1924–2021
Liudmyla Semykina
Painter and designer of Ukrainian dress
After the “letter of 139” she spent twenty years outside the Union of Artists, and was let back in “for lack of any fact of accusation”. Liudmyla Semykina, a Sixtiers painter and co-author of the destroyed stained-glass window Shevchenko. Mother, gave old Ukrainian dress a new life.
Key accomplishments
- Co-author of the stained-glass window Shevchenko. Mother at Kyiv University (1964), destroyed by the authorities
- Garments based on old Ukrainian dress: the series Princely Age, Polissia Legend, Scythian Steppe and High Castle
- Chief costume designer of the film Zakhar Berkut (1970–1971)
- Paintings: views of the port of Odesa, the triptych Legend of Kyiv, the series Kyivan Rus’
- Shevchenko National Prize (1997), Vasyl Stus Prize (2001), Honoured Artist of Ukraine (2009)
“A distorted image of Shevchenko”
Did you know that an artist could be thrown out of the Union of Artists because of Shevchenko? In 1964 Liudmyla Semykina was expelled “for an ideologically flawed work that gives a distorted image of T. Shevchenko”. The work was a stained-glass window for the poet’s 150th anniversary.
Odesa, the sea, Kyiv
Semykina was born in 1924 in Odesa. Her father was a well-known Communist Party official there, but during the Holodomor he refused to take part in the grain requisitions, left the party and worked as a carpenter for the rest of his life. Liudmyla studied at the Odesa art school, then graduated from the Kyiv Art Institute in 1953. A few months before her defence, her diploma painting, Port, was struck out as “ideologically wrong”, and she had to paint a group portrait of old Bolsheviks from the Arsenal factory in a rush. Still, her early paintings are of the Odesa port, its piers and the sea. She was one of the founders of the Club of Creative Youth, where the Sixtiers gathered, and from 1962 she began making clothes based on Ukrainian folk dress.
A window for the university
In 1964 Semykina, Opanas Zalyvakha, Alla Horska, Halyna Sevruk and Halyna Zubchenko made the stained-glass window Shevchenko. Mother for the foyer of Kyiv University. That same year it was destroyed on the authorities’ orders, and Semykina was expelled from the Union. With no state commissions, she sewed clothes in the folk tradition, svyta coats and keptar vests, and her dissident friends wore them boldly. She was reinstated in 1966.
Twenty years outside
In 1968 she signed the “letter of 139” against unlawful repression and closed trials in Ukraine. When the authorities demanded she withdraw her signature, she refused, as did Alla Horska and Halyna Sevruk. She was expelled again and only let back into the Union in 1988, “for lack of any fact of accusation”. She never stopped working: in 1970–1971 she was chief costume designer of the film Zakhar Berkut, and in 1980 she decorated the Petrivka metro station in Kyiv (now Pochaina). In the 1990s she created whole series of garments: Princely Age, Polissia Legend, Scythian Steppe, High Castle. For them she took the shapes of medieval Ukrainian clothing and restrained, refined ornament. In 1997 she received the Shevchenko Prize.
She wrote a memoir about her friend Alla Horska, The Victor of Her Time. Liudmyla Semykina died in Kyiv in 2021, at 96.
Why it matters today
Liudmyla Semykina showed that old Ukrainian dress is more than a museum piece: from princely, Polissian and Scythian motifs she made clothes for today. For twenty years the authorities kept her out of the Union, and she went on doing her work. Anyone who looks to Ukrainian tradition today to make something new is following in her footsteps.
