Background
Vasyl Yermylov was born on March 22, 1894, in the city of Kharkiv, Ukraine.
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Vasyl Yermylov was born on March 22, 1894, in the city of Kharkiv, Ukraine.
In 1910 Vasyl studied at the School for Applied Art in Kharkiv, and had lessons in the studio of Eduard Steinberg, having an interest in fresco painting and mosaic work. In 1912 he attended the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. In 1914 Yermylov returned to the School for Applied Art (Kharkiv) where he graduated with a Diploma in Decorative Painting.
Yermylov burst on the scene with his painted propaganda trains, his poster designs, political parades, and agit-automobiles. “Street art” also affected the design of public buildings. In 1919, for example, Yermylov and his colleagues decorated the foyer of the Kharkiv Circus. For the Kharkiv Actors’ Club, Yermylov painted murals based on the poetry of Velemir Khlebnikov, and in 1920 he decorated the walls of the Red Army Club. Yermylov’s early works – which he showed at exhibitions in Moscow and Kharkiv – were etchings reminiscent of Symbolism and their manner of execution had much in common with the plastic language of what was then called style moderne. Yermylov also painted his meticulous “Roll of Bread” in 1914.
That same year Yermylov visited Sergei Shchukin’s collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings in Moscow, making copies of Picasso’s pictures and paying homage to the Parisian master with his “Bread. Plate. Knife’ (1915). His Cubist composition “Night Café” (1917), on the other hand, looks like an etching, but it is now enhanced with newspaper collage, combining the velvet-like texture of a metal etching with the rigid clarity of a typographical font. It was shown at the “Union of the Seven” exhibition in Kharkiv and was reproduced in the 1918 catalog Seven plus Three.
From his autobiography we learn that Yermylov was drafted into the army as a private in 1915 and the following year was sent to the front with the First Caucasian Cavalry Corps. Military service brought him many experiences – frontline action, contusion, military detention, even jail; and he was also decorated with the Cross of St. George. Returning from Persia to Kharkiv in the spring of 1918, he painted “Dream” (now lost).
Two years later Yermylov decorated the Central Club of the Red Army Garrison, the surviving studies and documentary photographs testify to a totally new artistic style. Undoubtedly, Yermylov was familiar with the art of Mykhailo Boychuk who was teaching at the Ukrainian Academy of Art and developing his Neo-Byzantine school of art. For example, Yermylov incorporated the ironic and the grotesque rather than the hieratic into his mural for one of the Club halls – the so-called “Chess Room.”
While he was working for the Red Army Club in the early 1920s, Yermylov began to develop his Experimental Compositions, abstract works consisting of sparse geometric figures and other elements. Thanks to hands-on experience in Kharkiv and then Moscow, Yermylov soon excelled in drawing and painting. Meeting David Burliuk, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova and visiting Moscow exhibitions and collections, Yermylov was introduced to radically new ideas. Cubism, in particular, attracted him with its textures, its emphatic exposure of the structures and planes of objects and its “zoom-lens” effect.
After the Revolution, Yermylov headed the Artistic-Industrial Section of the Art Committee in Kharkiv. In 1920, he was employed at the South Russian Telegraph Agency and, in 1921 he was appointed head of the studio of the Art Industry Enterprise, and also began work in the Central Studio of Artistic Design and Propaganda. Thereafter, he moved from this kind of voluminous painting to the colored wooden relief: his “Guitar” (1924), for example, is no longer a dynamic melody, but a Constructivist harmony – which, with the beauty of logic and the perfection of an instrument, evokes a different sound.
At this time, Yermylov was heavily involved in color analysis, studying the theories of Wilhelm Ostwald and drawing up his own color primer or so-called ABC of the Language of Painting. He took the primary colors and extended their effect by whitening or darkening the pigment with achromatic white and black so as to obtain a great number of tints and shades. Much later, in 1945, he suggested establishing a laboratory of painting technique and technology at the Kharkiv Art Institute and two years after that presented a detailed teaching plan for a course on chromatics. In 1957, Yermylov compiled a curriculum entitled “The Spatial Idea” that included topics such as “The Esthetics of Numbers and Compasses” and “Linear Thought.”
