LONDON – The story of a country’s origins can be so much messier than its day-to-day politics. Things are put on paper and then leak through the cracks.
In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900–1930 at the Royal Academy shows how Ukraine grew into a thriving center of avant-garde art in the early decades of the 20th century, absorbing and reshaping its own versions of Cubism, Futurism and Constructivism. Most of the works in the exhibition are on loan from the Ukrainian National Museum and the Museum of Theatre, Music and Film of Ukraine.
The exhibition tells a version of the history of modernist painting in Ukraine that has been little told before, a version that tends toward the idea of Ukraine not as a puppet state subject to evil imperial designs, but as a nation bent on has striven since at least the mid-19th century to realize its dreams of self-determination. A sense of fluidity permeated the art world – artists came and went, traveling from country to country – as well as an exciting experiment that animated even fields like theater design.
Dreams of nationhood can be thwarted, but they can also be obscured. We’ve all heard of Kazimir Malevich, the suprematist painter of ‘Black Square’ fame, the man who injected intoxicating notions of spirituality into abstract art in the early 20th century. And from a Parisian named Sonia Delaunay, who developed Simultanism with her husband Robert.
In the relatively recent past, we have generally been persuaded to regard Malevich as a member of the Soviet avant-garde. The 2014 Tate Modern catalogue, on the occasion of a major gathering of his works, describes him as having ‘come of age in Tsarist Russia’. Not so here. Malevich (like all other artists in this show) is identified by his Ukrainian name: Kazymyr Malevych. Born in Kiev to a Polish family, he grew up in the countryside, and local folk traditions were very close to home, as they were for so many of the artists featured there. As for Delaunay, she is widely remembered as a celebrated member of the Parisian avant-class. Except she was no more French than Malevich was Soviet. Sonia Delaunay was also of Ukrainian descent; born in Odessa, she spent her childhood in the countryside.
But there are also many lesser-known artists in the exhibition, whose names do not deserve to be forgotten – Alexandra Exter, for example, whose career as an artist saw her shuttle from Kiev to Paris and then back again; “Bridge (Sevres)” (ca. 1912), a painting with a subdued palette, is squarely in cubist territory. Or Oleksander Bohomazov, who taught at the Kiev Art Institute from 1922 to 1930. His 1927 painting ‘Sharpening the Saws’ is one of the most notable works in the exhibition, as it connects with many other works. Socialist Realism paintings of the glorified worker, but the sense of geometry and brilliant use of color refresh that tired genre – see how the three saws fan out? The work is certainly a nod to more local folkloric traditions.
And then it all ended. Stalin’s purges of the 1930s – that brutal extermination of so many ‘bourgeois nationalists’ – did the government’s dirty work; movement and fluidity suddenly turned into the unanswerable rigidity of death. This incredible exhibition rescues an under-documented historical moment from oblivion.
In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900–1930 continues at the Royal Academy (Burlington Gardens, London, England) through October 13. The exhibition was curated by Konstantin Akinsha, art historian and curator, Katia Denysova, Courtauld Institute of Art, Olena Kashuba-Volvach, curator of the 19th and early 20th centuries. century art at the National Art Museum of Ukraine, and Ann Dumas, curator, Royal Academy of Arts.
