Yevheniia Berchenko

Biography

Yevheniia Berchenko is a Ukrainian art historian and researcher of folk decorative art of the first third of the twentieth century. Since 1920, she has been a graduate student at the Department of History of Ukrainian Culture at the Institute of Public Education (Kyiv).

In 1924, she took part in an ethnographic expedition along the Dnipro River led by academician Dmytro Yavornytskyi, where she got acquainted with the tradition of wall painting in the southern regions of Ukraine.

Contribution to Petrykivka Painting Research

Yevheniia Berchenko became one of the key researchers of the early period of studying Petrykivka painting. In 1928, she organized an exhibition of Ukrainian wall painting collections in Leningrad, where she presented original drawings from villages in the Katerynoslav, Kryvyi Rih, and Kremenchuk districts. It was the first large-scale public presentation of Ukrainian wall paintings outside of Ukraine.

She is the author of the fundamental work Wall Painting (Dnipropetrovs’k Region) (Kharkiv - Kyiv: State Publishing House of Ukraine, 1930. - 44 p.), one of the first scientific monographs on Petrykivka and related traditions of wall decorative art in the Dnipropetrovs’k region. Berchenko’s work has become a valuable source for Ukrainian art history and remains important for understanding the evolution of Petrykivka painting in its authentic environment-on the walls of huts.