Yablonsky, Anatol

Yablonsky, Anatol [Яблонський, Анатоль; Jablons'kyj, Anatol'], b 3 July 1912 in Kyiv, d 11 July 1954 in Paris. Painter. An interwar émigré, he studied art in Lviv and, with the financial support of Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, in Paris. He was a member of the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists in the 1930s and the Labor Association of Ukrainian Pictorial Artists in 1941–4. A specialist in church fresco painting and icon painting in the Neo-Byzantine style, he painted frescoes in the churches of the Studite monasteries in Lviv, Lavriv, and Uhniv, the Studite nunnery in Sukhovolia, and the nunnery of the Basilian order of nuns in Lviv, and 18 iconostases for churches and chapels in Galicia and outside Ukraine. Yablonsky often collaborated with Pavlo Kovzhun and Mykhailo Osinchuk. A postwar displaced person in Germany, in 1950 he settled in Paris. There he illustrated editions of Slovo o polku Ihorevi (The Tale of Ihor’s Campaign) and Ivan Franko’s Lys Mykyta (The Fox Mykyta), prepared albums of drawings of Ukrainian princes and hetmans and of Ukrainian folk costumes, painted icons for Paris’s Saint Volodymyr’s Church, and did portraits and landscapes on commission.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]