Displaced Persons

Peregrinations

“Art awakens things from sleep, imbues them with life, and they begin to exist for us. And this is the biggest mystery of art.”¹Yakiv Hnizdovskyi, “An Awakened Princess (Something That Will Never Be Written),” Svoboda, 7 May 1954; republished in: Yakiv Hnizdovsky. Paintings, Graphics, Ceramics, Articles, New York 1967, 75. ↩

Jacques Hnizdovsky, 1954

The laconic simplicity of this painting rendered with the precision of a draughtsman, belies layers of introvertive stories experienced by scores of refugees involuntarily escaping wartime trauma. Though universalist in its representation of the human condition against a background of life-changing geo-political shifts, it bears real significance for Ukrainian refugees forced to flee their homeland during the Second World War. Showing individuals sheltering in a migrant camp in Germany puts into play the tension between the anonymous and the familiar---a constant trope in Hnizdovsky’s choice of imagery. The specificity of this scene is made especially poignant because it represents the very camp where, together with his countrymen, Yakiv (Jacques) Hnizdovsky shared in the experience of migratory transience.

The original (Ukrainian) title of this work, Skytal’tsi refers to persons, who through unfortunate circumstances, have been separated from their home base, forced into a state of seemingly perpetual wandering. Not like true nomads who peregrinate as a way of life, skytal’tsi move from place to place because they’ve lost attachment to their roots. With no apparent possibility of restoring that connection, they succumb to an itinerant life, surrendering to an abject state of being---both materially and psychologically. Thus, the painting carries an ironic twist that bespeaks of solitude in numbers. Without overt drama, Hnizdovsky identifies with the pathos of skytal’tsi. Yet, with journalistic objectivity, he situates himself outside of the framing of the scene. Acknowledging his own life as being that of a roamer, his quest for an artistic base deviated from the story line treated in Displaced Persons. Thus, the painting brings to the fore the clash between the artist’s quest for vocational self-fulfillment in a time of great uncertainty, and the unnerving inability to find respite from his meanderings.

Aesthetic yearnings

“Beauty …is no longer at front and center, [it is] sidelined and circumstantial, as a reflex to the remains of instinct.”²Yakiv Hnizdovsky, “‘Hul’nia na Olimpii’ [Orgy on Olympus]. Pro Pitera Brojgelia starshoho [On Pieter Brueghel the Elder]” . ARKA, No. 5, November 1947; republished in Yakiv Hnizdovsky, 53. ↩

Jacques Hnizdovsky, 1947

Hnizdovsky’s artistic direction---modern, minimalist, and detail-oriented---was formed early in his life. His balanced, symmetrical style renders form with clarity and technical exactitude learned from revered classics whose art diverged from set conventions. His preference for prosaic, human-interest subjects in the manner of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, reflects the subtle witnessing of human conduct in banal common-day occurrences. Hnizdovsky’s appreciation for multi-figural compositions, confined interiors, and drole (and at times sarcastic) treatment of simple folk living routine lives comes across in an essay he wrote on Pieter Brueghel in 1947. At the same time, in the spirit of El Greco, in whom Hnizdovsky recognized a mystical and spiritual seer, he elevates the commonplace to a state of precious sanctity and staid reverence. Negotiating his own place in modernity as both a painter and a printmaker, Hnizdovsky identified mostly with Albrecht Dürer---whose art engaged the social, religious, and political complexity of his times, which appealed to Hnizdovsky’s own sensibilities.

