There is a school of thought at the moment which seems to hold that opposing the Russian invasion of Ukraine makes you a lackey of imperialism, and most likely some sort of fascist sympathiser. The Royal Academy’s current exhibition of Modernist Ukrainian art In the Eye of the Storm could certainly be seen as further confirmation that, with the exception of Reform and the US Republicans, most of the British and American ruling class are rooting for the Ukrainians. We can also say with absolute certainty that no major cultural institution will host a comparable exhibition asserting the validity of Palestinian identity or right to statehood.
The works in the exhibition are normally to be found in Kyiv’s National Museum. They were smuggled out of the country clandestinely and the London show is rather smaller than other iterations. It is precisely because it is effectively a government curated exhibition that it is so infuriating.
At times some of descriptions are vague to the point of deliberate dishonesty. There is no other was to describe the labelling of Manuil Shekhtman’s 1926 work Jewish Pogrom. “During the Ukrainian War of Independence (1917-21), various sides committed violent acts against the Jewish community”. That is one way of putting it. Even a stridently anti-Bolshevik historian like Robert Gerwarth writes in his book The Vanquished (p.89):
“The idea of a Jewish conspiracy at the heart of the revolution became central to the Whites’ propaganda as they tried to organise resistance against the Bolsheviks who otherwise had much more appealing promises (land, bread, liberation).”
Polish forces, Cossacks and Ukrainian nationalists also took part in pogroms which conflated Bolshevism and Judaism. Glossing over these facts seriously impairs the quality of the commentary provided.
But facts are stubborn things, and even the authors of the descriptions acknowledge that there was a brief period during Soviet rule when a distinctively Ukrainian artistic expression flourished. One reason for this was that Lenin had taught the Bolsheviks that “tsarism made the Great Russians executioners of the Ukrainian people”. He also insisted on the “full recognition of the Ukraine’s rights, including the right to free secession.”
Inevitably, this flourishing of a distinctively Ukrainian style of art was strangled by the imposition of the kitsch horrors of Stalinist realism. Artists like Mykahilo Boichuk were commissioned to provide art for public spaces and building but they were murdered in the purges of the 1930s and most of their work was destroyed, a harbinger of the greater horrors that Stalin was to inflict on Ukraine.
It’s a fair bet that Kazymyr Malevych, Sonia Delaunay, Alexandra Exter and El Lissitzky, Oleksandr Bohomazov and Mykhailo Boichuk are unknown to most non-Ukrainians. Some of the work is banal but it does show that in the early decades of the 20th century Ukrainian artists say themselves as part of the European avant-garde and were closely following what was happening across the continent. However, the duller pieces are more than compensated for by works which give some idea of the reality of the violence in the 1920s.
While there is no doubt that the exhibition is part of the Ukrainian government’s war effort, it does oblige viewer to look behind the official story and try to work out for themselves where these paintings fit into the history of the decades before and after the revolution.
Source >> Liam Redux
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