Since February 24, 2022, the world has been paying more attention to Ukrainian history. Will the same be true of its art history? The works selected for “In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900–1930s,” mostly from Kyiv’s National Art Museum of Ukraine, were urgently transported out of the country when the Russian offensive was intensifying in mid-2022; a traveling exhibition, while functioning as an advocate for the beleaguered nation, was also a way to safeguard them. The exhibition, which has appeared in Madrid, Brussels, and Vienna, concluded its tour in London.
The show’s curator, Konstantin Akinsha, aimed to challenge the long-entrenched assumption that most Soviet avant-garde art was made by ethnic Russians. The dispute over its legacy continues: When for this exhibition the Royal Academy used the spelling “Kazymyr Malevych” rather than “Kazimir Malevich,” it spurred protests from the Russian Foreign Ministry. Malevich, born of Polish parents in Kyiv, spent most of his life in Russia, but always accentuated his Ukrainian identity. Here he was shown in a greater context. Postrevolutionary Kyiv emerges as one of the most important avant-garde centers in the world. The provisional Ukrainian Soviet Republic established a short-lived act protecting minorities in terms of language and cultural expression. After the October Revolution, Ukrainian artists—a diverse lot of Jewish, Polish, Belarusian, and Russian extraction—sought to build a new, more open society. Alexandra Exter brought her fabulous knowledge of Cubism and Futurism from France and Italy and El Lissitzky (here represented by Composition, ca. 1918–20) led Kultur Lige, linking Jewish artists and publishing Yiddish-language art books for children.
Other artists, such as Mykhailo Boichuk and his associates Ivan Padalka and Manuil Shekhtman, were highly influenced by the art of Byzantine icons as well as the Italian Gothic and proto-Renaissance painting of Cimabue and Giotto in their portrayal of the countryside and heroic peasant life. Because an urban proletariat was rare in Ukraine, artists wanted to engage the countryside population and elevate their work, as Oleksandr Bohomazov did in his depictions of carpenters, one of which, Sharpening the Saws, 1927, with breathtaking psychedelic colors, was possibly the show’s greatest single work. Padalka’s Photographer, 1927, suggests the peasants’ induction to modernism by depicting a group of them having their picture taken. On the other hand, Shekhtman’s Jewish Pogrom, 1926, shows the atrocities committed during the civil war that followed the revolution.
Depictions of modern city life also abounded here, among them Anatol Petrytskyi’s Portrait of Mykhailo Semenko, 1929, in which the subject is pictured sitting in Kharkiv’s Cafe Poca, a bastion of European modernity. Others created monumental frescoes and street art, designing both news kiosks and the magazines sold in them. Vasyl Yermilov was present here with his cover design for the journal Nove Mystetstvo (New Art) from 1927. A fabulous section on Constructivist stage design also highlighted Petrytskyi, who was represented as well by two large-format paintings: The contrast between the striking realism of The Invalids, 1924, and the unsettled proportions of a seemingly ordinary home interior in At the Table, 1926, suggests his range as an artist. Semen Yoffe’s In the Shooting Gallery, 1932, with its two mysterious female figures, one in a Communist Pioneer uniform, the other clad in black, conjures an unsettling atmosphere of unidentified danger, bringing to mind the realism of Aleksandr Deyneka and evoking the revolution’s murky outcome.
The politics of Ukrainizatsia was only grudgingly allowed by Soviet Russia, and, especially with the advent of Stalinism in the late 1920s, the cosmopolitan artists of Ukraine were accused of bourgeois nationalism. Many of the artists presented at the show were shot; the period later became known as the Executed Renaissance. Their murals were painted over, their canvases hidden in the archives. It required a revolution and a war for the world to more fully comprehend the Soviet avant-garde’s particularly Ukrainian character. Today, we are in a better position to appreciate the complex makeup of the Eastern European avant-garde, in terms of nationalities, ethnicities, and languages. What brought these groups together was the dream of building a better future, tragically cut short by Stalinism, a dream that continues to elude Ukraine’s artists and writers in the present.
Source: Artforum.com