In 1938, Hnizdovsky began his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He set out on his artistic journey with a small stipend offered by Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytskyi---a dedicated patron of young Ukrainian artists from the Galicia region. His work came to the attention of the Metropolitan through the artist’s affiliation with ANUM (ukr. Asotsiatsiia Nezalezhykh Ukrains’kykh Mysttsiv)---the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists active in Lviv from 1930 to 1939 that integrated artists of Western Ukraine working mostly in the modernist vein. The young Hnizdovsky had been submitting illustrations to the Lviv newspaper, Novyi chas (New Time) and the local satirical journal, Komar (Mosquito). At the Academy, Hnizdovsky focused on painting and was to study sculpture, but here he became interested in xylography, an early method of wood-block text printing that involves first carving the letters in relief upon a wooden block and then, after inking it, applying it to paper. This method would prove to be advantageous for Hnizdovsky, offering an expedient outlet using mostly pear wood for making images during his itinerancy. With it, he had planned to do a portfolio project about trees, a lifelong pursuit. He would not return to the technique until several years later, though. A veritable itinerant, Hnizdovsky admittedly never felt himself like a refugee in flight, but more as a tourist of extremely limited means, perpetually discovering new places that engendered new subject matter. The outbreak of war disrupted the most critical time of Hnizdovsky’s artistic formation and set him on an unexpected journey through life.

Between Two Worlds

[The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1939) created] “a very special zone of Europe, whose peoples suffered three rounds of occupation during the Second World War: first Soviet, then German, then Soviet again.”³

Timothy Snyder

With Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, Hnizdovsky left Warsaw, migrating first to artistic Venice and then to Rome, where he envisioned himself joining the carefree life of art students. When he learned of his acceptance to the Academy of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb though, he moved to Croatia and completed his art training there in 1942. Meanwhile, his native land, now under Soviet occupation, became a tattered “bloodlands” where the treachery of Nazi Germany clashed with the occupational forces of the Red Army. Unable to return home to the Borshchiv region and dislocated from his origins and family connections in the village of Pylypche, he completed two subsequent years of post-graduate study in Yugoslavia. His journeying did not stop there. In 1944, when the Allied Forces began freeing the territories of the German Reich, Hnizdovsky moved from Zagreb and contacted his countrymen in Bavaria in the sleepy medieval town of Weyarn---one of many restorative postwar transit locations where Ukrainians found a temporary home in exile. Weyarn was one of numerous sites of so-called Displaced Persons (DP) camps in liberated Germany.⁴Semi-Annual Report to the President and the Congress, The Displaced Persons Commission, vol. 1-2, Washington, DC 1949. ↩

In a fastidious and keenly observant manner captured in his first completed major painting Displaced Persons, Hnizdovsky depicts the intimate daily unwinding of the émigrés at Weyarn. With nuclear precision, he exposes the material references of their peripatetic lifestyle. In a geometrically bissected, but balanced composition, punctuated by an ascetic smattering of everyday objects (the few possessions owned by the present bunkmates), a poignant existential moment is revealed to the viewer. Serving as an historical reference to the tens of thousands of persons displaced by war, driven from their homelands and bereft of belongings, the few objects that Hnizdovsky brings into focus actualize personal journeys and untold stories. They also anticipate what will become Hnizdovsky’s trademark: granular attention on the mundane and ordinary that surrounds us.

The orderly and rigidly stratified disposition of Displaced Persons is dictated by the design of the cold and intractable, centrally featured bunkbeds. Pushed against the drab wall in a capacious, but mostly vacant barrack, they reinforce the sparse militaristic ambiance serving as a temporary refugee sanctuary. Like a Flemish altarpiece rendered in grisaille, Hnizdovsky neutralizes the emotional aspect of the harsh setting through a subdued palette of browns and grays, with a few patches of maroon that unify the disparate parts of the entire composition. This allows the viewer to engage from an observable distance with the very private moments of the residents. A rarefied consideration of the human condition is orchestrated through Hnizdovsky’s scrupulous attention to minutiae. As our eye rests briefly on the young mother enjoying the company of her children on the bottom right bunk, the scattering of toys brings to light an instance of domesticity and a disruption in expected routines in confined quarters.⁵Information identifying the mother as Anna [(Nusia) Hankevych] Krawczuk was provided by a relative in a Facebook comment responding to a post by the Ukrainian Museum, 27 January 2021. See https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=Hnizdovsk (accessed 20 January 2026). According to an interview with Mira Hnizdovsky (January 23, 2026), other figures have been identified by Dr. Jurij Kuzycz, who lived at the Weyarn Camp, as: Irena Skichniv Dolnytska (top left), Bohdan Ukhach (middle left), “Dziadzo” Huryk (bottom left), Kostyk Flyoruk (top right), Anastasij (Nazio) Gorchynskyi (middle right), and Marichka Kuzych (the baby) and Marta Nakonechna (the little girl).                     ↩ Playful innocence, a bitter note on wartime trauma, underpins the image. Indeed, the older daughter who has paused in her playing to stare at the viewer appears secure and safe at the foot of her mother’s bed. This momentary glimpse into a tender family moment introduces a harmonious counterclockwise reading of the entire composition. In an orbicular manner, the artist exposes further details that point to countless separate narratives about lives left behind, including the artist’s.

