YAKUBEK KAREL

Honoured Artist of Ukraine, member of the Union of Artists of the USSR (1960), member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine (1964). Laureate of Volyn Regional Art Prize named after J. Kondzeliewicz (2004), decorated with the Order "For Merits" of the 3rd grade (2006).

The artist was born in Uzhhorod (the then Czechoslovakia), Transcarpathia. His father, a Slovak by birth, Mykhailo Yakubek, was a construction engineer, repressed and shot by the NKVD (National Committee for Internal Affairs). It was his father who financed his trips to Vienna, Prague, Budapest to visit the best museums in Europe, as well as his painting studies at the leading artists of that time.

One of his first teachers was a talented artist, Mykhailo Rosenberg, by whose advice in the early 1940s Yakubek entered the Budapest Academy of Arts. He understood that his level was already high enough, so he entered the Free Academy of Arts in Baia Mare, Romania (1943 - 1944), where he mastered a lot of professional secrets of easel painting as well as the main principles of stylistic methods. "... The Baia Mare period was the time when I was really happy," the artist said, recalling those days.

At the end of the 2^nd World War he got to Paris. In December 1945, he returned to Uzhhorod and in 1946 entered the last course of the newly created Uzhhorod Art and Industrial School, where his teachers were the coryphaei of the Transcarpathian school of painting Adalbert Erdeli and Yosyp Bokshai. "The carrier of the brilliant traditions of the Baia Mare school, Karel Yakubek, was a colleague rather than a student for these well-known artists", the art critic Zoia Navrotska said.

In 1964, a new period in life and creativity of Karel Yakubek started – he accepted the proposal of the leadership of the Union of Artists of Ukraine to move to Lutsk, where together with Hryhorii Chornoknyzhnyk he organized the Volyn section of the Artists' Union and department of the Art Fund. At the same time, he worked as a major artist of the city.                                                                                                                                                           

“When in 1964 Karel came to Lutsk,” Zoia Navrotska told “the city had a rather sporadic art life. He brought the traditions of eastern and western Europe, experience, inspiration, and took Volyn to the European art space at once. Karel Yakubek lived in Paris, shared the development of art with the Munich tradition, studied in Budapest (Hungary) and Bai Mare (Romania). And when we look at his works, it is felt a European aesthetics – the aesthetics of a free person, as if he did not live in the Soviet totalitarian past.”

Karel Yakubek worked in various techniques and genres. His work includes drawings with pencil and charcoal, watercolours, and pastels, but oil painting prevails. The artist worked in the following genres: landscapes, still lifes, portraits, plot compositions. He was interested in the nature of Transcarpathia, as well as Volyn landscapes, flowers and fruits, and things of everyday life.

"By spreading the energy of creative impulse, each work reveals the versatility of art search and a high professional level of the artist. All works are combined in one, surprisingly integral collection by a high culture of painting, sophisticated colour vision, aesthetic taste, the incredible tone of mood leitmotifs", Zoia Navrotska noted.

Since 1958, Karel Yakubek was a participant in regional, republican, regional, and international exhibitions. He held numerous personal exhibitions in Moscow (1969), Lublin (1999), Lutsk (1999).

The works of the artist are kept in museums and private collections of Ukraine, Russia, the USA, Canada, Germany, Poland, and Hungary.


Text: Kseniia Shokina
© Art & Culture Foundation Brovdi Art