T.S. Druz – Active Participant in Collectivization and WWII Veteran

Oleksandr Hryhorovych Maksymenko was a Soviet Ukrainian painter. Born on November 18, 1916 in the village of Vilkhovatka (now Poltava region), he graduated from the Dnipropetrovsk Art School (1938) and the Kyiv Art Institute (1947), where his teachers by profession were Yu. Bondar, M. Panin, and O. Shovkunenko. He worked in the field of easel painting, participating in republic and all-Union (from 1947) and foreign (from 1949) exhibitions. He was a member of the National Union of Artists of the Ukrainian SSR starting in 1947. His main works include "Landlords" (1947), "Water Has Come" (1957), "Thoughts of a Farmer" (1963), and "In a Free Minute" (1969-1970). Maksymenko's works are kept in state and private collections of Ukraine and abroad. He lived and worked in the city of Kyiv and died on October 15, 2011.