06.01.2007  Alexis Gritchenko (1883-1977)

• The late works of the great masters have always had an air of liberty and maturity which dominated the world around them. They sum up and express the life of those endowed with a superior sensitiveness. This can be seen in the last productions of Titian, Rembrandt and Greco as well as in the music of Beethoven and Wagner. We find something similar in the paintings of Alexis Gritchenko, which were executed since the last war. Gritchenko, who is now eighty years of age, has continued to develop his art and to maintain his vigorous style, in which he has so admirably depicted the tumultuous aspects of nature. Throughout a variety of countries this “vagabond of Ukrainia” as he calls himself, has drawn inspiration from the vast open spaces of the plain; from the geological forms of great mountains ranges; from the rhythmic movement of the great waters; from the changing shape of the clouds in their perpetual drift from one season to another, and from the vegetation that is constantly springing up into life. Having never lost his youthful memories of the endless plains of the Dnieper, nor the flavour of the Slavonic earth to which he was always attached, Gritchenko with his extraordinary vitality never lived the nostalgic life of a refugee. He has a fraternal feeling for all the countries he has visited. In France he is in every respect at home, and he has also assimilated the natural beauties and the human characteristics of Greece, Spain, Italy as well as several of the eastern and northern lands. Born in the old world, he nevertheless succeeded in conquering the new. Welcomed by the USA in 1958, a Gritchenko Foundation was eventually set up there, to contain his paintings and writings where they await the time when someday they may return to his native land. His art which is profoundly rooted in Russia is nevertheless remarkably universal in its appeal. He loves the Russian Icons of which he is a connoisseur, and has studied them attentively and retained something of their sumptuous colours, their ample and majestic style. He is too much of a painter to remain shut up in any of the historic styles, as is often the case with some of his countrymen. Abandoning his early oriental manner which he once defined as “flat surfaces, reversed perspectives, in a light immaterial style” he assimilated all the modern movements in Western art, the vivid chromatic style of the Fauves, the constructive architecture of Cubists, from these he took what was useful to him for his own lyrical vision of life, without being absorbed by them. The intense blues of his mountains ranges are crystallizations of the earth, transformed by the atmosphere. From upright forms he evokes the mystical interior of a cathedral, where Faith floats high up above the miniature human figure. A worldwind of forms, which would, to-day, be called “gestual” evokes the powerful winds that blow through most of his paintings. Even the houses, such as those of the Basque country with great red roofs, or those of Corsica and Spain huddled together in a solid mass; ships with bellowing sails, or peasants going about their daily work, seen along with all the other features which make up the immense play of life, the fragility of which, like vegetation, covers the rough surface of the globe. The still-lives of Gritchenko are very much alive. They consist of common objects, of fiery-coloured flowers, especially wild flowers discovered in Provence or Limusin and gathered by the artist, or sea produce, ursins, shrimps, starfishes and lobsters of strange forms for which he has a strong predilection. In all of these one finds a continual strain of warm palpitating colour, powerful and all inclusive like nature itself. Before these sumptuous works one recalls the art of Rubens or Delacroix, or a phrase of Virgil or Baudelaire who also felt and evoked the inner soul of things. In this way, Gritchenko painting goes far beyond the shallow researches and the pretentious simplifications of a purely intellectual order which os many of our contemporaries imageine to be new. Gritchenko’s art is united to the earth in a mystic marriage where all the sentiments and sensations take fire and invite us to share in a healthy joyful existence which the narrow utilitarian nature of modern life excludes. Invincible in its reaction to the social and technical sclerosis of our time, Gritchenko has rediscovered the real vocation of art which is to make humanity conscious of its greatness and high standing in the cosmos.