MYKOLA HLUSHСHENKO’S «SELF-PORTRAIT» OF 1923: IN THE MIRROR OF THE RENAISSANCE

Abstract

This article is a study of Mykola Hlushchenko’s self-portrait, created in 1923, during the artist’s «Berlin» period (1919–1924). The purpose of the article is to analyze the peculiarities of the artistic, stylistic and figurative structure of the work in the context of the traditions of portrait painting of the Northern Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance and the art of Germany in the 1920s. An analysis of the literature on the topic has shown that among Ukrainian art studies, a lot of research is devoted to the work of Mykola Hlushchenko. The main attention of scholars is focused on the works of the French period and paintings of the master’s mature work; most studies examine his landscape compositions, highlight the influence of Impressionism and Fauvism on the artist’s creative tastes and style. In the latest publications, books by B. Pinchevska and K. Lebedieva, the chronology of events is clarified and the facts of the artist’s biography are summarized; attention is focused on his intelligence activities. It is this aspect that has recently led to an increase in interest in the artist’s personality and has led to controversial statements about the relative artistic value of his works. A thorough art historical analysis of Glushchenko’s Self-Portrait will significantly complement the existing research on the «Berlin period», which was the basis for further defining the artist’s creative guidelines. An additional theoretical basis was provided by works on art history by Ukrainian and foreign scholars, which reveal the peculiarities of Renaissance portrait painting: the iconography of male portraits, the symbolism of the depicted attributes. On the basis of typology of visual material (male portraits of the Renaissance) and comparative studies, the article conducts an iconographic and iconological analysis, which made it possible to identify the peculiarities of the plastic and figurative structure of Glushchenko’s Self-Portrait. The article analyses the compositional and tonal-coloristic structure of Mykola Hlushchenko’s self-portrait. Particular attention is paid to the study of the figurative structure in view of the role and semantic meanings of the depicted attributes: a signet ring, a thistle. The influence of Otto Dix on Glushchenko’s work is revealed, and the connections between the early self-portraits of both artists and the traditional iconography of Northern Renaissance portraiture are established. It has been found that Mykola Hlushchenko’s self-portrait (1923) is an allusion to Albrecht Dürer’s work «Self-Portrait with Thistle» (1493).