Dariia Demchenko – Illia Levchenko

Networks of Intellectual exchange between Western and Eastern Europe: The case of Kyiv Art Historian Hryhorii Pavlutskyi (1861–1924)

Hryhorii Pavlutskyi (1861–1924) was a foundational figure in the institutionalization of art history in Kyiv. While his role within the art-historiographical landscape of the Russian Empire has been acknowledged, his engagement with Western European scholarship at the turn of the 20th century remains insufficiently examined. This article addresses this gap by analyzing Pavlutskyi’s work as part of a broader network of intellectual exchange between Western and Eastern Europe.

The study situates Pavlutskyi within transnational historiographical currents, focusing on his engagement with the problem of the migration and survival of images across time and space. Drawing on his writings on Renaissance art, classical antiquity, and Ukrainian Baroque, the article demonstrates how Pavlutskyi traced the persistence and transformation of gestures, motifs, and forms across historical periods.

By placing these analyses in dialogue with contemporaneous Western European scholarship (including Jacob Burckhardt and Eugène Müntz), the article argues that Pavlutskyi operated less as a theorist than as a mediator who selectively adapted and recontextualized key historiographical problems within the Kyiv academic environment. This perspective allows for a reconsideration of Ukrainian art historiography not as a peripheral or derivative field, but as a site of active intellectual synthesis shaped by multidirectional exchanges.

At the same time, the article critically engages with contemporary historiographical tendencies that seek to align Ukrainian scholarship primarily with Western European models. It suggests that such approaches risk reproducing self-colonizing frameworks and instead proposes understanding early 20th-century Ukrainian art history as a locally inflected form of Euro-modern intellectual practice, shaped by both imperial and transnational contexts.

Author's email:

fedra.thedra@gmail.com, levchenko@knu.ua

DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.54759/ART-2026-0101



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