Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/1518405
3 T he career and work of Konstyantin Piskorsky is one of many that was lost in the Soviet maelstrom and is only now surfacing. His work evolved from flatly rendered, simplified, natural forms to original abstract compositions using bold, stylized, ornamental forms, symbolist images, and geometrics. Occasionally, he drew works based on Ukrainian folklore or literary works and was the author of unpublished mystical-philosophi- cal texts, 'The Bio-meter of Life' and 'The Time of Thought'. His short life and legacy is one that reflects the fate of many Ukrainian intellectual families post-1917, but Piskorsky left behind a body of work whose style, whilst difficult to define, fits neatly into the period of artistic experimentation prevalent in Europe after the First World War, combining Futurism, Symbolism and Abstraction. His career was as diverse as his art. He studied in the law faculties of Kazan and Kyiv universities before, variously, working in a bank, teaching in a village school and serving in the army. His musings, preserved by his family, were obsessed with the Creation, Christ, the Cosmos, Science and Music; his subject matter varied from flat, one-dimensional abstracts, cosmic and fantastic musings, to Ukrainian themes drawn in the same fashion, almost as illustration. Born into the intelligentsia, Piskorsky had a somewhat unusual upbringing, partly amongst the peasantry, partly in a sophisticated urban environment. His father was Volodymyr Piskorsky, a Professor of World History at Nizhyn Lyceum in Ukraine and the budding artist travelled to both to Paris and Madrid as a child. Piskorsky's father became involved in the revolutionary movement and, during the disturbances of 1905, sent his family away, creating in his son a fascination with Revolution and the New World Order. Piskorsky enrolled in the Tsarist Army after the outbreak of World War I and served, though not in a fighting capacity, on the south west front. It was now, around 1917, that the first examples of his works on paper appeared together with musings on the absurdity and horror of war. In March 1918 Piskorsky returned to work in the bank in Kyiv though, with the government in the city changing hands eleven times between 1917 and 1921, the times were hugely unstable and the artist found himself retreating more and more into the spiritual. In the words of his great niece, Olena Novikova, "Joy rubbed shoulders with meditation and grief, the analysis of the world and the desire to see it better." The series, Dream dealt with Faith whilst his most notable work, Technics (Civilisation), showed a circle symbolizing the globe in which a bird, the symbol of Man, is overtaken by technics in the form of hammers, telegraph poles and a