In the early 1920s, Yermylov was particularly fond of working with textures, often introducing metal into his reliefs. In “Portrait” (1923), for example, a metal sheet renders the surface of the skin, forms the volume of the head, and outlines the round collar. In another work of the same year, “Portrait of a Man”, Yermylov balances the face within the spatial coordinates of verticals and horizontals, accenting the perpendicular lines and the soft arches; supported by the emphatic angles and congruent with the frame, a sophisticated silhouette glides over the black space of the background. Yermylov might be called not only a Constructivist, but also a founder of Minimalism. He needed only the outline of a circle or of a right angle to establish a correlation between our human world and the cosmos in a clear and simple way, tempered, however, by intuition.
These qualities can be identified in “Composition No. 3.” The broad wooden frame here is also a part of the composition, while the floating fibers of the wooden texture produce a soft rhythm, accentuating the purity of the white area which, in turn, assumes a cosmic resonance. The purity of this composition in wood, brass, oil, and varnish is comparable to Husserl’s phenomenological reduction in philosophy, for here is a dialogue with the object as such. Of course, with its white background, its arch and diagonals, “Composition No. 3” has much in common with Suprematism, although the density and weight distinguish it.
Along with these abstract compositions, Yermylov also constructed a number of works that connect with visible and tangible phenomena, among them the commemorative plaques for “Lenin’s death: 21 of January. 6.50” (Museum Ludwig, Cologne) and “Hills. 18.50. 21. 1. 1924” (Fine Art Fund Ltd., London). Yermylov also made an another panel consisting of four sections dedicated to the memory of Lenin.
Yermylov moved on from the commemorative plaques to designing cigarette packs, supporting the Constructivist aspiration to import art into everyday life-after all, conscientious proletarians would be carrying the cigarette packs Lenin, llich and Hammer and Sickle in their pockets. Yermylov fulfilled this public commission with the usual formal logic: he painted the curve of a sickle into a red square; he placed a hammer horizontally and enfolded the crimson circle in a zigzag of a black ribbon carrying the name of llich.
For Yermylov scale was not especially important – for he always carried out his assignment (whether great or small) in a monumental way. For example, he designed an advertising platform for the exhibition “10 Years of October” actual size and with real material, which then became the highpoint on the cover of the anniversary edition of the magazine New Art. What made a big difference was the way Yermylov used various materials and textures or the way in which he played with the flatness of paper or the open space of a town square, i.e. how he resolved these formal issues.
Yermylov’s Constructivism is well represented by his graphic works. In the 1920s he was greatly involved in designing books, especially covers, rendering typographical signs monumentally as in a playbill. He applied the principles of Cubo-Futurism, Constructivism, and Suprematism to the books that he designed, thus bringing the art of the avant-garde closer to the masses. Still, in the 1920s, Yermilov and other Ukrainian constructivists did not use typeset for their book covers, simply because at that time publishing-houses lacked types that could be polished and perfected to meet the new demands.
One way of importing the avant-garde into life was to apply the traditional and sacral color triad – white, black, and red. The cover of the catalog of the “Exhibition of Ukrainian Book Graphics” (Kharkiv, 1929), for example, reminds us of Piet Mondrian. Certainly, we recognize a similar quest for harmonious equilibrium, not in colors, but in the interplay of black and white, the black being the letters composed in different typefaces and fonts. Yermilov decorated the brochure entitled “Bolshevik Crops” with gridded, Suprematist compositions.
Yermylov also combined the collage techniques of revolutionary propaganda (photographs, newspaper and magazine clips) with the Constructivist elements of metal and wood. That is how he composed the two wall newspapers called “Generator” and “Cable Cars” that he showed at the Press Exhibition in Cologne in 1928. In the latter he used a collapsible screen to create a portable, wall-mounted construction, parts of which could be folded up, so that when the newspaper was open, it could be read from both sides. In “Generator”, Yermylov presented a centerfold of five equal planes of complex counterbalanced, rectangular forms. In the collages incorporating photographs, Yermylov was again appealing to immediate, visual reality, even if his objects and compositions were also “things in themselves” – for we are also aware of another world, self-sufficient and independent.
