КИЇВСЬКИЙ ПЕРІОД ЖИТТЯ І ТВОРЧОСТІ ІЛЛІ ШУЛЬГИ (1928-1938)

Abstract

Research work devoted to the details of the Kyiv period of life and work of Ukrainian painter Illia Shulga. This period covers the years 1928-1938, at this time there were rapid changes in the artistic life of Ukraine, which affected the fate of the artist. For most of his life the painter lived and worked at a distance from active artistic life, only in the late 1920s he manage to move to Kyiv. Despite the noticeable influence of avant-garde in artistic life, Illia Shulga consistently followed a realistic approach to art, it was the influence of his education, obtained at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. He successfully worked in various genres (portrait, landscape, genre paintings). During his lifetime, the artist has created about 1,000 works (the Kyiv period accounts for about 170 works), but most of them have not survived to our time. Most of Shulga's works disappeared during World War II. Today, a little more than 20 of his works are preserved in the museums of Ukraine from the huge creative heritage of the artist. The article introduces a number of documents that shed light on the details of the artist's biography. In particular, the criminal case of Illia Shulga, which recorded a number of details of the last period of the artist's life. The documents of the case shed light on the details of the arrest, the course of the investigation, and the reasons for sentencing the painter. The publication also analyzed the most complete currently known list of Shulga’s works, which includes 564 items. This list was compiled in 1941 by the artist's wife, and later this list and a number of other documents related to the life and work of the artist were deposited in the Archive-Museum D. Antonovych of the Ukrainian Free Academy of Sciences in the United States. The appendices contain a list of the artist's works that are currently stored in museums in Ukraine and a link to the list of the artist's works.