Alexis Gritchenko

Alexis Gritchenko (Krolevets 1883 – Vence 1977)

Alexis Gritchenko is a Ukrainian painter, watercolorist, writer, and art critic of the School of Paris. He was born in Krolevets, then part of the Russian Empire. He studied from 1905 to 1912 at the universities of Saint Petersburg, Kiev, and Moscow. He studied painting and drawing in the studio of S.I. Svetoslavsky from 1906 to 1908, in that of K.F. Yuon and I. Dudin from 1909 to 1910, and of P.P. Konchalovsky and I.I. Mashkov from 1911 to 1912 in Moscow. He also worked in the studio of V.I. Tatlin and studied the collection of Sergei Shchukin, which notably included works by Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet, and Pablo Picasso.

In 1911, Alexis Gritchenko visited Paris, the Louvre Museum, and met the painters André Lhote, Alexander Archipenko, and Henri Le Fauconnier in the French capital.

He began a trip to Italy and returned to Moscow, where he founded an avant-garde theory he called "Tsvetodinamos" (Color-Movement), whose fundamentals are the importance of color masses that define and divide space. Alexis Gritchenko's theory mingled with the ranks of the multiple Moscow avant-gardes, the primitivism of Alexander Shevchenko, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, the Suprematism of Kazimir Malevich, and Constructivism.

Alexis Gritchenko became a professor in a free state workshop in 1918, where he taught the essence of the theory alongside Alexander Shevchenko.

Rejecting the Bolshevik dictatorship, he decided to head west. He moved to Kiev, then from Sevastopol he reached Constantinople, where he stayed for two years. During these two years in Constantinople, he created watercolor scenes of life and landscapes. He went to Greece in 1921, arrived on French soil in Marseille in the autumn of 1921, and finally joined Paris.

In Paris, he was particularly active on the art scene. He exhibited at the Salon d'Automne from 1921 to 1945, at the Salon des Tuileries from 1928 to 1948, and participated in numerous exhibitions organized by famous galleries in France and abroad, notably at the Galerie Dominique, Galerie Bing, Galerie Katia Granoff, Galerie Druet, Galerie de l'Élysée, Galerie Weill, and Galerie Bernheim Jeune. The painter was also supported by art dealers Paul Guillaume and Léopold Zborowski.

Gritchenko's works are now preserved in museum collections such as the MoMA in New York, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels.