Ukrainian painter Mikhail Bozhiy

22 August 2021

I recently bought this oil painting by Mikhail Bozhiy, from a seller in Ukraine. I spotted it when I was trawling the internet, trying to find out about another mid-20th-century Ukrainian painter, Leonid Stil (more about him in a future blogpost…). I was a little apprehensive – buying an artwork that I had only seen online – but I needn’t have worried as it’s even more wonderful than I’d hoped. The name of the artist seemed familiar to me and I realised it was because, about a year ago, I had bought a postcard through ebay of this painting by him – ‘A Nurse’:

A Nurse. 1955

Something about the nurse spoke to me – possibly because this was when we were in the early scariest stage of the pandemic, and her calm expression and of course her profession, seemed soothing. I’ve had the card propped up in my study as a kind of talisman since I got it. And the style of the painting with its loose expressive brushwork – celebrating an everyday Soviet heroine going about her work – is also very much to my taste. I don’t have any information about the woman in my painting, which is dated 1969. She could be in the medical profession too – or perhaps she works in a dairy or a bakery. The advantage of not knowing is that I can imagine a story for her.

Details on the internet about Bozhiy’s life are sparse, but there are many images of his work, most of which seem to have been done in the 1950s:

A Milkmaid. 1950s

Svetlana Shipunova, an outstanding student. 1950

At the Table

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bozhiy was born in Mykolaiv, Ukraine in 1911. From 1930 to 1933 he studied at the Mykolaiv Art Technical School. In 1936 he moved with his wife to Odessa, where he worked as an animator at the film studio, and in 1938 he exhibited some portrait sketches at the Regional Art Exhibition. During the Great Patriotic War, Bozhiy was not sent to the front due to his poor state of health, but was engaged in creating war posters and satirical drawings. After the liberation of Odessa in April 1944 he started his own creative work again. Important shows include the All-Union Art Exhibitions in Moscow in 1950, 1951, 1952 and 1955. Bozhiy specialised in portraits and genre paintings. Well-known works include ‘Svetlana Shipunova, an Outstanding Student’ (1950), ‘A Nurse’ (1955) and ‘Thoughts’, an image of the revered Ukrainian writer, ethnographer and political figure, Taras Shevchenko, (1959-60) – all now in the collection of the Kyiv Museum of Ukrainian Art. In 1958 Bozhiy became a Soviet academician and in 1963 was awarded the title of ‘People’s Artist of the USSR’. He died in Odessa in 1990.