(b Krolovets, 2 April 1883; d Vence, 28 Jan 1977). Ukrainian painter and theorist. He studied philology and biology at the universities of Kiev, St Petersburg and Moscow before turning to art. He studied painting in Moscow and established close ties with the collectors Sergey Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. In 1911 he visited Paris where he became an enthusiast of Cubist painting, which, after a trip to Italy in 1913–14, he blended with his study of early Italian Renaissance painters, creating a style that brought together the cosmopolitan and urbane with the orthodoxy of the Byzantine legacy of sacred art. Hryshchenko devoted his theoretical work to the subject of Byzantine art and its links with modern art (1912) and to an analysis of the formal and stylistic properties of Byzantine painting in terms of modernist tendencies and practice (1916). After the 1917 revolution he became a professor at the Free Art Studios (Svomas) in Moscow and a member of the Commission for the Preservation of Historic Monuments. In 1919 he left Russia by way of the Crimea for Constantinople and Greece, which marked the beginning of a distinctive and inspired period of watercolour painting. In 1921, when he arrived in Paris, 12 paintings of Constantinople were included in the Salon d’Automne. A subsequent trip to Greece resulted in works that brought him into contact with renowned dealers and distinguished collectors (Léopold Zborowski, Albert C. Barnes). After 1924 Hryshchenko lived in southern France where he painted in muted, controlled and diaphanously transparent tones. In 1937 a one-man exhibition was held at the Museum of Ukrainian Art in L’vov (now L’viv). Later, the works that had been housed in the L’viv museum were branded as ‘formalist’ and destroyed during the Stalinist years. To preserve his artistic legacy the Alexis Gritchenko Foundation was formed in New York in 1958.