Education and early career Gritchenko studied
philology and
biology at the
universities of Kyiv,
St Petersburg and
Moscow before turning to art. He studied painting in Moscow and established close ties with the collectors
Sergey Shchukin and
Ivan Morozov. In 1911, he visited
Paris where he became an enthusiast of
modern art, especially
Cubist painting. After a trip to
Italy in 1913-14, he blended with his study of early
Italian Renaissance painters, creating a style that brought together the cosmopolitan and urbane with the orthodoxy of the Byzantine legacy of
sacred art. Gritchenko devoted his theoretical work to the subject of
Byzantine art and its links with
modern art, and to an analysis of the formal and stylistic properties of Byzantine painting in terms of modernist tendencies and practice. He published several books and articles, the most important of which were his studies on the icon in relation to Western art, and also took part in contemporary discussions on various aspects of modern art. After the
1917 revolution, Gritchenko became a professor at the Free Art Studios (
Svomas) in Moscow and a member of the Commission for the Preservation of Historic Monuments. In 1919, he was offered the directorship of the
Tretyakov Gallery, but decided to leave Russia by way of
Crimea to
Constantinople, leaving all his paintings and other possessions behind in Moscow. This period marked a distinctive and inspired period of
watercolour painting.
Emigration to France In 1921, Gritchenko arrived in Paris, and twelve of his paintings of Constantinople were included in the
Salon d'Automne, and
Fernand Léger placed them next to his own works. A subsequent trip to
Greece resulted in an exhibit at the
Byzantine Museum in Athens. The art dealer
Paul Guillaume introduced him to
Leopold Zborovsky, another well-known Paris dealer. Dr. Albert Barnes acquired seventeen Gritchenko's paintings for his collection, now The
Barnes Foundation in
Philadelphia. After 1924, Gritchenko lived in southern
France. Gritchenko made frequent trips to
Spain,
Portugal,
England and
Scandinavian countries, and the paintings he brought from those visits were exhibited in several leading Paris galleries, such as
Maison Bing, Granoff, Druet, De l`Elysse, Weil, and
Bernheim-Jeune. Salons, especially the
Salon des Tuileries and d`Automne, also exhibited his work. After an exhibition of Gritchenko's art at the
Maison Bing in 1926,
Louis Vauxcelles wrote about him, saying, "the young Ukrainian colorist conquered Paris." In 1937, a one-man exhibition with Gritchenko's works was held at the
Museum of Ukrainian Art in Lviv, then under Polish rule, where his first Ukrainian-French monograph appeared. ==Legacy==