Kratko, Bernard

Kratko, Bernard [Кратко, Бернард], b 17 January 1884 in Warsaw, d 1 August 1960 in Kyiv. Impressionist sculptor. Having studied art with Xawery Dunikowski at the Warsaw School of Fine Arts (1901–6), he worked as a sculptor in Warsaw and from 1916 in Petrograd. Settling in Ukraine, he became lecturer at Kharkiv Art Institute (1920–5) and Kyiv Art Institute (1925–35). At the same time (1921–4) he was on the faculty of the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts in Kyiv. He did many large busts for monuments: of Taras Shevchenko in Kyiv (1920, destroyed) and Kharkiv (1921), of Hryhorii Skovoroda in Skovorodynivka (1923), of Mariia Zankovetska (1928), of Mykhailo Boichuk (1934), and of Fedir Krychevsky (1935). His works also include decorative bas-reliefs on the monument to the executed Decembrists in Kyiv (1925) and on the portal of the Peasant Sanatorium in Odesa (1928). In 1937 Kratko was exiled to Central Asia, but he returned after the Second World War, settled in Staline (now Donetsk), and resumed sculpting. The composition Miners (1946) and the monuments to Ya. Sverdlov in Yenakiieve (1951) and to Vladimir Lenin in Cheliuskinets are examples of his later socialist-realist work.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).]