Drovniak Nykyfor

Drovniak Nykyfor

Nykyfor was born in Krynytsia village in Lemkivshchyna region (Poland nowadays), in 1895. He is one of the few naïve artists that became famous while still alive. Drovniak’s early works appeared in the late 1910s but did not attract wide public attention. Most Drovniak’s paintings were made in watercolors. His works created with this technique in the interwar period are considered to be the best in his oeuvre. Later on, he also used gouache, chalk and a pencil during his last years. He depicted the city architecture a lot: railway stations, factories and banks, landscapes.

Lviv painter Roman Turyn discovered Nykyfor’s talent for the world. He collected over 200 artist’s pictures and sent them to Leon Marcel’s gallery in Paris for the exhibition held by the Taras Shevchenko Ukrainian Folk Museum in 1932.
Later on, Polish painter Jerzy Wolff got interested in Nykyfor Drovniak. He published the essay Naïve Realism Artist in Poland. Nykyfor in 1938. The first personal exhibition of Nykyfor’s works was held in the Lviv Architect House the same year, in Warsaw in 1949, and in Dina Vierny’s gallery in Paris in 1959. Since then, Nykyfor from Krynytsia rose to worldwide fame as a naïve artist: people ordered icons and paintings, the most famous European galleries bought his works, his fans visited him in Krynytsia to get a painting literally from under Nykyfor’s brush.

The artist died in 1968.

The text is based on the materials of Rodovid Publishing House.