147 years since the birth of Fedir Krychevsky

On May 22, 1879, Fedir Krychevsky was born — a painter, educator, and the first rector of the Academy of Arts in Kyiv, who together with his brother Vasyl helped define Ukrainian modernism in painting, graphic art, and architecture.

Fedir Krychevsky was born in Lebedyn, in Slobozhanshchyna, into a large family of zemstvo paramedic Hryhoriy Krychevsky and Paraska Krychevska. His father came from a Jewish family and converted to Orthodoxy, while his mother was Ukrainian. The brothers spent their childhood in Vorozhba on the banks of the Psel River, surrounded by village houses, fairs, ornaments, and folk art, as well as near the estate of their wealthy neighbor, Count Vasyl Kapnist. A Russian nobleman of Ukrainian origin and grandson of the poet Vasyl Kapnist, the Count allowed young Fedir to use his library, study his collections of paintings and graphic art, and copy portraits of Cossacks.

His older brother, Vasyl Krychevsky, became an architect, graphic artist, and the author of the small coat of arms of the Ukrainian People’s Republic featuring the trident. He designed the Poltava Zemstvo building — one of the key landmarks of Ukrainian modernist architecture.

Fedir worked primarily in painting: he portrayed peasants, family scenes, portraits, and monumental compositions in which Ukrainian everyday life stopped being treated as “ethnography” and became contemporary art.

In his self-portrait, he depicted himself wearing a traditional sheepskin coat, leaving no distance between a European-trained artist and the world he came from.

In 1917, together with Heorhiy Narbut, Mykhailo Boychuk, Oleksandr Murashko, and other artists, Fedir Krychevsky co-founded the Ukrainian Academy of Arts in Kyiv and became its first rector. In Kyiv, he lived on Heorhiivskyi Lane near Saint Sophia Cathedral, maintained a studio, taught students, and trained a generation of Ukrainian artists.

In 1928, Krychevsky’s triptych Life was exhibited at the Venice Biennale. European newspapers wrote extensively about the work, and Krychevsky himself was described as one of the strongest artists represented in the Soviet pavilion.

Then came war and repression. During the Nazi occupation, the artist was deported to Königsberg for forced labor. After the war, he returned to Kyiv largely on foot, only to face Soviet interrogations and exile to Irpin. Krychevsky refused to paint an official portrait of Stalin, lost the ability to work, and died in poverty and hunger in 1947.

Today we remember Fedir and Vasyl Krychevsky not simply as “artists of their era,” but as people who consciously built Ukrainian culture — in Kyiv, Poltava, Vorozhba, through studios, academies, architecture, and paintings. The postage stamp dedicated to Fedir Krychevsky is one more way to speak about his legacy today.