Background
Mykhailo Boychuk was born on October 30, 1882 in Romanivka, Ternopil region, Ukraine (formerly Austria-Hungary). He had a brother, Timofey Boychuk.
Михайло Бойчук
Mykhailo Boychuk was born on October 30, 1882 in Romanivka, Ternopil region, Ukraine (formerly Austria-Hungary). He had a brother, Timofey Boychuk.
Mykhailo Boychuk studied painting under Yuliaan Pankevych in Lviv. Subsequently he graduated from the Krakow Azademy of Fine Arts in 1905 and continued his studies in Vienna and Munich. Then he attended the Academie Ransom in Paris, studying with Paul Serusier from 1907 to 1910.
Mykhailo Boychuk founded his own studio-school in Paris in 1909. In 1910, he returned to Lviv, where he worked as a conservator at the National Museum. In 1911, he travelled to the Russian Empire, but, after World War I started, he was interned there as an Austrian citizen. After the war, Boychuk remained in Kiev.
In 1917, he became one of the founders of the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts, where he taught fresco and mosaic, and in 1920 was a rector.
By 1925, he already performed a number of high-profile monumental works, and formed a school of monumental painters which existed until his death.
Many of the Boychuk's works mainly involved frescoes and mosaics. In 1919 he painted murals for the Lutske Army Barracks in Kyiv and made frescoes for the Kiev Theater of Opera and Ballet. He also made frescoes for the Kharkiv Opera Theater in 1921, the Ukrainian SSR's pavilion at the First All-Russian Cottage Industry and Agriculture Exhibition in Moscow, and the Kiev Co-operative Institute in 1923. Later, he switched to the socialist realism style, in which his main works were murals for the Peasant Sanatorium in Odessa in 1927-1928 and for the Kharkiv Chervonozavodskyi Ukrainian Drama Theater in 1933-1935.
In 1937 Boychuk was accused of being an agent of the Vatican, arrested and executed on July 13, 1937 in Kiev, Ukraine.
Untitled
The Last Supper
Portrait of Andriy Sheptytsky
Frescoes of Kharkiv Chervonozavodsky theatre - The holiday of harvest
A Girl
Portrait of Sedliar
Prophet Elijah
Portrait of Taras Shevchenko
Milkmaid
Yaroslavna's Lament
Portrait of a woman
Exlibris
Two Under a Tree
Frescoes of Kharkiv Chervonozavodsky theatre - The holiday of harvest
Harvest
Portrait of Vladimir Lenin
Due to the Great Purge, a campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union which occurred from 1936 to 1938, Boychuk's Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine was disestablished. He was accused of being an agent of the Vatican and executed. Many of his works were destroyed.
In 1925, he co-founded the Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine.
He was married to Sofiia Nalepinska, also an artist. She was executed several months after him.
