White wings of Gavriil Vashchenko

In memory of the People’s Artist of the BSSR

He, like no one else, knew how to draw flight: birds soaring up, feathers of clouds scattered across the sky — Gavriil Vashchenko had a special, keen sense of the sky and air. And today his paintings seem to blow over us with the wind. Next to them you can breathe deeply. It was Gavriil Vashchenko who made the stork spreading its wings a symbol first of his native Polesie, and then of the whole of Belarus — and he was never offended that other artists quickly picked up this image, without remembering the original authorship: the main thing is that the white wings spread over the Motherland, protecting its people.

oleg karpovich

He was born in 1928 in the Gomel Region: the village of Chikalovichi, Bragin District, a simple peasant family. He got the sense of beauty from his mother — genuine, unclouded, true: the Polesie peasant woman was a skilled embroiderer, who created elegant patterns. Since childhood, the future artist was fascinated by the nature of his native land — discreet and magically attractive, which in the spring was flooded with melt water so that there was a real sea all around. And then in 1941 war broke into this beautiful world...
 All that was left of their native village was ashes; the Vashchenko family miraculously survived the raid: they were already being led to execution when a motorcyclist rushed up to the fascist detachment with orders and, apparently, ordered the occupants not to linger. And the people deprived of their homes were left alive — the enemies had no time to kill... The elder brother Nikolai was at the front, and Gavriil got to the partisans. Years later, these memories were echoed in the films Breakthrough and Ballad of Courage. However, then he did not even think about becoming an artist, he simply drew homemade playing cards and maps, which was much more serious, as the partisans used them to mark the location of Nazi troops. It was with these ‘works’ that after the war he went to enter art school — he went completely suddenly, without expecting anything from himself. He was going to be a railway worker, where students were given rations and their own corner in the dormitory, and suddenly he read in a newspaper thrown on the street: the Kiev School of Applied Arts was announcing an intake of students. He got ready and went there — from torn Belarus to a destroyed city, where he had to sleep in the assembly hall of the school, where at night students even froze to death. And he survived. In cold and hunger, on a meagre bread ration. And he remained true to his calling. In his first year, he was taught by Tatyana Yablonskaya, the future famous and great artist. “Our teachers were educated in Paris and Vienna. We learned about all the trends and movements in painting first hand. During class, the teacher could pull out a folder with sheets of paper and say: this is how Misha Vrubel painted,” recalled the artist. It was during his years of study that he discovered a craving for monumental art.
A year later he went to finish his studies in Lvov, then on assignment to Chisinau. They received him well, appreciating the talent of the young master, and gave him an apartment. At the age of 29 he became a member of the Union of Artists of the USSR. He could have lived in the lush, bright south, but... in his paintings there was still only Belarusian Polesie, discreet brown-ochre tones — the colours of his native land. And at the first opportunity in 1961, Vashchenko returned to Minsk with his wife and two children: the artist Vladimir Stelmashonok said that at the Belarusian Theatre and Art Institute (now the Academy of Arts), a competition was open for the vacancy of the head of the Department of Decorative and Applied Arts. It was in this institute that Vashchenko spent the next four decades, training a whole galaxy of masters.
Nevertheless, teaching, which he threw himself into, did not interfere with his own creative development. Being a realist, Vashchenko never confined himself to any narrowly defined boundaries. His still life Cyclamens, which he presented at a youth exhibition at the Palace of Arts in 1966, went to Moscow, to VDNKh, during the Days of Belarusian Culture. The still life returned from there with a bronze medal, which was truly fantastic.
“When I moved to Minsk, people immediately labelled me and often pressed me,” the artist recalled. “I was greeted with hostility and assigned to formalism. And since I stood for the fact that culture is always national, I was declared a nationalist.” Recognition in the capital of the Soviet Union was a salvation, as well as the help of the director of the National Art Museum Yelena Aladova, the good genius of Belarusian artists of the 20th century. It was she who ‘pushed’ through the works of Vashchenko, Savitsky, Shchemelev, which art functionaries did not want to allow into all-Union exhibitions — and the works returned from there with awards. This is how Ballad of Courage, a painting depicting a partisan forest as a fortress from a bird’s eye view, received a silver medal named after Mitrofan Grekov. Thus, the work of Gavriil Vashchenko My Polesie, in which the famous storks circle, was awarded a gold medal at VDNKh...

Ballad of Courage, 1974

 And it was Vashchenko who saved the capital’s Red Church from demolition and alterations: in it, it was dilapidated, there was a warehouse for a film studio and it was assumed that there would be the Cinema House in this place. The artist was offered to design the interior and make stained glass windows. “I dedicated the stained glass windows to the theme of cinema,” Vashchenko later said. “If you look closely, the three ‘roses’ in the church are a typical photographic lens. Moreover, the colour scheme was not chosen by chance — these are combinations of the colours of the flags of all the union republics. By the way, this building was going to be demolished. However, when Pyotr Masherov saw what an ensemble I managed to create there (the sun just illuminated the stained glass windows — they sparkled), he was amazed that people wanted to destroy such beauty!”

From Time Immemorial, 1981

The day of the accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant became a black day for Gavriil Vashchenko. His native village found itself in the exclusion zone... Outwardly he was calm, but pain broke through in the pictures: swift horses trying to get away from trouble, while covered by a poisonous cloud — Radiation, Chernobyl Requiem, Wormwood Star, Mother Martyr, Trouble, Chernobyl Apple Trees... He only managed to visit there once after the disaster, when he ventured into the exclusion zone together with filmmakers who began filming in the 1990s documentary about the artist.
“Recognition gives only one advantage: it prohibits you from working worse than you can. And on the contrary: it forces you to work better than you can,” said Gavriil Vashchenko. His works were scattered across dozens of countries and museums; in Gomel, he opened his own gallery, donating his works to his compatriots. In the studio he kept the most valuable things, things that could not be sold under any circumstances — portraits of relatives and friends.
Either in British Cambridge or in the USA, Gavriil Vashchenko was recognized as the Man of the Epoch, Man of the 20th Century. At the same time, he did not listen to anyone’s promises, did not wallow in flattery and remained faithful to his Motherland. Memory depicts the artist’s grandmother: in a peasant’s wimple, a dark face like from an ancient icon, framed by a white towel, a clay bowl with eggs in her hands. Her name was Sincleta, and she lived to be 118 years old... Gavriil Vashchenko himself was given less, but the field he cultivated is still sprouting golden ears of corn to this day. And already his students release their students into the world. The tree of life stretched its branches to the sky, and white storks circled above it, hugging Belarus with their wings...


On an anniversary scale
The exhibition of works by Gavriil Vashchenko The Polesie Giant is being held at the National Art Museum. For the artist, Polesie is not just the embodiment of the concept of ‘small homeland’ or the place where he spent his childhood. Vashchenko’s works sound like a hymn to man and nature. The master’s creative style combines the traditions of Belarusian icon painting and fresco painting with modern monumental art, the founder and pioneer of which was Gavriil Vashchenko. The exhibition will run until February 4th, 2024.

Aleksandr Kushner

By Irina Ovsepyan