Yevheniia Evenbakh

Biography

Yevheniia Konstantynivna Evenbach was born in 1889 in Kremenchuk to a railroad worker. She studied painting in St. Petersburg, in particular with Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, and later graduated from Leningrad University (1925). An artist by vocation, she was the first person to systematically record Petrykivka painting, and thus opened it up to the world.

She met Dmytro Yavornytskyi by chance in the summer of 1911 in Katerynoslav, where Evenbach was making sketches in the Regional Museum. Yavornytskyi came over, looked at the works, and offered to travel to the villages. He himself had been impressed by what he saw in the huts of the Prydniprovia for several years and was looking for an artist who could accurately capture it. Yevheniia Kostiantynivna turned out to be just such a person.

In the summers of 1911 and 1913, she made two expeditions to the villages of the Katerynoslav region, recording fragments of the mural decor of huts in the form of sketches and tracings, and collecting paintings. One third of the samples are Petrykivka paintings. During her second expedition in 1913, she met Tetiana Pata, a meeting that gave her an impetus to further study and collect works by Ukrainian folk artists.

In 1913, an exhibition based on the collection was held in St. Petersburg, the first public display of Petrykivka painting outside of Ukraine. Evenbach herself lived a long creative life: she painted landscapes, watercolors, graphics, illustrated children’s books, and participated in exhibitions until the 1970s. She died in 1981.

Contribution to the research

Yevheniia Evenbach is the person thanks to whom Petrykivka painting received its first documentary evidence. Her watercolors on tracing paper, made with great care and respect for the originals, are of considerable historical and artistic interest, especially given that the wall paintings of that time have hardly survived: they were whitewashed and renewed every year.

The materials she collected are kept at the Yavornytskyi National History Museum in Dnipro, the National Museum of Ukrainian Decorative Arts, and the Russian Ethnographic Museum in St. Petersburg. They became the basis for the first scientific research and publications on Petrykivka painting, and the 1913 exhibition in St. Petersburg was the starting point for its official recording as an independent artistic phenomenon.