Oleksandr Murashko

Biography

In 1913 Oleksandr Murashko opened a studio under the roof of the twelve-storey Ginzburg building on Institutskaya Street in Kiev, the city’s skyscraper of the day. His pupils were mostly young Jewish artists: Nisson Shifrin, Boris Aronson, Alexander Tyshler, Solomon Nikritin, Mark Epstein, Barukh Goldfain, Issachar Ber Ryback. Many of them later became well-known painters and sculptors.

Murashko was then close to forty.

He was born in Kiev on 26 August (7 September) 1875; until 1891 he bore the surname Krachkovsky. His stepfather, Oleksandr Ivanovych Murashko, ran an icon-painting workshop and worked on the interior of St Vladimir’s Cathedral, and his uncle, Mykola Ivanovych Murashko, founded the Kiev Drawing School, where the boy began his studies.

In 1894, on the recommendation of several well-known artists, he entered the Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg; from 1896 he studied under Ilya Repin and appears in Yelena Makovskaya-Luksch’s group portrait “Repin’s Students”. He graduated from the Academy in 1900 with the diploma painting “The Funeral of the Chieftain”, a dramatic scene from the history of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, full of respect for their rites and military valour. In 1901 he went abroad: he studied in Munich under Anton Ažbe and visited Italy and France. He began as a realist in the spirit of the Peredvizhniki, but after Munich and Paris his manner became more refined, close to Impressionism.

The painting “Café” (1902–1903) is built like a short story: a young, attractive woman destined to serve as bait for wealthy customers, all in a cherry-red key. It was followed by a finished study from life, “Portrait of a Girl in a Red Hat” (1902–1903): the bright patch of the hat against a black dress, a translucent shawl through which the hands show. I think the study says more about him than the painting does, because it has no story, only colour. Then came portraits, the best of them “The Artist N. I. Murashko” (1907) and “The Artist Jan Stanisławski” (1908), both now in the National Art Museum of Ukraine, and the portrait of O. M. Nesterova. “Carousel”, full of the joy of life, won a gold medal at the exhibition in Munich in 1909. He exhibited in Venice, Rome, Amsterdam, Berlin, Cologne and Düsseldorf. In 1914 came “Peasant Family” and “Quiet Grief”, pictures about the hardships of the people’s life.

From 1909 to 1912 Murashko taught at the Kiev Art School. He was a Peredvizhnik and a member of the Union of Russian Artists, and at the same time belonged to the Young Muse movement, which arose in 1906 and whose members wanted to renew Ukrainian art by drawing on the experience of the rest of Europe. In 1916 he founded the Association of Kiev Artists, in 1917 he became one of the founders of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts, and in the last months of his life he served as its acting rector. In 1909 he married Marguerite Kruger, a notary’s daughter, and in 1910, after his father’s death, he bought a small house in Lukyanovka, then on the edge of Kiev.

Kiev knew him, and in those unsettled times he was not afraid to walk home late in the evening. On 14 June 1919 Murashko was killed by unknown assailants not far from his house in Lukyanovka. Many people came to see him off; he was buried in the Lukyanovka Cemetery.

His paintings are in the National Art Museum of Ukraine, in the art museums of Dnipro, Kharkiv, Odesa, Zaporizhzhia and Khmelnytskyi, in the National Museum in Lviv, in the Bashkir Art Museum and in the National Art Museum of Belarus in Minsk, which holds his portrait of the architect Leon Benois. Marguerite Murashko’s memoirs of their life together were published in Kyiv in 2016 under the title “These Ten Years of Great, Deep Happiness…”.