Olena Kulchytska

Biography

In the 1950s, when the authorities in Lviv decided to close the art college, the elderly artist launched a whole campaign in its defence. The year was 1955, and she was seventy-seven.

Olena Kulchytska was born on 15 September 1877 in Berezhany, in Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary. Her father, Lev Kulchytsky, was a court counsellor and a lawyer; she grew up beside his interest in painting. Her mother was called Maria, and Olena had a sister, Olha-Melania, and a brother, Volodymyr. In 1894 she finished the eight-year school at the convent of the Sacramentine sisters in Lviv. In 1901–1902 she spent several months with her sister at the Lviv School of Arts and Crafts and received her first lessons in watercolour. She then studied in the private studios of Stanisław Batowski-Kaczor and Roman Bratkowski and in 1907 graduated from the Academy of Arts in Vienna; by other accounts, she was in Vienna from 1903 to 1908, at the school of industrial design. After her studies she travelled through the art centres of Europe, among them Munich, Paris and London.

Her first solo exhibition took place in Lviv in 1909: etchings, prints, watercolours, woodcuts and filigree. It was a great success, and her work was praised by Ivan Trush and other Ukrainian artists of the younger generation. She combined the folk art of western Ukraine, the Hutsul tradition in particular, with the devices of European Art Nouveau (the Secession). In 1912 she took part in the Ukrainian art exhibition in Kyiv, and later showed her work in Kraków, Warsaw, Poznań and other cities.

From 1909 she taught at a gymnasium in Lviv, and from 1910 to 1938 at a girls’ school in Przemyśl, where, with others, she helped found the Ukrainian museum Strywihor and lived for some time. In the 1920s and 1930s she worked a great deal for the book trade: she illustrated Ivan Franko, Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Vasyl Stefanyk and Yurii Fedkovych, and more than seventy children’s books in the series “For Our Littlest Ones”, among them Oscar Wilde’s “The Star-Child” (1920). Later Ukrainian publishers counted her designs for “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”, “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” and “Mykyta the Fox” among the golden holdings of Ukrainian book illustration. Rugs were a separate field: her sister wove kilims from her designs, about eighty of them. She also made pieces in enamel, bronze and majolica. Her graphic work includes the etchings “By the Lamp” and “By the Well”, the woodcuts “Dovbush” and “Winter”, the cycle “History of the Princely Times” and the linocut series “Ukrainian Writers”.

During the First World War she drew the sufferings of civilians and refugees; postcards after these works were printed in Vienna by the Ukrainian Women’s Committee to Aid Wounded Soldiers. Between 1928 and 1946 she covered almost all of western Ukraine on foot, working from life. From these journeys came the watercolour albums “Folk Architecture of the Western Regions of Ukraine” and “Folk Dress of the Western Regions of Ukraine” (1959, more than a hundred drawings).

After 1939 Kulchytska worked as an artist at the Shevchenko Museum in Lviv, and from 1940 she headed the folk art department of the Lviv Ethnographic Museum of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. From 1945 to 1954 she taught graphic art at the Ivan Fedorov Ukrainian Printing Institute, where she became a professor in 1948. It seems to me worth noting that under Soviet rule she did not leave, and that she petitioned various institutions for the release of arrested figures of Ukrainian culture and helped the families of those who had been repressed and exiled. She was named People’s Painter of the Ukrainian SSR in 1956.

She died on 8 March 1967 in Lviv and was buried in the Lychakiv Cemetery. In the same year she was posthumously awarded the Shevchenko State Prize of the Ukrainian SSR. The memorial museum opened in 1971 in her flat, on the basis of several thousand works that she had given to the Lviv museum.