MYCHAJLO MOROZ (1904-1992)
Catskill Mountains (1,279 m - 4,180 ft)
United States of America (New York State)
In Catskill Mountains, 1961, oil on canvas
The mountains
The Catskill Mountains (1,279 m - 4,180 ft) also known as the Catskills, are a physiographic province of the larger Appalachian Mountains, located in southeastern New York. As a cultural and geographic region, the Catskills are generally defined as those areas close to or within the borders of the Catskill Park, a 700,000-acre (2,800 km2) forest preserve forever protected from many forms of development under New York state law.
Geologically, the Catskills are a mature dissected plateau, a once-flat region subsequently uplifted and eroded into sharp relief by watercourses. The Catskills form the northeastern end of the Allegheny Plateau (also known as the Appalachian Plateau).
The Catskills are well known in American culture, both as the setting for many 19th-century Hudson River School paintings and as the favored destination for vacationers from New York City in the mid-20th century. The region's many large resorts gave countless young stand-up comedians an opportunity to hone their craft. In addition, the Catskills have long been a haven for artists, musicians, and writers, especially in and around the towns of Phoenicia and Woodstock.
The painter
Mychajlo Moroz is a prominent Ukrainian artist, best remembered for his landscapes painted with turbulent strokes and vivid colors. In 1923 he became a student in the newly established Novakivskyi School of Art, where he studied until 1927. The next two years were spent studying art in Paris on a scholarship from Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky. In Paris, Moroz studied at the Académie Julian.
While in Paris, Moroz met such renowned Ukrainian artists as Oleksa Hryshchenko (Alexis Gritchenko), Mykola Hlushchenko and Vasyl Khmeliuk, who were also working in variations of the expressionist style. In Paris Moroz met the famous French artist and father of the fauvist movement, Henri Matisse. The direct encounter with the Ecole de Paris, particularly the experience of French expressionists, had a strong impact on Moroz.
In 1931 Moroz traveled to Italy accompanied by his former teacher, and in 1932 he became Novakivskyi's assistant. Together they made trips to the picturesque Carpathian Mountains and were inspired to paint numerous works of the land and its people. The events of World War II and the occupation of western Ukraine by the Soviet Union interrupted Moroz's work and forced him to seek asylum for his young wife, Irena, and infant son, Ihor, in Germany.
In 1949 Moroz and his family settled in New York, where he continued to make a living as an artist. In January, 1959 he had his first of five solo exhibitions at the Panoras Gallery in New York. The journal Art News noted: "Mychajlo Moroz, a Ukrainian, is only a newcomer to New York. The unity of the show as a whole, the fluency, the fast play of brush and color, reveal an experienced painter, a man who sees his scene all of a piece, grasps its details instinctively and with a quick technique lays it out flatly and distinctly." (January 1959).
As a result of the 1962 exhibition, The New York Times wrote: "Mychajlo Moroz is showing lively interpretations of picturesque scenes, some of which tend to go beyond the picturesque to the expressionistic." (January 23, 1962).
An entire room in the Ukrainian Museum in Rome is dedicated to Moroz's work. In 1990 a retrospective exhibition of his work was held at The Ukrainian Museum in New York. The artist died in 1992 on Staten Island, N.Y.
