Still Life with a Palette

Натюрморт з палітрою

MediumOil on cardboard

Dimensions31 × 48 cm (framed 50 × 67 cm)

LocationPrivate collection (sold at Goldens Auction House, Kyiv)

A studio still life built around the painter's own palette, the tool turned into subject, worked in the thick, tactile impasto and deliberately weighed colour relationships of Selskyi's mature manner. Signed lower right; catalogued by the Goldens auction house as 1970s rather than a single year.

Image: reproduction sourced from gs-art.com. This work is still in copyright — © the artist / rights holder. Shown for editorial and educational purposes; contact us for attribution or removal.

rights-review

About the Artist

Roman Selskyi

1903–1990

Roman Selskyi was the central figure of twentieth-century Lviv painting and the founder of the school known as Ukrainian colourism, in which colour rather than subject carries the picture. Trained in Kraków and Paris, where he worked at Fernand Léger's Académie Moderne, he brought European modernism back to Galicia and first chaired the avant-garde group 'Artes'. As a professor in Lviv from 1947 he taught for nearly thirty years and shaped a generation of painters who kept a non-doctrinal practice alive in Soviet Ukraine.

View artist profile →

Movements

Modernism

Modernism was a radical, early-to-mid-20th-century cultural movement that broke with traditional artistic, literary, and social forms to align with a rapidly industrializing world. Characterized by experimentation, abstraction, and individualism, it sought new modes of expression to address themes of alienation and social change following World War I. Rejection of Tradition: Modernists rejected Victorian morality, academic art, and realistic depictions of subjects, seeking to "make it new". Experimentation: A shift towards abstraction in art (e.g., Cubism) and new techniques in literature, such as stream of consciousness (e.g., Virginia Woolf, James Joyce). Key Themes: Focused on subjectivity, alienation, the fragmentation of reality, and the quest for new meaning. Architecture & Design: Marked by minimalism, functionalism, and the use of industrial materials, famously summarized by Le Corbusier’s "a building is a machine for living in". Time Period: Roughly 1890s–1960s, emerging in Europe and America as a response to urbanization and technological advances.

Explore movement →

Also part of

Lviv Colourism

Related Works

1968

Windfall

A Carpathian forest floor of storm-thrown spruce, the shattered trunks flattened into pale calligraphic shapes against a dense dark green ground worked in heavy impasto. Bought by the gallery directly from Selskyi in 1980.

rights-review

1980

Houses in Chornohora

Highland houses in the Chornohora range, from the Carpathian series Selskyi worked on for three decades, reduced to blocks of colour and roofline. Shown repeatedly in NU ART's Selskyi retrospectives, including 'Roman Selskyi. Modernism and Magic' (2018) and his 120th-anniversary exhibition (2023).

rights-review

1981

Crimean Window

A window motif that fuses still life and landscape: a spotted jug, a bowl of grapes and a straw hat on a table in front of an open frame giving onto tiled roofs, a rooster, cypresses and a pink Crimean mountain. Donated to the gallery by Selskyi himself in 1984.

rights-review

1903

Girl in a Red Hat

Oleksandr Murashko