Ukrainian art takes refuge in the Thyssen museum in Madrid


‘In the eye of the hurricane. Avant-garde in Ukraine, 1900-1930’, the exhibition with which the Thyssen wants to pay homage to Ukrainian art and people, is generating great expectation internationally for obvious reasons. It is the first time that a significant part of the Ukrainian cultural heritage has left the country since the war began and the objective is clear: to claim their own identity and, in the process, to safeguard this wealth during the Russian occupation.

The exhibition brings together some 70 works, among which are paintings, drawings, collages or theatrical designs, more than fifty came from Ukraine on a dangerous journey in a country besieged by war.

The development of the avant-garde in Ukraine took place in a complicated sociopolitical context in which empires collapsed, the First World War broke out, and the revolutions of 1917, which were followed by the Ukrainian war of independence (1917-1921) and the creation of Soviet Ukraine.

Stalin’s brutal repression of the Ukrainian intelligentsia led to the execution of dozens of writers, intellectuals, theater directors and artists, while the ‘Holodomor’, the famine caused by Stalin’s forced collectivization between 1932 and 1933, killed some 7 million people throughout the USSR, about 5 million in Ukraine.

The State apparatus requisitioned crops and food and surrounded entire towns so that no one could leave, sentencing their inhabitants to certain death. And despite the fact that it was one of the greatest humanitarian tragedies of the 20th century, the ukrainian art He lived in those years a true boom, a fruitful period of artistic experimentation.

The exhibition opens a window on the Ukrainian avant-garde between 1900 and 1930, and demonstrates that “much” of what has traditionally been called the Russian avant-garde is really “Ukrainian avant-garde”, they explain from Thyssen. A review of ukrainian art avant-garde in the first decades of the 20th century, showing the different artistic styles, from figurative art to Constructivism, past Futurism or Expressionism.

At the press conference to present the exhibition, the President of Ukraine Zelenski intervened to thank Spain for this exhibition and to publicize in Europe the powerful creativity of the first vanguards of that country, which after Madrid the exhibition will continue at the Ludwig Museum from Cologne.

The exhibition includes a range of styles ranging from the neo-Byzantine paintings of the followers of Mykhailo Boichuk to the experimental works of the members of the Kultur Lige, who were looking for a new vision of contemporary Ukrainian art, as well as the painting of Kazymyr Malevych and El Lissitzky. , international avant-garde artists who worked in Ukraine or international figures who were born and began their careers in Ukrainian territory, such as Baranoff-Rossiné, Sonia Delaunay or Alexandra Exter, a pioneer in the translation of cubist principles to stage design.

Of Baranoff-Rossiné, “Adam and Eve” (1912) stands out, a work in which he experimented with a suggestive colorist alternative to the painting of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, with whom he maintained a close friendship. While Alexandra Exter was a prominent Ukrainian artist she absorbed cubism and futurism in Paris to reinterpret and later expand it in her homeland.

Considered the father of Russian Futurism, Davyd Burliuk became a promoter of the new artistic trends that were beginning to emerge and a promoter of change in the outdated local cultural institutions. His painting moved between post-impressionism and expressionism.

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Davyd Burliuk, Carousel 1921 Oil on canvas, 33 x 45.5 cm. (NATIONAL MUSEUM OF ART OF UKRANIA.)

The “boichukistas” stand out, followers of Mykhailo Boichuk, an artist who traveled to various European capitals to complete his training. At the end of 1917 he opened a painting workshop at the newly founded Ukrainian Academy of Art, advocating for an art conceived as a national art heritage and achieved a synthesis of styles from Byzantine art, pre-Renaissance Italian frescoes and Ukrainian folk art. . His students who became known as “Boichukists” would soon after be branded bourgeois nationalists and many of them, including Boichuk himself, were executed in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s and much of their public art destroyed.

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Kostiantyn Yeleva (Portrait) Oil on canvas. (NATIONAL MUSEUM OF ART UKRAINE)

The artistic activity of the last generation of the Ukrainian avant-garde was cut short by a radical change, in the midst of the Stalin era. In 1932 Socialist Realism was introduced as the only official Soviet art style, with propaganda qualities being valued over experimentation, an example by Kostiantyn Yeleva.

The ukrainian art who survived Stalin escapes from Putin

“The Ukrainian is an independent avant-garde that should be part of the world movement of the early 20th century,” said Maryna Drobotiuk, chief curator of the kyiv institution. “This exhibition will show what Russia is trying to destroy with the current war and the connection Ukraine has with Europe.” From the museums in the reclaimed city of Kherson, it is estimated that the Russians looted some 15,000 historical pieces and works of art.

“Russia has always tried to steal our cultural identity, the names of our artists,” added Serhii Pohoreltsev, the Ukrainian ambassador to Spain. “Cultural genocide does not kill, but it steals identity; that is why it is important to identify Ukrainian artists,” said the ambassador just nine decades after the Holodomor, the terrible famine caused by Stalin between 1932 and 1933 that killed about five Millions of Ukrainians

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Oleksandr Bohomazov, Sharpening the Saws 1927. Oil on canvas. 138 x 155cm. (NATIONAL MUSEUM OF ART OF UKRANIA.)

“In the eye of the hurricane…” was born from a project outlined by the baron’s daughter, Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, and the Ukrainian curator Konstantin Akinsha. A few days after the invasion of Russia, Francesca, closely linked to the ukrainian art proposed to carry out this risky exhibition. The Thyssen museum itself already had works by Ukrainian authors who were registered within the Russian avant-garde, so it was time to give them their own identity and vindicate them above the inaccurate labels that compressed them for so long.

In record time, the Madrid museum manages to exhibit some 70 works that allow us to investigate the wide range of styles -cubism, futurism, expressionism or suprematism- mixed with elements of national folklore that flourished in a period of wars, revolutions and mass murders. .

The transfer of the works has not been easy. The convoy with the pieces left on November 15, just a couple of hours before Putin ordered the launch of about a hundred missiles on Ukraine that hit numerous cities.

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Volodymyr Burliuk Ukrainian Peasant Woman, 1910-1911 Oil on canvas. 132 x 70 cm. (THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA NATIONAL MUSEUM, MADRID)

The few pieces that managed to avoid the Stalinist purges of the last century are now avoiding another Russian threat: Putin’s missiles. And it is that in addition to protecting the pieces, the other objective of the exhibition consists of rescuing the purely Ukrainian condition of all these paintings and painters exhibited here, of what until recently was necessarily known as Russian art.

Akinsha recalled that the looting perpetrated by Putin’s troops of Ukrainian heritage has not been paralleled since World War II: “Russian newspapers boast that their museum collections are growing. A violation of all international laws and regulations is being recorded. Institutions need to address it.

Source-www.diariolibre.com