On the wall at the mother’s head hangs a beloved picture (more probably an icon) that offers a sense of security, a pall of protection over the migrating family. On the second, middle bunk, a man (maybe the father, or grandfather) leans over to hand a trinket to the baby below and delights in the human connection. Both parties seem glad for the diversion. Separated from the others on the top bunk and content in his own privacy, a man rests comfortably with bent knee as he immerses himself in the wistful reverie of pleasurable reading. The stack of books piled on his pillow (and the reading glasses) suggest he was of an educated class before being uprooted from his profession and status. Hnizdovsky was close to such bookish intellectuals living in uncertainty in displaced persons camps and designed several individualized bookplates (ex libris) for them.

The studiousness of this anonymous book lover is matched by attributes that belie the impermanence of the moment. A fedora rests prominently on the bedpost and belted trousers hang down the side with a few other personal belongings within reach. He is prepared to move to the next stop on his journey, maybe as soon as daybreak, and most likely with all his books in hand. Indeed, the faded graffiti on the wall above him underscores the temporariness of his situation. The fresher markings of 1946 and 1947 give evidence of the years already spent by the internee in a state of in-betweenness; the inscribed 1948 marks the year Hnizdovsky completed the painting.

Meanwhile, a young and elegant, probably single woman rests across from “the professor” on the top bunk. The Venus effect is captured as she admires her youthful features in a small hand mirror. Her presence bespeaks of expectancy and hope, if not desire, given that her private wall is plastered with pictures of admirers---all directionally positioned to meet her gaze. (There were many marriages that took place in the camps, some for the sake of expediency for a quicker exit; others to last for decades well beyond emigration). In this case, the anticipation is palpable: the young lady’s fancy feathered hat caps an outer jacket, and a prominently dangling undergarment are all at the ready for a stylish quick departure if necessary. Beneath her, on the middle bunk, lies an agitated, somewhat anxious worker, trying to finish off his cigarette before retiring for the night. While most of the others have actual pillows on which to lay their weary heads, his is only a folded-up army blanket that covers a suitcase that will eventually prop up his sleeping body. But he is nowhere near retiring. The most restless of the temporary squatters is the man on the bottom bunk who soaks his feet in a basin as he sits awash with concern and worry as to what will come next in his life. An alarm clock on the floor will no doubt signal an early awakening. His grooming instruments laid out by his suitcase will be easily accessible if needed for a speedy exit just before he dons his floppy hat that hangs at the ready on a hook on the wall. For each of these inmates, being bound to the temporary barracks hardly simulates the comfort of home. The limited social contact underscores their isolation, and the lack of free mobility highlights their alien status. As if suspended in time, each awaits emigration to any country that will accept them as refugees. Like most Ukrainians living out the postwar years in Displaced Persons (DP) camps, Hnizdovsky would also be in this anticipatory state awaiting emigration to the United States, which would finally come in June 1949.

