Verkhovyna

Volodymyr Yatsenko was a renowned master of lyrical landscape painting and art history writing.

Yatsenko’s paintings are held in museums across large and small cities of Ukraine, including Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lubny, Poltava, Ostroh, and others.

The artist was born in 1915 in the village of Savkivka, Zolotonosha district, Poltava Governorate (now in Cherkasy Oblast). From an early age, he chose art as his path.

From 1931 to 1937, he studied at the Kharkiv Art College under Oleksiy Kokel and Mykhailo Kozyk, and then at the Kharkiv Art Institute, where he trained in the studio of Mykola Samokysh and became his favorite student. 

He completed his studies in 1942 while in evacuation in Samarkand, where he met many artists including Vasyl Kasiyan, Illya Shtilman, Igor Grabar, Sergei Gerasimov, Dmitry Moor, Vladimir Favorsky, and Petro Pokarzhevsky.

After returning to Kharkiv from 1944 to 1952, he served as director of the Kharkiv Art Museum, overseeing its reconstruction, and taught at the Kharkiv Art Institute.

In the early 1950s, he moved to Kyiv and took an active part in exhibition activities. For nearly two decades — from 1970 to 1989 — he led the State Museum of Ukrainian Fine Arts (now the National Art Museum of Ukraine).

Volodymyr Yatsenko authored the monograph M. S. Samokysh (1945) and the album Mykola Samokysh (1979), researching his teacher's legacy.

The artist was awarded certificates of honor, orders, and medals.

The artist passed away on October 23, 2010, in Kyiv.

The majority of his paintings depict the nature of his native Ukraine — its steppes and forests.

Among Volodymyr Yatsenko's original paintings are Above the Dnipro (1957), On Chernecha Hora (1960), New Buildings of Kyiv (1965), In Zaporizhzhia (1964–1965), Wind (1969), Summer Day (1970), and others.

UFDA digitized three works by the artist from the collection of the Regional Communal Museum of Local History in Borshchiv: Flowers (1985), Verkhovyna (1978), and Familiar Landscape (1985). These paintings are now available for viewing on the fund's website.

The artist worked in the field of genre and landscape painting. His canvases convey the grandeur and harmony of Ukrainian nature. His compositions are built on smooth color transitions — from the rich greens of grass and trees to soft blue skies. The interplay of light and shadow lends his works depth, while his skilled brushwork makes them vivid and dynamic.