Vasyl Kasiian

Biography

Sources give Kasiian’s date of birth differently: most often 1 January 1896, but also 20 December 1896, and even the year 1899. I would keep to 1896, as most publications do.

He was born in Mikulyntsi, now part of Snyatyn, then in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, within Austria-Hungary. The family was large; according to family tradition, the line descended from Armenians, his grandfather served as a priest in an Armenian church, and in his father’s house the local branch of the Sich sports and fire-brigade society used to meet. He studied at the secondary school in Snyatyn and finished the gymnasium in Kolomyia.

In the First World War he served in the Austro-Hungarian army. According to some accounts, he was sent to the Italian Front; in 1918 he ended up in a prisoner-of-war camp at Monte Cassino and returned to Austria only in 1920.

Then came Prague. From 1920 to 1926 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts under Max Švabinský, attended lectures on philosophy at Charles University, and in 1921–1923 made posters in aid of the famine-stricken in Ukraine. In his early woodcuts and linocuts he turned to the lives of workers: “The Widow’s Mite”, “Carpathian Mother”, “Looking for Work”, “Homeless Unemployed”, “Strike” (1926). He also learned from Ukrainian printmaking of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. In 1927, to his design, a monument to soldiers of the Ukrainian Galician Army was put up in the military cemetery in Liberec, in what is now the Czech Republic: a mother with two children bends over a fallen soldier. It is his only sculptural work.

In 1923 Kasiian took Soviet citizenship, in February 1927 he moved to Kyiv and became a professor at the Kyiv Art Institute. In 1930 he moved to Kharkiv, took part in founding the Ukrainian Polygraphic Institute, the printing and publishing school, and headed a department there. From 1930 to 1941 he worked at the Kharkiv Art Institute, and from 1940 he was its deputy director. He belonged to the Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine and the Zhovten group. Works known from these years include the linocut series “Dnieper Construction” (1932–1934), illustrations to Nikolai Gogol’s “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka”, and to the “Kobzar” (1934), where the drawings are done in pen and watercolour. In 1937, according to some accounts, he was at risk of repression, but for reasons unknown he escaped it.

From the start of the war he was part of the team producing “agit-windows”, propaganda posters displayed in windows, at the House of the Red Army in Kharkiv. In January 1942 the institutes were evacuated to Talgar near Alma-Ata, then to Samarkand. There he made the posters “Captured Fascists”, “Our People Have Come”, “All the Nation’s Strength to Defeat the Enemy” and “Into Battle, Slavs!” (1942), which is called one of the best political posters of the war.

In 1944 Kasiian returned to Kyiv, headed the graphic arts department at the art institute and received the title of People’s Painter of the USSR. In 1947 he was elected a full member of the USSR Academy of Arts. In 1944–1949 and 1962–1968 he chaired the board of the Union of Artists of Ukraine, the official professional organisation of artists; from 1955 he headed the fine arts section at the Institute of Art Studies, Folklore and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. He was a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR and a member of the Communist Party from 1946. He took part in numerous exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale.

Shevchenko remained his main subject. He created five cycles of illustrations and designs for the “Kobzar”, designed separate editions of “The Hired Girl” and “Haidamaky”, and wrote about thirty articles on Shevchenko studies. In 1942 he reported that he had illustrated and designed 102 books. He also illustrated Ivan Franko, Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Lesya Ukrainka and Vasyl Stefanyk. In 1960 he made the cycle of large prints “Kyiv Metro Builders”, and in 1947 the series of etchings “Lenin and Ukraine”. In 1964 he received the Shevchenko State Prize, and in 1971 the State Prize of the Ukrainian SSR for taking part in the six-volume “History of Ukrainian Art”. On 11 January 1974 he was awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labour. In his last years he made murals for the Feofaniia hospital in Kyiv. In all he created about ten thousand works.

Kasiian died in Kyiv in late June 1976; sources give different dates, most often 29 June. He is buried in Baikove Cemetery. In 1982 a museum devoted to him opened in Snyatyn, and in 1978 a prize in his name was established for the best political poster.