Waiting and Working

“The Second World War had one positive consequence in that the refugee question became linked to higher political issues.”⁶Marta Dyczok, The Grand Alliance and Ukrainian Refugees, New York 2000, 6. ↩

Marta Dyczok

Only a few kilometers from Munich, the Weyarn refugee camp was administered by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), established in 1943 with the aim of bringing aid to involuntarily displaced victims of war through international humanitarian cooperation. In his capacity as an artist, Hnizdovsky was afforded the opportunity to document the administrative activities of UNRRA at the Weyarn Displaced Persons camp.⁷“Displaced Persons Camp,” Hnizdovsky Gallery, https://hnizdovsky.gallery/pages/dpcamp (accessed January 20, 2026) ↩ Using pen and ink and a calligraphic brush, he made aesthetically engaging yet administratively informative charts, which included reports on incoming aid, population movement, medical infirmary admissions, cash flow, and food supplies between October 14, 1945 and October 15, 1946. His layout of the camp’s administration buildings gives some indication of the complexity of the operation. In reporting on the delivery of clothing and tools, for instance, Hnizdovsky produced an instructive visual belying his inherent predilection for a clear and organized spatial field. Far from caricature, he wittily organized his report into a composition of parallel horizontal bands, and in the manner of a children’s book illustrator, showed utilitarian items animated in each register. Objects for everyday usage---from men’s jackets and shirts, and women’s shoes and skirts, to blankets and mattresses, cutlery, tablecloths and axes---all rendered in a schematic three-dimensional treatment---provide a spirited picture of how daily needs were met in the camp.

Generally, Ukrainian life in these camps was far from perfidious. As the displaced waited for sponsors for emigration, cultural and educational opportunities abounded, largely by those who shared in the unanticipated circumstances of transitoriness. Schools were set up for the young ones and various vocational workshops were available for young adults to prepare them for a range of skilled jobs once they were on their own. As camp residents pooled their talents to put on various musical and theatrical performances, as well as to commemorate historic events related to Ukraine’s long quest for independence, the camps provided a vibrant scene of social engagement. Amateur musical groups were formed; children’s concerts were organized; poetry was written, and scholarly articles were published. In the spirt of Dürer’s animated monogram, Hnizdovsky designed the title of the literary and arts émigré monthly ARKA, which was being published in nearby Munich by the renowned academic, George Shevelov. Not only did Hnizdovsky emulate the calligraphic effect of Dürer’s perky signature for his own autograph, but he adapted its spiritedness to the graphic layout of the journal. Several of Hnizdovsky’s reflections on great artists appeared as short essays in this publication. Under wartime shortages, Hnizdovsky also worked as an illustrator for the publisher Hran’ (The Edge). His skills at both woodcuts and linocuts allowed him to continue to create simple, but engaging images that he submitted to camp art exhibitions---a unique phenomenon in the history of twentieth century art. A smaller and grittier version of Hnizdovsky’s Displaced Persons seen from a photograph from a Munich exhibition of camp art. The painting shows three men and three women wrapped mummy-like in coarse blankets. Only one infant is depicted. Though its whereabouts are unknown, the oil painting was at some point reproduced as a postcard image and titled “Homeless”.

As a genre of creative modernist production rarely taken into consideration in the history of modernist expression, DP camp art exhibitions were more than just an outlet for artists. These occasions supplied closer insight into the heroic wartime challenges for self-expression integral to the nature and legacy of modernist art. They also bring to our attention to artists whose careers were eclipsed by the Second World War, but who, like Hnizdovsky, continued to make art notwithstanding. Indeed, Hnizdovsky was one of the lucky ones who found himself fully occupied artistically at the Weyarn Camp. Commissioned by the UNRRA to document life in the camp, the painting Displaced Persons represents a compelling testimonial to a universal story of persons uprooted by war. While tracking the constrained life of refugees, the artist also offers a glimpse into his own vulnerabilities, making his personal journey a part of that story.

The privilege of Hnizdovsky’s official assignment came with supplies made available to him and the ability to paint in a workspace equipped with a capacious table for the artist’s convenience---a unique instance of government support that would have seemed unthinkable in a period of postwar depravity. Thus, along with practical, yet historically important assignments such as a poster marking the first anniversary of the founding of the Weyarn DP camp and designing a chapel plaque commemorating the prayerful life of 265 Ukrainian refugees residing in the camp, a large-scale painting such as Displaced Persons not only bespeaks of private moments and personal histories but individualizes the group experience.

