Mykola Hlushchenko

Biography

In the spring of 1940 Hlushchenko travelled to Berlin with a delegation of the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. The official purpose was the exhibition “Folk Art in the USSR”, which he helped to organise. According to some accounts, he in fact brought back information that Germany was preparing for war with the Soviet Union, and a memorandum based on his material reached Stalin in June 1940. This cannot be checked against documents; I would treat the dates with caution.

He was born on 17 September 1901 (4 September, Old Style) in Novomoskovsk in Yekaterinoslav Governorate (now Samar, Dnipropetrovsk Region). He attended the commercial school in Yuzivka and finished it in 1918. He was then mobilised into Anton Denikin’s Volunteer Army, the main anti-Bolshevik force in southern Russia. With the remnants of its units he ended up in Poland, was held in a camp for interned persons, escaped, and made his way to Germany. In Berlin he studied at the studio school of Hans Baluschek, and in 1920–1924 at the Higher School of Fine Arts in Charlottenburg. According to some accounts, his studies and living costs were paid for by figures of the émigré community, among them Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi and Roman Smal-Stotskyi. In 1924 his first solo exhibition was held at the Kasper Gallery in Berlin, arranged with the help of Volodymyr Vynnychenko. Critics noticed these works; in his Berlin period his manner was closer to the New Objectivity.

In 1925 Hlushchenko moved to Paris and opened a studio visited by Russian and Ukrainian émigrés. There his painting became post-Impressionist, and French critics took notice of him at once. He painted landscapes of France, Italy and Holland, flowers, still lifes, nudes and portraits. Among the portraits are Oleksandr Dovzhenko and Vynnychenko, as well as the writers Romain Rolland, Henri Barbusse and Victor Margueritte and the painter Paul Signac, painted on commission from the Soviet side. He designed the Soviet pavilion at the fair in Lyon and in 1930 made a series of illustrations for Gogol’s “Dead Souls”. In 1934 he travelled to the Balearic Islands, to Majorca. At the beginning of the 1930s he belonged to the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists and helped organise its large exhibition of Ukrainian, French and Italian painting in Lviv. His work was shown in Paris (five exhibitions in 1925–1934), Milan, Budapest, Stockholm and Rome.

Several different dates are attached to his intelligence work. According to some accounts, he began cooperating with Soviet intelligence in 1926; according to others, he was recruited in 1933; there is also a version in which his recruitment was completed in 1926, with the agent codename “Yarema”. According to some accounts, he obtained drawings of military equipment and drew émigrés into the work. This information comes from intelligence archives that I have not seen myself, and the exact extent of his involvement is unclear. His acquaintances and colleagues, by the available accounts, did not know of it during his lifetime.

In 1936 he returned to Moscow, and in 1944 he moved to Kyiv. He taught, and from 1939 was listed as a professor at the Kyiv Art Institute. In 1944 he painted “Kyiv in 1944. Karl Marx Street”: a grey sky over wrecked houses, in the distance small figures clearing the rubble, trampled snow.

Landscape remained his favourite genre: “March on the Dnieper” (1947), “Kyiv Autumn” (1950), “Thaw” and “Winter Sun” (1956), “Spring in the Carpathians” (1957), “Spring near Kyiv” (1961), “May Blossom” (1971). He travelled in Italy, France, Belgium and Switzerland, and in the 1960s his painting became noticeably brighter in colour. In the 1970s he took up monotype and made a series of flower still lifes in it. Exhibitions of his work were held in London (1966), Belgrade (1966, 1968), Toronto (1967–1969) and other cities. He received the title of People’s Artist of the Ukrainian SSR in 1944, the Shevchenko National Prize in 1972 for the series “On Lenin’s Places Abroad” and “Landscapes of Ukraine”, the Order of the Red Banner of Labour in 1960, and the title of People’s Artist of the USSR in 1976.

Hlushchenko died in Kyiv on 31 October 1977 and was buried at Baikove Cemetery. By his will, 1,250 of his works were given to the Ministry of Culture of the Ukrainian SSR.