"Bringing the Museum to You"

The Cyber Art Show continues our study of Russian landscape painters in the Public Domain with a twelve-piece Exhibition of works by Mykhailo Andrіyovich Berkos (1861-1919). Born in Odessa, Ukraine, Mikail was of Russian and Greek origin, his father a subject of Greece and his mother from Russian nobility.

 

Mikhail first studied painting at the Odessa Drawing School, from which he graduated in 1877. He then studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg from 1878 to 1889, painting in the studio of Mikhail Klodt and Vladimir Orlovsky. During these years he exhibited at academic exhibitions, where he won small and large and silver medals.  In 1889 he graduated from the Academy with the rank of First-Degree Class Artist and the right to travel abroad at public expense.

 

From 1890 to 1893 Berkos traveled to Europe, studying the art of museums in France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Switzerland. He also took up en plein air painting, turning to the subject of Ukrainian nature. Influenced by Impressionism, he began perfecting his technique.

 

In the second half of the 1890s he moved to Kharkiv, living in a suburb of Mala. After 1904 he taught at the School of Drawing in Kharkiv. In 1906 he became the Chairman of the Society of Kharkiv Artists, promoting Ukrainian art. From 1912-1917 Berkos helped found the Kharkiv Art College and became one of its leading teachers. He died of typhus on December 20, 1919 in Kharkiv.

 

Mikhail Berkos' works were presented at exhibitions and competitions at the Academy of Arts (1890, 1892–1894); the All-Russia exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod (1896); St. Petersburg Society of Artists (1894–1903); the Exposition Universelle in Paris (1900); societies of Russian watercolors (1894–1898, 1900–1905, 1907, 1910, 1914); southern Russian artists,  and Kharkiv painters (1893, 1894, 1912, 1914–1917).