Vasyl Ilych Kassian (Vasili Kasian) was born on January 1, 1896 in the village of Mykulyntsi in the Ukraine (Galicia and Lodemeria, Stanislav Region). He studied art with Czech painter Max Svabinsky at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, Czechoslavakia, graduating in 1926.

A veteran of World War I he went on to work as a graphic artist, painter and parliamentarian. In the 1930s he was a professor at the Kiev Artistic Institute, the center of the Ukraine Avant-garde art in 1920s-1930s.  He earned the honor of ‘People’s Painter of the Soviet Union’ and was an academician with the Academy of Arts of the Soviet Union.

He did several works (illustrations, posters and portraits) devoted to socialist construction in the Ukraine. Many of his works were devoted to the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko and his literary compatriots.

Vasyl Illych Kasian died on June 26,1976 in Kiev, Ukrainian S.S.R.