Page 10 - Michel Andreenko and Ukrainian Artists in Paris

his wife Rikla, who was Jewish, in New York in 1949. He became a U.S.
their apartment from Nazi’s and citizen and enrolled at the
their sympathizers in Paris during
the war, others like Wirsta, whose Cooper Union School of Art where
family left their western Ukrainian he graduated in 1954. He spent
home in Bukovina for Romania, the following year in Paris until
kept moving from one location 1956, returning in 1958-59, taking
to another, attempting to stay a studio on Rue Vaugirard, where
he divided time working
there and New York.
Unlike Hutsaliuk, Wirsta
and Solohub made
Paris their final home.
Both continued to study
art after they arrived
while also establishing
themselves economically,
a phenomenon common
to refugees. Wirsta
retold of his early days
of painting Parisian
landmarks from the
Andriy Solohub, Boats, (1950), Oil on can- sidewalk, such as Notre
vas, 20 x 28”, Gift of Mr. Bohdan Kowalsky Dame, in the hope of making a
sale to someone passing-by, and
steps ahead of incarceration and of taking work as a decorator for
death, before peacetime became film, and other jobs. His work was
20
a reality. Solohub was taken to figurative primarily at the time, and
work in German labor camps he was interested in sculpture as
before resettlement in a displaced well. His commitment to engaging
persons camp in Salzburg in 1945, with the art of his day however,
and Hutsaliuk, after fighting in particularly modern art and its
the war and becoming wounded, contemporary developments,
moved to multiple displacement led him to abandon figuration
camps before moving to Munich in for abstraction, beginning in
1946. 1957-58. Solohub enrolled at the
National Academy of Fine Arts,
It was out of this context, similar continuing art studies he had
to Andreenko’s own during World begun in Salzburg. Andreenko
War I, that many artists found himself, continued his Vanishing
their way to Paris - Wirsta and Paris series, but also travelled
Solohub in 1950 and Hutsaliuk by extensively in Spain in 1955 and
1955, having emigrated first to then Northern Europe in 1957,

20 Jean-Francois Drouard, Wirsta, Itineraire d’un Peintre, Paris: Editions P.I.U.F. et le groupe
Reflets, p. 87