Kavsan, Dmitro. Portrait of Jurii Maniichuk.
1996. Oil on canvas. 91 x 70 cm.

Jurii V. Maniichuk assembled his collection of close to 150 Ukrainian paintings of the Soviet era while living and working in Kyiv in the 1990s. Born in Lviv, he earned his Ph.D. in international law from T. Shevchenko Kyiv State University and was a university professor there until moving to Canada and earning a master’s of law at Osgoode Hall, York University, in Toronto in 1991.

He immigrated to the U.S. and became an American citizen while working as a legal specialist for the Library of Congress in the early 1990s. In 1993, two years after Ukraine attained its independence, Maniichuk returned to Kyiv as a legal consultant to the Ukrainian parliament and presidential administration for the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Bank.

With the country and art world undergoing colossal changes, Maniichuk chose to preserve leading examples of an art genre in danger of being destroyed. In 1999, Maniichuk brought his collection to the U.S. and a year later married New York-based journalist, Rose Brady. Maniichuk died unexpectedly in 2009 while visiting Kyiv. A portion of his collection is on loan to the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York City and can be viewed there.

About Rose Brady

Rose Brady is a writer and editor based in Naples, Florida. She worked for many years as a senior editor for Bloomberg Businessweek and was BusinessWeek’s Moscow bureau chief from 1989-1993, covering the end of the Cold War and of the Soviet Union. Brady has a Ph.D. in political science from St. Petersburg State University in Russia, a M.Sc. in international relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a B.A. in English from Yale University. She was married to Jurii Maniichuk in 2000 and inherited his art collection after his death in 2009.