Alexis Gritchenko

Alexis Gritchenko (Oleksa Hryshchenko) was born in 1883 in Krovelets, in what is today the Sumy region, and emigrated to Paris in 1921. Well traveled, Gritchenko spent significant time in Crimea, Constantinople, Moscow, Spain, Portugal and southern France.

Gritchenko had early success in Paris—shortly upon arrival in 1921 he managed to submit 24 works for the Salon d’Automne exhibition entitled “The Spirit of the Orient”. Shortly after, in February 1922 his first solo show featuring his Constantinople period works of 1919 was held at Kyivan Jacques Povolozki’s bookstore. Although he made no sales, the exposure earned him the attention of prominent reviewers. In 1923, his new gallery dealer sold 14 works to millionaire Albert C. Barnes, a chemist who had come to Paris to buy art for the new museum for his workers enjoyment in Merion, Pennsylvania. In 1931, Gritchenko’s work was featured in the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists in Lviv’s first exhibition. Organized by Sviatoslav Hordynsky, the exhibition featured 116 works by 42 artists – Ukrainian artists working in Paris, as well as prominent French, Belgian and Italian artists, such as Picasso, Chagall, Severini, Gromaire, Modigliani, and Derain.

Among Alexis Gritchenko’s works in UIMA’s permanent collection are several lithographs of landscapes from the artist’s travels abroad in Greece and Turkey and the areas surrounding Cagnes sur Mer in Provence on the French Riviera, where he made his home after 1927.

Gritchenko’s painting, Three Cypress Trees, 1956, is based on a Provence landscape and bears some affinities with works by Van Gogh and Cezanne who also resided in that area many years earlier. Like Van Gogh’s Starry Night, 1889, an image of Saint-Rémy de Provence, Gritchenko has captured a scene of a distant mountainous landscape anchored by cypress trees in the foreground. He has chosen a more panoramic, downward angle view than Van Gogh’s landscape profile, as if Gritchenko was painting from the top of a mountain himself. This strategy gave him the opportunity to capture the area’s topography and the patterns and textures determined by farmers’ cultivation of the land. Color functions as both an expressive tool for conveying the sublimity of the purple, blue and pink evening sky, and as a device for asserting the composition’s underlying planar, two-dimensional structure.