A REMEMBRANCE: Yuri Ivanovych Khymych, 1928

A REMEMBRANCE: Yuri Ivanovych Khymych, 1928 - 2003

by William Green Miller

WASHINGTON - Just after his 75th birthday and shortly before his death on July 23, I spent an afternoon in Kyiv with Yuri Ivanovych Khymych at his studio just behind the Trapezna Church at the Percherska Lavra. It was a lovely early July day. We looked toward the south and the downstream Dnipro, at the domes and churches of the Near and Far Caves and the green tinned roofs of the passageways between.

"There is no place of beauty like this anywhere in the world," exclaimed Mr. Khymych with fresh joy. Even though he had gazed at this prospect thousands of times, he found every glimpse unique. He was driven to paint every day because there was always a new quality of color or tone that needed to be captured.

Yuri Khymych was my friend, I am proud to say. We became friends through his art. Let me explain how it happened. Not long after I came to Kyiv as U.S. ambassador in 1993, an exhibit of his paintings was on the walls of the Museum of the City of Kyiv at Klovsky Palace. It was a bright, sunny spring day. I had never seen anything like his painting before.

His paintings of St. Sophia seemed to leap out of their plain white frames, as though the buildings were alive. One of those paintings of St. Sophia surrounded by blooming chestnut trees and his characteristic puffy pink clouds struck me as a masterpiece, as did a number of other paintings of St. Sophia and other Kyivan churches.

To say that these paintings were animate and muscular is an understatement. I had never looked at paintings of buildings that used color in such a powerful way. I had to meet this man.

We met soon thereafter. I was delighted to find a person as vital as his great powerful paintings. Here was a man rooted in the beauty of his country who in his art was able to capture the essence of churches, rivers, windmills, ancient tombs and ruins, mountains, trees and flowers in their seasons, and to transfer his own passionate and intelligent vitality into his brushes onto almost any flat surface at hand: the backs of posters, pieces of cardboard boxes, scraps of paper.

He had to paint and did so throughout his long life.

We spent many hours together during the four and a half years I served as ambassador to Ukraine and during my frequent later visits to Kyiv. We looked, together, at thousands of his paintings, the record of a lifetime of work, full of joy and insight, painting Ukraine, Russia, the other republics of the Soviet Union from Central Asia to the bleak north, Helsinki, Prague, Rostov Velikii and the many other places he wandered to, alone.

What a remarkable, exceptional man: How was it possible a man could paint churches over a lifetime during the worst repressive years of tyranny? He was a free spirit in every way, despite the circumstances in which he lived, He was, of course, no threat to the state. He was regarded as a great painter and honored even as a youth and throughout his life.

I have a watercolor given to me by Mr. Khymych done in Samarkand in Central Asia, of which I am very fond. It captures the heat and translucent light of Central Asia that I know firsthand. The artist explained it was done in a few minutes because the air was so dry and the sun so hot, watercolors would dry and harden almost as fast as they were mixed with water. In a very real sense, he captured the heat and the light with his lightning-like brush strokes. As a young man, he was honored as one of the Soviet Union's best watercolorists.

He painted Ukraine again and again, traveling to every city and town with a church or remarkable building - from Kamianets-Podilsky, where he was born on April 12, 1928, to Chernihiv, Lviv, the Karpaty and to Crimea, where he served in Sevastopol as a soldier and spent many summers later with his family, particularly in Sudak.

I realize now how much I learned about Ukraine from Mr. Khymych as he lifted folder after folder bulging with 3-by 4-foot gouache paintings of the places and buildings he loved. Since I also went to those places with his guidance - Bakhchysarai, Sudak, Khersonesos, St. Sophia, the Vydubytskyi Monastery, Chernihiv, Pereiaslav-Khmelnytskyi, Lviv, the Carpathian Mountains and so many others venues - I was able to share and understand his colors and sense of time and place. He had the gift to recognize the genius of a place.

How much else I learned about Ukraine from Yuri Khymych! He would recite poems he had written at the time of the paintings he was showing. He recounted the odyssey of his family during Word War II, with all of its difficulties and pain. He spoke of his loves and how they inspired his paintings. He would make wry comments about the current political and economic situation and occasionally mimic, in a good-natured way, the speeches of Ukrainian political leaders he heard on the radio.

After a long day at the Embassy wrestling with the intricacies of Ukrainian politics, I would often escape the office to have tea and pea bread and dinner with Mr. Khymych and his wife, Valentyna, and their cats. What marvelous cats. Mr. Khymych and the cats knew each other well and their conversations demonstrated mutual respect and awareness.

I had the good fortune to be shown by Mr. Khymych many thousands of his paintings, perhaps more than anyone else except his wife, Valya, and son Misha, a great artist in his own right whose genius was nurtured and deeply respected by his father. My house is filled with his work, where it continues to give me great pleasure.

It is my hope that the paintings of Yuri Khymych will be preserved in a living museum of his work in Kyiv. His art is a great documentary treasure of Ukraine, particularly its cultural vitality, and deserves to be seen and enjoyed by succeeding generations of Ukrainians who would understand and be enriched by the great spirit and talent of the artist Yuri Khymych.

William Green Miller, who was the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 1993 to 1998, now is a senior policy fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

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