Alexis Gritchenko

Biography

In 1919 Gritchenko was offered the directorship of the Tretyakov Gallery. He declined, left his paintings and belongings in Moscow and departed: first to Kyiv, then to Sevastopol, and from there to Constantinople.

He was born on 2 April 1883 (21 March, Old Style) in Krolevets, in Chernigov Governorate, the son of a bank clerk, and was orphaned early. From 1905 to 1912 he studied at the universities of St Petersburg, Kyiv and Moscow and received a degree in biology. At the same time, in 1905, he studied drawing and painting in the private studio of Serhiy Svitoslavsky in Kyiv. After two years of work in Kyiv (1906–1908) he moved to Moscow, hoping to find a real artistic life there, but, it seems, he had little success. In 1909–1910 he studied in the Moscow studio of Konstantin Yuon and Ivan Dudin, and in 1911–1912 with Ilya Mashkov and Pyotr Konchalovsky. In 1911 he visited Paris, in 1912 he travelled through Russian towns to study early Russian painting, and in 1913–1914 he toured Italy. He painted Impressionist landscapes, tried Cubism and Fauvism, and took devices and imagery from the Russian icon, Ukrainian popular prints (lubok) and Italian fresco. His pictures were shown at exhibitions in Moscow and St Petersburg: those of the New Society of Artists (1910), the Jack of Diamonds (1912), the Union of Youth (1913, 1914), and the shows “Free Art” and “Exhibition of Painting 1915”. From 1917 he belonged to the World of Art group.

He also wrote about what he did as a painter. In 1913 he published a study of the links between Russian painting, Byzantium and the West, and in 1917 “The Russian Icon as a Pictorial Art”; he contributed to the journal Apollon and to the collections “Questions of Painting”, argued with critics, and in 1919, together with Aleksandr Shevchenko, issued the manifesto “Color-Dynamos and Tectonic Primitivism”. It seems to me that this double work, with brush and with pen, explains why he is so easily taken for an art historian who simply liked to paint.

In 1917 he joined the council of the Professional Union of Painters of Moscow, and in 1918 the All-Russian Collegium for Museums and the Protection of Antiquities. He organised the removal of Old Master paintings from the collection of the Princes Baryatinsky out of the front-line zone. In 1919 he taught at the State Free Art Studios (Svomas) in Moscow.

After Constantinople, where he spent two years, Gritchenko lived in France from 1921. He later wrote a book about that time, “Two Years in Constantinople”. He exhibited at the Salon d’Automne from 1923 and became a member of the salon in 1931, and showed work at the Salon des Tuileries and the Salon des Indépendants. Solo exhibitions were held in Paris, Madrid (1934), Barcelona (1935), Stockholm, Gothenburg (1937), Limoges, Strasbourg, Cagnes-sur-Mer and Toronto. In 1937 his work was also shown in Lviv. He took an active part in the Paris Group of Ukrainian Artists and was connected with the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists in Lviv. Among his other books are the memoirs “Ukraine of My Blue Days”, “My Meetings with French Artists” and “Years of Sturm und Drang”. In 1958 the Alexis Gritchenko Foundation was established in New York to preserve his legacy. In the early 1960s it emerged that his works from the Lviv collections had been destroyed as “bourgeois formalism”.

Gritchenko died on 28 January 1977 in Vence. In accordance with his will, a large part of his legacy, including seventy works, an archive and manuscripts, was transferred in March 2006 to the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv.