Hutsul Folk Art

Stefaniia Hebus-Baranetska is among the distinguished Ukrainian graphic artists.

She was a master of woodcut engraving, known both in Ukraine and abroad. Hebus-Baranetska's works are held in the National Art Museum of Ukraine, the National Museum in Lviv, and in museum, gallery, and private collections in Ukraine and beyond.

The artist was born in 1905 in Przemyśl. She received her initial artistic training at Oleksa Novakivskyi's painting school in Lviv, which she entered in 1926 while studying art history at Lviv University.

She took part in the reporting exhibitions of Novakivsky's students held at the Academic House, including the Second Exhibition, ceremonially opened in October 1928 in the presence of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytskyi.

In 1933, she graduated from the Lviv Polytechnic (art department), where her teachers included Osyp Kurylas, Jan Rozen, Ludwik Tyrowicz, and Ya. K. Olpynsky. After graduating, she worked as a teacher of graphic art, tapestry weaving, and composition at the Lviv School of Applied Arts.

In 1934, she took part in art exhibitions of the Ukrainian Society of Friends of Art in Lviv and Stanyslaviv for the first time.

From 1937, the artwork of Stefaniia Hebus-Baranetska was exhibited abroad. From 1946, she took part in republican exhibitions, and from 1960, in all-Union exhibitions.

Solo exhibitions of her work were held in Lviv in 1957, 1958, 1962, and 1966, and in Kyiv in 1967.

The artist died in 1985.

The artist worked in the field of easel graphic art and woodcut engraving. In her woodcuts, she poetically depicted images of the Ukrainian peasantry, the picturesque Ukrainian landscape, and architectural monuments. During the Soviet period, she depicted the life of working people in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR. She is the author of numerous bookplates.

Hebus-Baranetska was drawn primarily to genre scenes: her works reflect the life of the western Ukrainian village and its people. She was also attracted to landscape, in which the main components were architectural motifs of town and village, as well as small-format applied engraving — narrative and greeting postcards and bookplates.

Among Stefaniia Hebus-Baranetska’s original graphic works are The Shepherd (1935), Folk Dances (1937), Collective Farm Life (1947), Monument to Taras Shevchenko in Kyiv (1961), Kateryna (1964), and many others.

UFDA digitised four works by the artist from the collection of the Regional Communal Museum of Local History in Borshchiv, including Monument to Taras Shevchenko in Kyiv (1961) and Hutsul Folk Art (1965).