Oleksandr Bohomazov 1880-1930 - the Lost Futurist of Ukraine

Oleksandr Bohomazov’s beginning in life was not easy and his troubles were to deeply impact his life as an artist. His mother walked out on the family when he was an infant. Bohomazov was himself to write: ‘as for father, we kept our distance from him. We feared him. We were strangers.’ Lacking in affection, the child became fragile and introspective, constantly seeking the love he had not been given. He set out on a career in art without the support of his father and in 1908 he met a fellow student at the Academy of Arts in Kyiv – the bohemian Wanda Monastyrska, who became his muse and the love of his life. By 1913 Bohomazov’s ardent pursuit of Wanda had born fruit; the pair were married in August in Boyarka, outside Kyiv.

This seismic event set off an ‘explosion of creativity’ within him. It set him on a new path, unencumbered by emotional anguish, to a new language of Futurism, the equal of his European contemporaries whose work he never saw. Having never left the Russian, nor Soviet, empires in his lifetime, this Kyiv-based artist can have heard about the new tendencies in Western Art only through magazines or publications. Nonetheless, Bohomazov managed to create masterpieces no less exceptional or ground-breaking than those of his European contemporaries. Judge this for yourselves in today's lecture.