhibit show that Radysh had a flare for the monumental and dramatic - qualities that must have served him well at the theater.

After finding refuge in Germany's displaced persons' camps, Radysh plunged headlong into the cultural life of "taborova Ukraina." Those were turbulent and exceptionally creative times for the thousands of young Ukrainians thrown together under conditions of what must have seemed like a surreal combination of hardship and freedom. (Several of Jacques Hnizdovsky's paintings depict the humorous side of those times.)

Some studied at gymnasiums or at the Ukrainian Free University; many took to the political intrigues involving the nationalist followers of Stepan Bandera, Andrii Melnyk and Mykola Lebed; all had a good time. Radysh, like other artists in the camps, painted, sketched and exhibited his work. He also designed sets for the Ensemble of Ukrainian Actors in Augsburg. By the late 1940s many of the camps' residents had moved on to the United States and Canada. Radysh, by then already married, settled in New York in 1950.

Radysh has been called a neo-impressionist, and many of his paintings do indeed exhibit the painterly qualities that typified that movement. We see dabs of paint, applied roughly, almost serendipitously. It looks like impressionism, except that, unlike the impressionists of the 19th century, Radysh, unless painting flowers, was rather less concerned with light - with capturing light - than with forms.

Radysh's superb city and landscapes - especially those painted toward the latter years of his life - are tightly structured compositions consisting of bright slabs of thickly applied and mostly unmixed paint. Radysh obviously favored the painting knife as much as the brush. The forms - whether trees or rocks or fields or bridges or machines - adorn the surface of the canvas, less as objects representing things and more as fields of color. Those fields, their texture and tactileness, and the relations between them, all very modernist in spirit, define Radysh's best work.

The exhibit includes several photographs of set designs Radysh made for a theatrical performance at the Ukrainian National Home in New York. Executed with seemingly effortless and bold strokes on oversized pieces of wrapping paper, they show an artist who was experimenting, moving beyond the artistic traditions of inter-war Ukraine and Poland, and finding his own voice. Those designs were destroyed. Thanks to Mrs. Radysh and UVAN, we can at least get some sense of the fascinating man who made them.

The exhibit will be on display at the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences until the end of December.

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor at Rutgers University-Newark and a painter.

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