In the eye of the Storm

​Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, interest in Ukrainian culture has flourished in the West, helping Ukrainian literature, music and art to meet with a new, receptive audience for the first time. Taking advantage of this blossoming demand for all things Ukrainian, the latest exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Art, In the eye of the Storm, showcases the country’s modernist era from 1900 to the 1930s.

Just as during the current conflict, this period of violent upheaval went hand in hand with a thriving creative scene across literature, theatre and art. The modernist movement unfolded against a backdrop of collapsing empires, the First World War, the fight for independence, the establishment of Soviet Ukraine, the Holodomor and Stalin’s purges.  

Most of the works on show are on loan from the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv, others come from the Museum of Theatre, Music and Cinema of Ukraine, having been removed from the country for safekeeping in the autumn of 2022 and trucked across the border into Poland.

Ironically, curator Konstantin Akinsha had been trying for several years to convince Western museums to host the show, only to be met with lukewarm interest or deterred by political tensions. Once the war came to Kyiv, all this changed. “Ironically, at the end of the day, the best promoter of my exhibition was Vladimir Putin. He ultimately made it possible by invading Ukraine,” Akinsha told New York-based ARTnews. As well as bringing an under-recognised school of modernism to a new audience, the exhibition – which launched in Madrid in 2022 – serves to save these precious artworks from the threat of Russian attack.

“The museum collections of Mariupol, Melitopol, and Kherson were lost, removed by Russians or partly destroyed,” Akinsha says. “When the war started, I decided that, if they don’t want to evacuate the collections, I had no choice but to start my own war. I was adamant that we had to move the paintings that eventually comprised In the Eye of the Storm abroad because the prospect of the show would be more acceptable than an evacuation. We made an appeal to the presidential administration. To my surprise, our undertaking was supported by President Zelensky.”

The exhibition demonstrates the falsehood of Putin’s claim that Ukrainian culture independent of Russia does not exist. It is rich in vivid colour and compositions of Ukrainian folk and decorative art – part of the wider modernist movement with its emphasis on revolutionary and technological innovation, but with a distinct flavour of its own.

It features artists from Russian, Polish and Jewish, as well as Ukrainian, communities, all of whom lived or worked in Ukraine for a period. Some are already well known to an international audience, including Kazymyr Malevych, Sonia Delaunay and El Lissitzky. Less celebrated, but equally significant, was Alexandra Exter, who founded an influential art studio in Kyiv introducing painters to the latest European art movements while associating them directly with Ukrainian folk art. Many other of the artists represented here, I, for one, had never heard of, including Oleksandr Bohomazov, Mykhailo Boichuk and Issachar Ber Ryback. Between them, they helped define Ukraine’s cultural identity in the early 20th century before it was snuffed out by Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders.

For many of the featured works, this was not the first time they had been rescued from danger. Some had been confiscated during the Stalin era or hidden from the Soviet censors. From the 1930s onwards, dozens of modernist works were confiscated from museums and other institutions and held in secret storerooms awaiting destruction. Ironically it was another war – World War II – that prevented the demolition of many of these precious paintings as the leadership turned its attention to a mightier foe than the art world. Numerous works were later saved by the director of Ukraine’s National Museum in Kyiv, who took them into storage and cunningly marked their value as zero on the accompanying paperwork, enabling them to remain under the radar.

The same goes for the artists themselves – some fled the country and flourished abroad; some stayed and perished in the purges. Boichuk, for example, was shot by the Soviet secret police in 1937. The monumental frescoes he was most famous for were plastered over. Ryback fled after his father was murdered in a pogrom in Elisavetgrad that left 350 dead, heading first to Kyiv, then Moscow, and finally to Berlin.

Along with El Lissitzky, Manuil Shekhtman, Sarah Shor and Marko Epshtein, Rybak was part of the Jewish Kultur Lige an organisation founded in Kyiv in 1918 that promoted the development of contemporary Jewish-Yiddish culture. A section of the exhibition features work by this group of artists, much of it depicting subject matter particular to the Jewish community of the period – the shtetl and the violent pogroms of the 1917-21 civil war.

The exhibition highlights the range of artistic styles and cultural identities prevalent in Ukraine’s artistic circles at that time. The influence of other modernist movements of the period is evident, and hardly surprising. There was no art academy in Ukraine at the start of the 20th century, so Ukrainian artists moved westwards to study, and brought back to Ukraine new ideas based on the creative movements prevalent in Europe at the time: cubism from France; futurism from Italy; expressionism from Germany.

This freedom of artistic experimentation that runs through the exhibition came to an abrupt end by the mid-1930s, with Stalin increasingly fearful of Ukraine’s national movement and of any kind of experimentation in art, music, literature or theatre, which was labelled bourgeois, decadent and “formalist”.

“Mr Putin repeats every other day that Ukraine’s identity and culture doesn’t exist, but In the Eye of the Storm proves that it does,” Akinsha says. In its review of the show, The Guardian urges its readers to: “go to this show, if you can, not just because the art is so moving, but because it feels like the smallest act of solidarity with Ukraine and its culture.” I, for one, will be looking for an opportunity to get to London this summer to see it.
 
In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine 1900-1930s runs at the Royal Academy of Art, Burlington Gardens until 13 October 2024.

Image taken from the RA website: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/eye-of-the-storm
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For the full interview with Konstantin Akinsha, see https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/in-the-eye-of-the-storm-curator-konstantin-akinsha-ukrainian-modernism-1234711930/

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