Nataliia Hlukhenska
Biography
Nataliia Hlukhenka was born on 29 October 1909 in the city of Klintsy (now Bryansk Oblast) into a family of teachers: her father came from a Cossack family, and her great-great-grandfather was a clerk in the Sich.
In 1927, she graduated from the Kyiv Art and Industrial Vocational School with a degree in painting. In 1931, she graduated from the Pedagogical Faculty of the Kyiv Institute of Proletarian Art Culture with a degree in folk and decorative art. Her teachers included Fedir Krychevskyi, Max Helman, Serhii Kolos, Yevhen Sahaidachnyi, Serhii Hiliarov, and Mykola Makarenko.
Almost all of her professional life was connected with Dnipro: in 1931-1935 she taught graphic disciplines at the Dnipro Art College; in 1935-1941 and 1944-1968 - at the Department of Descriptive Geometry and Graphics of the Dnipro Civil Engineering Institute and at the Dnipro Art School. It was during this period that she constantly visited Petrykivka and the surrounding villages, got acquainted with local artists and systematized their traditions.
In 1964, she defended her PhD thesis on the topic “Application of Ukrainian Ornament of Petrykivka Village in the Art Industry ”, one of the first academic studies of Petrykivka. She has been an associate professor since 1965. She has been a member of the Union of Soviet Artists of Ukraine (now the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine) since 1961. Among her students are sculptor Vasyl Borodai, painters Petro Marho, Andrii Potapenko, and Mykola Rodzin.
She was the wife of the artist Oleksii Vandalovskyi and the mother of the artist Viktor Vandalovskyi. Later she moved to Kyiv, where she died on March 14, 2004.
Contribution to Petrykivka Painting Research
Nataliia Hlukhenka is one of the most influential figures in the history of research and popularization of Petrykivka painting in the twentieth century. Her 1964 PhD thesis was the first academic work to systematically analyze Petrykivka ornamentation in the context of the art industry.
She paid special attention to the senior masters of the Petrykivka school - Tetiana Patia, Iryna Pylypenko, Nadiia Tymoshenko, Hanna Isaieva, and Fedir Panko** - as well as to documenting the history of the Petrykivka School of Decorative Painting under the leadership of Tetiana Patia. Along with her research, she was actively involved in organizational work: in 1978-1987, as a member of the Ukrainian Society for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, she helped organize traveling exhibitions of Ukrainian folk artists abroad.
Key innovation: It was Natalia Hlukhenka who introduced the tradition of every Petrykivka master signing his or her work**. This fundamentally changed the status of Petrykivka from an anonymous folk craft to an author’s art, where each work has a specific author. This innovation made possible the very notion of the “Petrykivka school” with its generations, dynasties, and personal styles.
Key works
Author of over 200 publications. Among the most important:
- Petrykivka painting on porcelain and glass - Dnipropetrovs’k, 1958
- *Petrykivka Masters of Decorative Painting - Kyiv, 1959
- *Tetiana Pata // Decorative art of the USSR. - 1960. - No. 5
- *Petrykivka decorative paintings - Kyiv: Art, 1965
- *Petrykivka paintings - Kyiv, 1973
- *Petrykivka mural painting in Kyiv // Kyiv. - 1988. - No. 10 Albums-monographs: Tetiana Pata (Kyiv, 1975), Petrykivka (Dnipropetrovs’k, 1975), Fedir Panko (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1978).
Catalogs: “Exhibition of Petrykivka Decorative Painting” (1979 - in Greek; 1981 - in Spanish).
**Postcard set: “Fedir Panko” (1986).
Author of articles in the Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine. Along with Borys Butnyk-Siverskyi, she is a major figure in the art historical understanding of Petrykivka in the Soviet era.