The Carpathians

Havrylo Hliuk entered the history of fine arts of Ukraine and the world with his distinctive lyrical-poetic and, at the same time, realistically objective works on the theme of glorifying the working person.

Landscape and portrait painter. A seminal figure of the second wave of Transcarpathian painting of the 20th century. Havrylo Hliuk's original paintings have been exhibited in Kyiv, New York, Paris, Warsaw, Mexico City, Venice, and Caracas, and are held in numerous museums.

The artist was born in 1912 in the city of Sighetu Marmației (present-day Romania). He came from a Jewish family.

A passion for designing and crafting furniture — inherited from his father — and later a drive toward numerous drawings and sketches led Hliuk very early to study in workshops: first in craft workshops, and then in painting studios.

From 1931 to 1933 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest. By that time, the artist's family had relocated to Uzhhorod, which was then part of Czechoslovakia.

Extensive artistic exercises and plein air painting sessions yielded results. The artist developed a confident hand for painterly sketches and even found early success with audiences, selling his first works to admirers.

However, the political climate in Hungary shifted, and Hliuk was informed that his presence on Hungarian territory was no longer welcome. In 1933, Hliuk left Budapest. In Romania, he was conscripted into the army for a year and a half, completing his military service in the city of Sibiu. After his demobilization in the spring of 1936, due to his citizenship status the artist was unable to travel to Czechoslovakia where his parents lived, and was compelled to go to Bucharest instead.

Following the annexation of Bessarabia by the Soviet Union, Havrylo Martynovych enrolled as a second-year student at the art college in Chișinău. But all his plans were upended by the Second World War. Hliuk was mobilized into the labor army, where he worked in a technical unit, on railway construction, and at various other sites.

After the war and many years of hardship, he moved to Moldova, where he worked as an artist for newspapers and magazine editorial offices. In 1947 he became a member of the Union of Artists in Chișinău, Moldova. The artist's brother found Havrylo through the Red Cross. From 1947 onward, Havrylo settled in Uzhhorod, where his family lived. His sister, a concentration camp survivor, was eventually found in Venezuela.

Havrylo Hliuk became a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine in 1954 and was awarded the title of Honored Art Worker of Ukraine in 1968. For his painting Lumberjacks, he received the Grand Silver Medal at the 1958 World Exhibition in Brussels. He passed away in 1983 in Uzhhorod.

The artwork of Havrylo Hliuk included  genre scenes, portraits, and landscapes. Art critic Olena Polyanska noted the artist's enduring inclination toward depicting working people — lumberjacks, collective farm workers — and their lives in the fields and mountains. This is a defining characteristic of his work as a realist painter.

Art critics consider Lumberjacks on the Peace Watch, created in 1950, to be one of Havrylo Hliuk's finest works. Contemporaries praised it as tastefully conceived and masterfully executed. There is nothing contrived or artificial about it — on the contrary, the figures of the lumberjacks are bathed in sunlight, boldly lit and monumental in presence.

The painting that brought Hliuk European recognition was Lumberjacks, completed in 1954. In 1958, the work was awarded the Grand Silver Medal at the World Exhibition in Brussels.

Havrylo Hliuk’s paintings include Village Street (1947), At Rest (1950), Lumberjacks on the Peace Watch (1950–1951), Lumberjacks (1954), Collective Farm Woman from the Teresva Valley (1955), Mountain Landscape (1962), Evening Falls (1967),Threshing (1970), and others.

UFDA digitized The Carpathians (1979) by the artist from the collection of the Regional Communal Museum of Local History in Borshchiv. This painting is now available for viewing on the fund's website.

Hliuk became one of the founding figures of the Transcarpathian postwar landscape school. The decorative quality inherent to this school left a significant mark on the painterly character of the artist's canvases.

The artist loved to paint from life — what professionals call alla prima — where the harmony of movements flowed freely onto paper in fluid lines and expressive strokes. The portrait occupied an important place in the artist's body of work. His psychologically nuanced portraits of contemporaries convey to the viewer a depth of insight into the subject through what can be described as the sitter's own "spiritual confession."

Where Hliuk's portrait works revealed a tendency toward the monumentalization of figures — most notably in his portrait-genre compositions — his landscape canvases expressed the principles of decorativism, closely aligned in stylistic sensibility with the work of other Transcarpathian artists of the same era.у.

The artist left behind a substantial graphic legacy, which bears witness to his considerable mastery of drawing. A confident, assured hand is felt throughout his many sketches and fully realized graphic compositions.