A change in the scientific worldview determines refocusing of investigations of new or existing factual material. Ukrainian painting, researched throughout the 20th
and in early 21st century, acquired historical and cultural as well as artistic and stylistic features within the Soviet methodological framework (ideoligically
modified) targeted at the global systems of arts systematization and classification. Along with that, particular scholars offered alternative classification principles
(I. Ioffe, M. Alpatov, M. Kahan, V. Vlasov), including Ukrainian ones with the focus on the national specificity (A. Prahov, F. Shmit, V. Modzalevskyi, M. Holubets,
I. Ohienko, K. Shirotskiy, D. Antonovych, B.-I. Antonych, M. Stankevych, etc.). The approach this thesis offers is based upon synchrony and diachrony;
namely, the analysis of artistic processes in critical times as well as in transition and phase periods that make the development of painting intermittent rather than linear.
Thereby, the factual material visualizes the diverse arts and crafts as well as the artists’ worldviews. Their classification, systematization, generalization by certain
criteria, and identifying the dominant trends determine the relevance of this paper, the problem and its solution, namely, building conceptual models of Ukrainian painting of the 19th – early 21st century. The thesis solves this problem with reliance on the complex interdisciplinary approach (art studies, culturology, history, philoshophy, psychology, mathematics, and optics) to researching painting within the specified chronological framework; refocusing from a stylistic and genre-based approach to an artist’s perception of the spacetime as well as actualization of the context and criteria for reality evaluation provides a new perspective of painting in the field of cultural dynamics. Literary analysis shows that contextuality of Ukrainian painting has been conceptualized sporadically; when considering the works of a particular period, the researchers paid attention to the obvious sense-organizing approches of the artists who preferred to express, directly or indirectly, the authentic Ukrainian culture, the peculiarities of the material as well as the spiritual development of the nation, and its traditions. Thereby, a circle of artists has been identified who determined the axiological framework for their own work in 19th – early 20th century on the basis of the national culture, idea, memory, mental and spiritual vision. Literature on the work of T. Shevhenko as the founder of the nation-oriented art and its genre specificity is the most in-depth in this respect. The work of Ukrainian modernists, the Sixtiers, and the artists from the independent Ukraine is less investigated in the given context. Relationships between the artist and the government comprise a separate chapter in the history of Ukrainian arts, estimated ambiguously during the age of totalitarianism (M. Burachek, I. Vrona, M. Zubar, K. Slipko-Moskaltsiv, M. Khmuryi, E. Kholostenko, M. Kotliar, V. Afanasiev, Y. Zatenatskyi, H. Ostrovskyi, P. Hovdia, B. Butnyk-Siverskyi, B. Lobanovskyi, V. Klevaev,
M. Kryvolapov, Yu. Belichko, V. Fomenko) and afterwards (B. Lobanovskyi, O. Holubets, O. Rohotchenko, H. Skliarenko, T. Ohneva, L. Smyrna, N. Averianova).
A number of Ukrainian scholars have written investigations reports, books, and chapters in composite works as well as scholarly article collections about the
conventional content and form of painting within the normalized socialist realism framework. Heroic themes related to wars, revolutions, labor feats, and
collectivization eliminated any displays of individualism, noncom-formity, and alternative views of the time, resulting into “in-migration” of artists. It is worth
noting that artists worked in between those extremes, realizing their own artisitc visions at the level of form and language, which is the microlevel, with the
accordance of the macrolevel established by the system: the mythologized stereotype of “a happy Soviet.” Conventionalism as a condition of acceptance or non-acceptance of certain norms makes it possible to manifest individualism, which actually took place in the Soviet times, in contradiction to conformism as subordination and dissolution of a self.
