CHICAGO – The exhibit hall was at double capacity. Like the champagne bottles welling over the kitchenette’s threshold, anxious guests overflowed into the foyer, hoping for a glimpse of the canvases that summoned every eye with their soulful depth and luminosity.
These very patient people came from all walks of life – from consul generals of India and Iceland, to trendy Windy City gallery owners and aspiring artists, to wide-eyed suburban teens, to Fourth Wave Ukrainian immigrants visiting the museum for the first time.
They were waiting to see the slow-moving but nimble-witted white-haired genius, surrealist Ivan Marchuk.
Maria Klimchak
Ivan Marchuk speaks at the Ukrainian National Museum.
This historic visit and exhibit was produced, curated and promoted by the Ukrainian National Museum’s supremely dedicated staff. For months leading up to the June 28 opening, the UNM’s president, curator, archivist and office coordinator worked tirelessly to bring the artist to Chicago along with his transcendent work, and to answer every inquiry its poster and press release inspired. Here are some of the most common.
“Who decides what makes a genius?”
The global consulting firm Creators Synectics recruited a panel of creativity experts, who were given the results of a survey asking 4,000 diverse Britons to nominate world geniuses in all fields.
The panel scored each entrant against these factors: paradigm shifting, popular acclaim, intellectual power, achievement and cultural importance. These experts agree that the term “genius” describes people who have turned their field or specialty on its head.
But once our inquisitors arrived at the opening reception, they no longer needed this information. They stood before the seemingly three-dimensional canvases spellbound, on a subconscious level that defies explanation.
You don’t have to understand art technique to feel the shimmering moonlit tranquility summoning from across a sleepy field. You don’t need to know art history to feel the Chornobyl-induced agony of tangled tempura extracted from the soul of an earth lover. You don’t need an essay to comprehend the riveting hyperrealist landscape series “Voice of My Soul.” It’s impossible not to stop, stare and ponder these outpourings of passion and precision.
How exactly did Marchuk turn his profession on its head?
Even world-renowned geniuses need to have a sense of humor. When asked what his elaborate, critically acclaimed painting technique was called, Mr. Marchuk once responded off-the-cuff: “Plyontanism.” He created this “-ism” from the Polish word “plyontatys” (to get tangled) – the way his sisters’ hair would tangle into unrecognizable knots.
The very paintings that emanate vast luminosity and depth from a distance, once viewed from just inches away, reveal thousands of thread-thin tempura snarls.
It is this dense web of pigment, these super fine filaments, these seemingly arbitrary tangles that create Mr. Marchuk’s luminous, enamel-like depth of field. They entwine stark polarities: good with evil, harmony with discord, beauty with grotesqueness, nature with technology, life with death. One off-the-cuff response enabled him to coin a term that’s since been integrated into the global art vernacular.
Where does he come from?
The son of a master weaver, Mr. Marchuk was born in western Ukraine in the 1930s. While the adults plotted how to make a surgeon or biologist out of him, little Ivan was slipping scraps of paper from his father’s briefcase and sneaking off into a crawlspace to paint his first floral compositions.
He explains it this way: “It was all or nothing. I never wanted to be a ‘normal artist’, I wanted to be free. People asked me what I was doing. I had no idea what I was doing! If I knew, I wouldn’t have done it. I’m a glutton for the unknown, the adventurous, the slightly dangerous. I just can’t sit still.”
When asked about his training at the Lviv College of Applied Arts and the Lviv State Institute of Applied and Decorative Arts, he’ll tell you his real art training came from working the land and cutting off a finger tip while chopping wood with his father. The local healer splinted and wrapped it up – but it grew back with a twist. Maybe it’s this twist in the pinkie that enables his special touch with the paintbrush?
The crowd at the opening of an exhibit of works by Ivan Marchuk.
Mr. Marchuk was banned from the “hell” that was the Union of Artists in Soviet Ukraine for refusing to conform to socialist realism in the 1980s. Officials feared his “tangles” contained some subversive code. And the fact that he spoke exclusively in Ukrainian made them nervous – the word on the streets of Lviv was that he “Ukrainianized” Kyiv.
“My mission was to create myself on canvas, then share it with the world, to bring some joy into it.” So, when an Australian tourist of Ukrainian descent was brought to tears by Mr. Marchuk’s exhibit and invited him to visit, the maestro took off to Sydney. From there, he exported his genius to Canada and the U.S. He signed up for English lessons but didn’t learn much because his appetite for painting usurped all of his time. And, propelled his work across the globe.
Mr. Marchuk’s evocative mastery has been praised in Belgium, Germany, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Slovakia, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, Jordan and Italy, where the International Academy of Modern Art inducted him as an honorary member of the Scientific Council of Rome’s Academy. His enigmatic landscapes and surreal psychic-scapes were extolled by Pablo Picasso’s biographer, esteemed art critic Roland Penrose. He has packed exhibit halls three times the size of ours all over Europe.
The search for “heaven on earth,” however, ultimately landed him back in the place where he feels part of the landscape, where intimate, sincere conversation flows organically – back to his now independent homeland, which awarded him Ukraine’s highest artistic distinction: the Shevchenko National Prize. Mr. Marchuk returned in 2001 to Kyiv, were he still lives, ruminates and creates.
And while the maestro weaves his magic, his curator, art director and muse, Tamara Strypko, plans, promotes and processes the logistics that enable him to attend events like ours all over the world. The genius need only show up, speak his mind, sign autographs, pose for photos and flirt with his admirers.
What does he think of Chicago?
It was an exhilarating, but exhausting evening. Yet, you would never have known from Mr. Marchuk’s chipper demeanor the following day, when UNM board members joined him and Ms. Strypko on a Chicago Riverboat Tour.
The 83-year-old guest exuded the vigor of a much younger dreamer – always ready to share knowledge, opinions and soup recipes. His secret? Fresh air, life purpose, openness to new experience, and food, in moderation: potatoes, cucumbers, sauerkraut, herring, salo, buckwheat, rice and oatmeal topped with raisins, dried apricots or nuts. Whiskey doesn’t hurt either, he added, knocking down “sto hram” (100 grams).
The wanderer marveled at the majestic high-rises and landscape architecture along the Chicago River. We tried to translate the tour guide’s prezzi, but when she began to describe the maneuvers of famous real estate moguls, the maestro told us: “Save your breath.”
After a few toasts someone asked: Maestro, would you like to paint this landscape? He shook his head. These behemoths stand created. And earthquake-safe. They will not change. But the movement of the breeze through a particular waft of grass in the moonlight – that lasts only for a finite moment. That – must be preserved on canvas.
The artist’s feelings about this Windy City visit have also been preserved – in the UNM guest book, where his joy and gratitude flowed like the ink that filled two whole pages. After his final whiskey shot of the night, he revealed how moved he was by the warmth, appreciation and love that enveloped him in Chicago like nowhere else.
Visit, and see for yourself – a day spent with Ivan Marchuk may just turn your world on its head.
Oryna Hrushetsky is a member of the Ukrainian National Museum’s executive board.