Simplified as a woodcut print to serve as a logo for the Weyarn camp, the painting serves as a searing testimonial to man’s dignity and to Hnizdovsky’s personal reverence for the smallest observable item in nature---a trait that would characterize his entire life’s oeuvre. Focused on the overlooked and ignored, whether it be a solitary gnarly tree, which he would treat as if it were a portrait, or craggy walnuts presented as a still life, or the wispy fronds of a delicate fern that required technical expertise to produce as a woodcut---there was no end to the variety of commonplace subjects that, over a lifetime, Hnizdovsky would elevate to poetic rumination.⁸For a broad sampling of Hnizdovsky’s subjects, see Abe M. Tahir, Jr., Hnizdovsky. Woodcuts. 1944-1975, Gretna, LA 1976; Jacques Hnizdovsky 1915-1985. Retrospective Exhibition, curated with catalogue text by Jaroslaw Leshko, exh. cat., New York 1995. ↩

Arrival

“DP Artist Finds Success but Can’t Tell His Folks.”⁹Jacques Hnizdovsky, “DP Artist Finds Success, But Can’t Tell His Folks,” The Minneapolis Star, 4 September 1950, 43. Like so many immigrants from behind the Iron Curtain, Hnizdovsky feared that his parents, siblings, and relatives would be repressed in the Soviet Union should anyone learn of his success in America. He chose, therefore, to remain silent about his whereabouts. ↩

Jacques Hnizdovsky, 1950

Soon after Hnizdovsky arrived in the United States in the summer of 1949 and landed in St. Paul, Minnesota, he found employment in the advertising agency of Brown & Bigelow---the first steady job in his life! Not long thereafter, he was awarded the Second Purchase Award for a woodcut submitted to the first biennial exhibition of prints and drawings at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts which he entered by sheer coincidence.¹⁰Hnizdovsky’s woodcut Bush was acquired by the Minnesota Institute of Art in 1950 for its permanent collection. It was selected by A. Hyatt Mayor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. A feature article on the immigrant artist with a photograph of Hnizdovsky in a borrowed artist’s smock appeared in the local St. Paul newspaper. See Hnizdovsky, “DP Artist Finds Success,” 43. ↩ A second work, a painting entitled Eggs from his student days, won recognition at the Minnesota State Fair, juried by Japanese-born American painter Yasuo Kuniyoshi. Spurred on by these events to become an independent artist, the restless, now 35-year-old Hnizdovsky was determined to fully devote himself to his art. He relocated once again, this time to New York to begin painting after a long hiatus. As he struggled with his mercurial relationship towards the medium, engaging with the genre proved challenging.

Without a studio and limited access to materials, and unable to pay for a model (a strict requirement for figure painting learned from his student days in the Academy), he became a keen observer of his immediate environment. He captured New York’s tall skyscrapers in the spirit of Gothic verticality and treated crowds monolithically, as if totems trapped by everyday routines and habits. Hnizdovsky’s predilection for observational rather than emotional detail already rooted in the painting of Displaced Persons with the precision of an engineer, is projected onto an efficient picture of modern urbanity. The introspective, isolated world of alienated individuals living in a restive metropolis reflects the regimentation of city life, insinuating a certain invisibility implied by a submissiveness to the status quo. The apparent orderliness of the city grid, belying an ethos of unruffled quietude and the pathos of obscurity, is captured by the artist’s exacting drawing skills and the linear precision gained from his painstaking study of Japanese prints. As Hnizdovsky again took up woodcuts, he replaced the nameless human figure absorbed into a crowd (a persistent subject of his contemplative life) with the imposing presence of a living plant or self-articulating domestic animal. As he placed these singular objects at the very foreground of our vision and positioned them vertically close to the frontal plane, he developed an approach that may have offered the effect of isolation and introspection as seen in Displaced Persons but without the slightest hint of a life interrupted.

