Masiutyn, Vasyl or Masjutin, Wassilij [Масютин, Василь; Masjutyn, Vasyl'], b 29 January 1884 in Riga, Latvia, d 15 December 1955 in West Berlin, West Germany. Ukrainian engraver, medalist, sculptor, painter, graphic artist, writer, and art scholar. He studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (1909–14). His early work consisted of fantastic symbolist, often grotesque, etchings, such as Hermaphrodite and Woman with Tail. In 1920 a large solo exhibition of his works was held at the Rumiantsev Museum in Moscow. An émigré in Berlin from 1921, he worked there as a commercial artist and illustrator of Russian books. In the early 1930s he became a member of the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists and took part in its exhibitions in Lviv. Having turned his attention to Ukrainian themes, he sculpted busts of Hetmans Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Petro Doroshenko, and Ivan Mazepa and produced a series of 63 bronze historical medallions (10 on Kyivan Rus’, 47 on the Cossack period, and 7 on the modern period). He also did the print series ‘Seven Mortal Sins,’ colored woodcuts, illustrations to Aesop’s fables and the works of Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Aleksandr Pushkin, and Honoré de Balzac, and oils. He wrote Die Gravüre und die Lithographie (1922), a study of the English graphic artist T. Bewick (1923), articles on Ukrainian art and artists in Ukrainian and German art journals, and novels in German (eg, Der Doppelmensch, 1925), two of which appeared in Ukrainian—Dva z odnoho (Two from One, 1936) and Tsarivna Nefreta (Queen Nefertiti, 1938).

Sviatoslav Hordynsky

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]