Konstyantin Piskorsky
1892-1922
The career and work of Konstyantin Piskorsky is one of many that was lost in the Soviet maelstrom and is only now surfacing. His work evolved from flatly rendered, simplified, natural forms to original abstract compositions using bold, stylized, ornamental forms, symbolist images, and geometrics. Occasionally, he drew works based on Ukrainian folklore or literary works and was the author of unpublished mystical-philosophical texts, ‘The Bio-meter of Life’ and ‘The Time of Thought’. His short life and legacy is one that reflects the fate of many Ukrainian intellectual families post-1917, but Piskorsky left behind a body of work whose style, whilst difficult to define, fits neatly into the period of artistic experimentation prevalent in Europe after the First World War, combining Futurism, Symbolism and Abstraction.
His career was as diverse as his art. He studied in the law faculties of Kazan and Kyiv universities before, variously, working in a bank, teaching in a village school and serving in the army. His musings, preserved by his family, were obsessed with the Creation, Christ, the Cosmos, Science and Music; his subject matter varied from flat, one-dimensional abstracts, cosmic and fantastic musings, to Ukrainian themes drawn in the same fashion, almost as illustration.
Born into the intelligentsia, Piskorsky had a somewhat unusual upbringing, partly amongst the peasantry, partly in a sophisticated urban environment. His father was Volodymyr Piskorsky, a Professor of World History at Nizhyn Lyceum in Ukraine and the budding artist travelled to both to Paris and Madrid as a child.
Piskorsky’s father became involved in the revolutionary movement and, during the disturbances of 1905, sent his family away, creating in his son a fascination with Revolution and the New World Order. Piskorsky enrolled in the Tsarist Army after the outbreak of World War I and served, though not in a fighting capacity, on the south west front. It was now, around 1917, that the first examples of his works on paper appeared together with musings on the absurdity and horror of war.
In March 1918 Piskorsky returned to work in the bank in Kyiv though, with the government in the city changing hands eleven times between 1917 and 1921, the times were hugely unstable and the artist found himself retreating more and more into the spiritual. In the words of his great niece, Olena Novikova, “Joy rubbed shoulders with meditation and grief, the analysis of the world and the desire to see it better.” The series, Dream dealt with Faith whilst his most notable work, Technics (Civilisation), showed a circle symbolizing the globe in which a bird, the symbol of Man, is overtaken by technics in the form of hammers, telegraph poles and a riot of geometric shapes. The drawing is dated 21st May, before the Bolshevik takeover, but it is difficult to imagine a more other-worldly view of revolution by any artist in any Western canon.
Technically, Piskorsky, a man without artistic education, was a master, but his subject matter revealed a man battling his internal demons, Paradise, Anxiety, Funeral, Bliss, show the strife of Man to survive the all-encompassing horror of Civil War. His choice of the Brothers Karamazov for illustration make sense. Nowhere in Russian literature is the spiritual battle between extremes of Good and Evil more clearly writ and Lizaveta the Lethal (p. 13), the deaf mute who gives birth to the murderous, Smerdyakov, is a choice of character that only an artist of the tortured vision of Piskorsky could have made.
As the continual changes of government threw Kyiv into further chaos, Piskorsky wrote the article, ‘The Fateful Hour’ and drew ‘Ukraine Enslaved’, where a row of geometric figures kneel before symbols of the country, the windmill, the thatched house and the church. This work was a gateway to what amounted to a series which showed an increased discontent with the Bolshevik takeover of which two controversial works, Cossack and White Guard, did not see the light of day until this century. Poles (p. 9) shows two storks, symbols of birth, a war with one another, and yet set in a heavenly embrace. Idol (p. 7) is from the same series and could be aimed at the increasing Cult of Personality prevalent in Soviet Russia or as a fantastic interpretation of the artist’s inner, increasingly religious, world.
With life becoming harder, the artist now married and with three children, the family was forced to live in one room and Piskorsky retreated further into his inner world. In May 1919, Piskorsky entered the studio of Heorgiy Narbut at the Kyiv Academy of Arts. The choice of professor was not coincidental, for Narbut was one of the finest, and most technically gifted, practitioners of graphic art in Ukraine at the time. Whilst studying at the Academy, Piskorsky, in order to save his three children from hunger, began working as a children’s teacher in the village of Sovki near Kyiv where he founded a society devoted to the study of Taras Shevchenko, the first Ukrainian writer whose themes were close to the artist and whose work he illustrated (p. 20).
In 1918, the artist wrote of the task of creating a, ‘Map of Individual Human Life’ – a philosophical tract about the relationship between human experiences, states and creativity with that of existence – named by Piskorsky as the, “Bio-meter of Life”. “In the incomprehensible living infinity of being there are incomprehensible centers. The human personality is like that center – among a single moving substance,” he wrote.
Unfortunately, overwork, hardship and near-starvation undermined his health, with typhus the victor. How prophetic that he had drawn a bird-like creature earlier, named it typhus and predicted that he that he would die the disease. He succumbed in Kyiv on March 9, 1922, at the age of 29. Such ambiguous, individualistic works by a devout believer would not have survived the crackdown on Ukrainian nationalist sympathies which began in the early 1930’s and all work by Piskorsky was hidden by his family for many years. That which was in institutions, the Museum of Ukrainian Art and the Central State Archive of Literature, which houses the majority of his work, was saved, as was the work of his contemporaries, Bohomazov and Palmov, by Dmitro Horbachev.