The Profane and Mundane

“Hnizdovsky’s world encompasses a limited spectrum, essentially a natural history of animals and birds, wild and domestic, arrested and in repose, often observed at the zoo.”¹¹Peter Wick, “Foreword” in Abe M. Tahir, Jr., Hnizdovsky. Woodcuts, ix. ↩

Peter Wick, 1976

While the shadow of migratory disquietude shaped Hnizdovsky’s worldview, his concentrated effort in woodblock carving allowed him to tap into his innermost thoughts and ground his art with profound introspection. The solitary, albeit jaunty, centrally disposed subjects he depicted no doubt soothed his own unsettled state of being and brought him respite. Thus, the singularity of a lone object imprinted boldly on delicate, flimsy Japanese paper might function as a wistful simulacrum of ephemerality, but the artistic intent that drove such imagery was never barren or vacuous. In the spirit of the rarest of medieval herbaria and bestiaries, Hnizdovsky’s laboriously scrutinized solitary subjects, be it flora or fauna, meticulously carved into wood in the manner of a Linnaean system of taxonomies and rendered with essential clarity and unmitigated authenticity, even when multiplied as a print set. A basketful of uncracked nuts meticulously carved to reveal the ridges of their shells is as precious as a single dissected walnut revealing its inner structure; farmers’ crates of corncobs or string beans, or a woven box of Brussel sprouts or other produce available on the common open-air market, speak not of rigid confinement but of the beauty of disparateness, made even more special in editions in which the artist hand-painted each print.¹²Gordon P. DeWolf, Flora Exotica: A Collection of Flowering Plants. Boston 1972. ↩ Despite the ordinariness of such subject matter, diversity in sameness transcends the pedestrian and extends to existential questions that kept nagging at the artist. For these he sought inspiration in the timeless products of Japanese printmaking and Chinese brush painting. Intermittently, Hnizdovsky would turn to canonic religious subjects as full-scale paintings, e.g., “The Good Shepherd” (1954), “The Crucifixion” (1955), “The Last Supper” (1956), which he treated as modern-day icons while retaining the austerity of the Byzantine manner. Before finally coming to terms with his unsettled searchings, Hnizdovsky made yet one more fateful relocation. In 1957-58, he spent time in Paris where he met his future wife. Returning to New York, he finally found the long-searched for stability which centered him (and his art) to the end of his productive and artistically fruitful life. In the 1970s, Hnizdovsky fulfilled yet another lifetime dream: an art immersive trip to Japan.

Coming Full Circle

“The life of a person is merely an imperfect reflection of a personal dream.”¹³Yakiv Hnizdovskyi, “An Awakened Princess,” 75. ↩

Jacques Hnizdovsky, 1954

Displaced Persons set the tone for much of Hnizdovsky’s work. As he observed the world around him, Hnizdovsky’s art might be read as engaging with themes of alienation, separation, and anonymity---all of which he certainly experienced in his roving life, yet these intermittent wistful states are offset by the carefree lightness of singular objects, executed with a sense of joyful pleasure. As a kind of antipode to the potential interior grayness of life wrapped up in generic routines, Hnizdovsky’s artistic output resulted in a lifetime of hopeful scions. The simplicity of a frontal old goose or a stoic impish cat staring out at the viewer become bearers of a fundamental shift of consciousness about everydayness. An aged knotty tree, the symmetry of an entire grove lined up in patterned formation along a strict perspective, a New York scene of city dwellers comprising a uniformly rushing crowd of subway passengers all heading in the same direction, or the rounded botanical accuracy of a sunflower bespeak of an artist with a penetrating scrutiny of the world around him, all relayed rationally, unemotionally, and sometimes with a hint of sardonic acceptance of a life he could never have planned for himself.

Dr. Myroslava M. Mudrak, Emerita Professor, History of Art, The Ohio State University