THE KHARKIV STUDIO MOVEMENT AND BLUE LILY STUDIO AS AN ASPECT OF EUROPEAN ART PRACTICES

Abstract

The article examines the studio movement in Kharkiv in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how it was influenced by European cultural and artistic processes. The studios of Yegor Schrader (1875–1907), Yevhen Agafonov’s Blue Lily (1907–1912), Oleksiy Grot, Eduard Steinberg, Mykola Savvin, Oleksiy Zahonov (1909–1913), the Thistle (1913–1914), and Nakos’-Vykos’ (1914) were recipients of European artistic practices; they involved Ukraine in European artistic processes and contributed to the creation of a Ukrainian version of European styles and movements. A special role in Kharkiv’s artistic life was played by the Blue Lily studio, founded by Kharkiv artist Yevhen Agafonov, which quickly turned into an artistic association. Its members were engaged in painting, drawing, engraving, organized plein air, exhibitions, including innovative ones (The Ring, 1911, 1912), where they introduced the public to the new art that had burst upon Europe. The students published the literary and artistic almanac “Blue Lily” (1911), and were involved in theater activities. Yevhen Agafonov was a stage designer for the first cabaret theater in Kharkiv, the Blue Eye (1909–1911), which introduced the Kharkiv audience to modernist plays and modernist aesthetics. The Blue Lily Studio, focusing on contemporary European models, became a place of learning, experimentation and practice, one of the initiators of the Ukrainian avant-garde. The presence of national Ukrainian themes in the artistic works of the Studio Movement (in particular, Yevhen Agafonov) was an important contribution to the nation-building process. And the various types of creative activity of the studio artists turned Kharkiv into a European city involved in building a common European cultural space.