Oleksa Novakivskyi
Oleksa Kharlampiyovych Novakivskyi whose last name is also written as Novakivs´kyi was a Ukrainian Impressionist painter and art teacher.
Biography
Oleksa Novakivskyi was born to a forester who worked at the estate of an aristocratic Polish family. A local nobleman took note of his talent and provided the means for him to pursue an artistic education. From 1888 to 1892, Novakivskyi studied in Odessa with the watercolorist and decorative painter,. Further support enabled him to transfer to the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts, where he worked, among others, with Jan Matejko and Leon Wyczółkowski. He graduated in 1900.For about ten years, Novakivskyi lived in the village of Mogiła, now part of Nowa Huta near Kraków. He shared a house with an elderly widow whose daughter he later married. Novakivskyi's first exhibit was with the Society for the Development of Ruthenian Art, in 1901, but he achieved little attention until his personal exhibition in Kraków in 1911.
In 1913 the painter moved to Lviv, where he received patronage of the Metropolitan Archbishop, Andrey Sheptytsky. Shortly after, he started his own art school. Most of the noted painters of early twentieth-century Galicia studied there, at least briefly.
Novakivskyi's most successful exhibition came in 1921. From 1924 to 1925, he was Dean of Arts at the Secret Ukrainian University.
Oleksa Novakivkskyi died in 1935 and is buried in Lychakiv Cemetery.
Legacy
In 1940 20 paitings by Novakivskyi stored in the funds of the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum of Lviv were taken to Moscow, where they became part of an exhibition dedicated to first anniversary of the Soviet annexation of Western Ukraine. Those works have never been returned to Lviv and their fate remains unknown.In 1972, the was established in Lviv.