In 1929, Yermylov made a few compositions incorporating tangible objects such as a knife, a box of matches or a plate and a hunk of bread, the latter two made of wood. Yermylov’s artifacts strike us by their corporeality, their substance and their flesh, since he was representing the visible world. He transformed reality analytically, he assembled abstract “experimental compositions”, he created new objects that entered houses, clubs, streets, space and railroads, he was drawn to the sheen of metal, the transparency of glass and the fibrous structure of a wood surface.
Yermylov constructed a universal order out of the materials at his disposal. He asserted the value of the ordinary by exposing the fundamental, architectonic principles of everyday objects – their simplicity and their authenticity. In creating a pictorial composition such as “Box of Matches” (1922) Yermylov was approaching reality as something totally concrete, but, in making the familiar unfamiliar, he also arouses our intuition and reminds us that beneath every object there is the unknown quality of matter itself, its flesh and its structure. Vasyl Yermylov died on January 6, 1968 in Kharkiv.
The post-Revolutionary development of art in Kharkiv is often referred to as the “Yermilov” period. To this day, he is regarded as the leader of the Ukrainian Constructivist school and a key figure of the avant-garde. The works that Yermilov created in the early 1920s – what he described as “experimental” – are especially important, even if his artistic evolution of the 1910s and 1920s lies outside canons and conventional sequences.
Decorative Composition
1912Bread
1914Guitar
1919Lady with a Fan
1919Composition. the Beginning
1920Sketch for Design of the Train 'Red Ucraine'
1920Mandolin
1920Three Compositions for Book Design (ending)
1922Female Portrait
1923Relief
1923Arlequin
1924Cover of 'Avant Garde'
1929Palace of Pioneers and Octobrists in Kharkov. Interior Design Project
1934On the beach. Morning. Evening.
1936Vasyl Yermylov Fair Use Design for Cigarettes
For Yermylov, as for many of his contemporaries, the name of Lenin was synonymous with “revolutionary” in its broadest sense. For an artist foreign to political doctrine such as Yermylov, here was a universal notion of global transformation according to the laws of reason. In 1948, expelled from the Union of Artists of the USSR and the target of merciless criticism, Yermylov wrote to his old friend, the artist Oleksandr Khvostenko-Khvostov: “imagine, how it feels… to be formalist, cosmopolitan, unpatriotic… that I’ve been expelled is nothing less than evil and slanderous”. Even in the 1960s the artist still believed that the “Lenin era represented a totally new style and form in the fine arts” and when we look at his works of the 1920s, we cannot but be impressed by the ways in which he melded socio-political ideas and the pure esthetics of material.
Vasyl Yermylov adhered to the artistic traditions of Avant-garde, Constructivism, and Cubo-Futurism. Yermilov was trying to resolve complex formal assignments, producing multifarious, but still logical, combinations of materials and textures – wood, cardboard, copper, glass, wood shavings, oil, enamel. Both in monumental commissions and in the graphic designs, Yermilov took special account of mass psychology, turning to the traditions of folk art and primitivism as well as to contemporary artistic experience. His evolution was relentless, moving from fresco paintings through Cubism and mass propaganda towards Constructivism and the Experimental Compositions, Yermylov’s commitment to the material, painterly surface and to the creative process itself is constant.
Quotations: “I did my best to ensure that the images reflected their original ethnicity. To obtain this result, I rendered the figures according to the spirit of old Ukrainian painting and etching.”
From 1911 to 1912 he was a member of the Golubaya Liliya (Blue Lily) in Kharkiv. In 1913 – 1914 he was a member of the group Budiak (Weed), Kharkiv. In 1918 he founded the group League of Seven, together with the artist Maria Sinyakova.
Quotes from others about the person
Yermylov’s precise calculations keep clashing with poetic explosions.
