The Kiss

Ukrainian artist Vsevolod Maksymovych is considered the most important devotee of Art Nouveau style in Ukraine.

At an early age, most of his paintings shared the period’s preoccupations with exoticism, mysticism, and sexuality. He was influenced by Aubrey Beardsley and Mikhail Vrubel and studied in Poltava and then in Moscow. From 1912 to 1914 he created his most outstanding works—giant decorative panels in which he used many iconographic sources, including Ancient Greek and Roman, Assyrian, and Poltava folk art. At the same time, he was close to Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov (with whom he was filmed in Drama in the Futurists’ Cabaret No. 13, which was probably the world's first avant-garde film in history). In 1914 he died by suicide after a drug overdose. Most likely, the reason that pushed the artist to such a step was the failure of his solo exhibition in Moscow. 

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