In November 2019, the Georgia Museum of Art received a gift of paintings from the Jurii Maniichuk and Rose Brady Collection. Five of these six paintings are now on view in the museum’s permanent collection wing, where they will be up through September 26 (the sixth is undergoing conservation). They represent highlights of a collection of more than 100 paintings from Soviet-era Ukraine assembled by the late Jurii Maniichuk (1955 – 2009), while he was living and working in Kyiv, Ukraine, in the 1990s.
Born in L’viv, Western Ukraine, Maniichuk grew up in the Soviet years, earning his doctoral degree and teaching international law at Kyiv State University before immigrating to the United States and becoming an American citizen in the late 1980s. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he returned to his native country as a legal consultant to the newly independent Ukrainian government on behalf of the World Bank.
The country was undergoing tremendous political and economic change, and its art world was no exception. Realist and socialist realist paintings that Soviet-era government ministries and museums had commissioned and exhibited were out of favor — in danger of being forgotten, painted over or even destroyed. With the help of art experts, Maniichuk acquired paintings directly from leading painters, their heirs and regional art institutions. The collection includes works from the 1950s to the 1980s that are portraits, still lifes, historic images and scenes of Soviet work and life. All of the painters were based in Ukraine and came from various ethnic backgrounds — Russian, Jewish, Tatar and Ukrainian. Most trained or taught at top art academies such as the Kyiv Art Institute (now the Ukrainian National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture).
Maniichuk’s goal was to preserve a window into the past and to rescue the paintings for study and reflection by future generations. He brought the collection to the U.S. in 1999. The following year, he married Brady, Moscow bureau chief of BusinessWeek from 1989 to 1993 and later one of its senior editors. When Maniichuk died, in 2009, she began looking for a permanent home for the collection. Edward Kasinec, visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and curator emeritus of the historic Slavic and East European Collections of the New York Public Library, introduced Brady to the Georgia Museum of Art, where she donated these six large paintings, appreciating its impressive collection of and commitment to studying Russian art.
Authored by:
Hillary Brown
