Abstract
The works of the portrait genre of the representative of the Repin’s direction of the Kharkiv school of painting — V. L. Ganotsky are studied. Creativity of the master is analyzed in the context of the formation and development of portrait painting in Kharkiv. The role of the artist in preserving traditions in the artistic and stylistic system of the Ukrainian easel portrait of the last third of the XX–XXI centuries is revealed. The artistic and stylistic features of the works of the portrait genre are analyzed: compositional, coloristic, light-tonal structure, technique of execution.As a result of the artistic and stylistic analysis, it was concluded that the “volume-plastic style” dominates the portrait images of the 1980s, with its inherent clear correlation between character and space. Portraits of this period are characterized by conciseness, expressiveness of silhouette, certainty of tonal solution, restrained by color palette.It is revealed that the art of Baroque, Romanticism and Art Nouveau influenced the formation of art by the masters of the mature period of the 1990s. We define the style of portraits of this period as “pictorial” (according to the terminology of G. Wölflin). It was found that the main feature of the artist’s paintings lies in the intense contrast of the light-and-dark palette. It is concluded that as a result of the complexity of the compositional structure of the portrait by the introduction of the motive of the landscape and still life, the image of an individual personality becomes a portrait-picture.