For a lover of Soviet avant-garde art, In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900–1930s is a tipping moment for a few realizations that started around the full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022. The exciting and pioneering art coming out of Soviet empire in the 1920s and ’30s has been Russified for a century. Since the 1960s and the alleviation of the Cold War, there has been a narrative — exemplified by studies such as Camilla Gray’s The Russian Experiment in Art: 1863–1922 — that the important artists coming from the Soviet Union were Russian or of Russian ethnicity. The Russian avant-garde’s status was solidified in the cultural climate of the 1960s and ’70s in the West, and when the Left clashed with the ancien régime. Soviet art presented a thrilling lesson on how artists can engage in politics and the ways in which they can be wrong. But perhaps there should be another lesson learned: about how imperialism works within culture.
Russian control over Soviet satellite countries did not end in 1991. This stronghold extended well into art, and art as a part of a separate Ukrainian cultural identity is something Russia strove to obliterate. Despite the international support for Ukraine since 2022, the West has still been facilitating Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its cultural hegemony for years.
In a fascinating account, the show’s curator, Konstantin Akinsha, begins his story with how he tried to put on a show of the Ukrainian “executed Renaissance” (that means killed in Stalinist purges) since 2018. By early 2022 — sure that the war was merely weeks away — Akinsha began trying to organize an exhibition that would physically remove the works from endangered buildings, chiefly the National Art Museum in Kyiv. With support from Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza — the dynastic Swiss art collector — the location was secured and works were shipped out of the war zone without insurance, using trucks…
Auteur: Agata Pyzik
