All posts tagged Kyiv

Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery

From the press photos I wasn’t anticipating too much but ‘Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary’ turns out to be a really interesting and rewarding exhibition, fully deserving the two floors of gallery space given over to it.

First room of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery

One of the problems is the promotion web pages and images just show one photo at a time and some of them look a bit meh, don’t feel that good, as a group they don’t add up to a unified look’ etc. It’s only when you get to the exhibition that you realise a number of key facts which transform your understanding.

1. Amateur Boris Mikhailov got into photography by accident, had no formal training, and so was free to invent and make things up. A lot of these innovations are really interesting.

2. Articulate Mikhailov is a very good explainer of his own work, so the wall labels which explain it are not only informative but his explanations of his innovations are unusually inspiring and interesting.

3. Bad photography One of these was the simple idea of bad photography. In the Soviet Union photography was a profession like any other, heavily controlled by the state with approved styles and qualities to promote uplifting images of perfect life in the workers’ state.

Mikhailov opened up a whole new world when he realised that bad, out of focus, poorly framed, damaged images were themselves a valid aesthetic, and a political statement. Badly printed, damaged or poor-quality productions were, he realised, the appropriate response to the shabby reality of Soviet life: ‘lousy photography for a lousy reality’. This explains why some of the images, when seen in isolation on a web page are only meh, whereas seen en masse, and accompanied by an eloquent explanation, they gain so much more power.

4. Sets It also explains why Mikhailov’s images are conceived and designed to be seen in sets and the sets don’t just represent a new subject, but the best of them embody an entirely new technique and way of thinking about photography. As he explains:

‘The idea that a single picture contains maximum information is a lie; I don’t believe in absolute truth. Exploring something from many different angles gives you a heightened sense of the truth. I need the sum of the images, the sum of the sequences in order to cast doubt on the correctness of one single, possible perception. The vibration between the images expands their possibilities.’

Biography

Born in Kharkiv, Ukraine in 1938, Boris Mikhailov is a self-taught photographer. Having trained as an engineer, he was first introduced to photography when he was given a camera to document the state-owned factory where he worked. He took advantage of this opportunity to take nude photographs of his first wife – an act forbidden under Soviet norms – which he developed and printed in the factory’s laboratory. He was fired when the photographs were found by KGB agents. From then he pursued photography full time, using it as a subversive tool and operating as part of the underground art scene.

His work first gained international exposure in the 1990s with the series ‘Case History’, a shockingly direct portrayal of the realities of post-Soviet life in the Ukraine. Having learned of him via his post-USSR collapse photos, Western fans were then able to go back and review his subversive works from the 1970s and ’80s. This exhibition presents the complete body of his work in chronological order.

‘Ukrainian Diary’ brings together work from over twenty of Mikhailov’s most important series, including:

Slideshow: Yesterday’s Sandwich (mid-’60s to 1970s)

One day he threw a couple of slides onto his bed and they stuck together. When he held the stuck slides up to the light he realised they made a dramatically surreal image and hence was born the series ‘Yesterday’s Sandwich’. As he experimented with the technique he realised the juxtaposition of random images could be thought of as reflecting the dualism and contradictions of Soviet society.

His commentary is fascinating. He explains that the 60s and 70s were a time, in all the countries of the Soviet bloc, of hidden messages and secret codes. No-one took official propaganda seriously but all organs of free expression were ruthlessly suppressed. Hence codes and secret signs and hidden allusions. In actual fact no particular ‘message’ emerges from these images except a surreal subversion of the normal, logical, sensible everyday world.

Nearly 100 of these wonderfully funny, crazy, surreal images are here displayed as a slideshow projected onto the wall of a darkened space in the gallery. For some reason they are displayed to a severely edited version of the classic Pink Floyd album, Dark Side of the Moon’ which Mikhailov considers an ‘exaggeration of beauty’ conveying a kind of ‘paradise lost’. It makes it an even more surreal experience, watching images from a distant and vanished society accompanied by such a familiar homely soundtrack.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing one of the composite images in the Yesterday’s Sandwich slideshow (photo by the author)

Black Archive (1968 to 1979)

‘Black Archive’ documents everyday life in Kharkiv, often revealing the disparity between public life and private life in domestic spaces. Under Soviet rule it was forbidden to photograph everyday life and so Mikhailov was forced to hide his camera in order to take furtive snapshots, often taken from behind and at odd angles. By contrast, the private sphere of people’s apartments was a space of freedom, most vividly expressed in the carefree nudity of many of his subjects.

But in the series Mikhailov also deploys his concept of ‘bad photography’— the deliberate production of sloppily printed, blurred, and low-contrast images full of visible flaws — as a metaphor and a tool for social critique.

Red (1968 to 1978)

The set ‘Red’ brings together more than 70 images taken in Kharkiv in the late 1960s and 1970s, all of which contain the colour red. From the wall labels we learn that red was a powerful symbol of the Russian Revolution (1917) and of the Soviet Union (1922 to 1991). Its presence in these varied photos indicates the extent to which communist ideology saturated everyday life. As usual Mikhailov explains all this in his vivid and fascinating way:

‘The word “red” in Russian has the same root as the word for beauty, it also means revolution and evokes blood and the red flag. Everyone associated red with communism. But few people realised that red had permeated all our lives. Demonstrations and parades are an important part of this series. It’s a place where one of the main images of Soviet propaganda—the face of happy Soviet life, secure in its future—was created. They became absolutely kitschy and vulgar… I sometimes felt that I was surrounded by a herd of cynics, victims, and fools, followed by people wearing red ribbons as if they were policemen. As if the regime was using the people’s desire to celebrate for its own ends. And it was important to me to photograph them in such a way that you could tell the “Soviet” from the “human”.’

From the series ‘Red’ by Boris Mikhailov (1968-75) © Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

Luriki (Coloured Soviet Portraits) (1971 to 1985)

After losing his job as an engineer, Mikhailov managed to make a living as a commercial photographer, sometimes working on the black market, enlarging, retouching, and hand-colouring snapshots of weddings, newborns or family members lost in the war.

In what is considered the first use of found material in contemporary Soviet photography, Mikhailov then appropriated and reworked these manipulated photographs for his own practice. Often using vibrant or exaggerated colours, he made them more ‘beautiful’, staying within the law while simultaneously mocking the way Soviet propaganda glorified mundane events.

By means of these simple techniques, Luriki comically undermined the absurdity of the iconography of Soviet life. Grouped together, the pictures are like a Soviet family album, a collection of surreal, ridiculous situations.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing one of the Luriki images (photo by the author)

Dance (1978)

Apparently open-air dancing was a popular activity in Soviet Kharkiv. Mikhailov has a lovely set depicting people of all ages, sizes and shape, in 1970s Soviet clothes, sedately dancing, quite often women dancing with other women.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing some of the Dance photos (photo by the author)

Series of Four (early 1980s)

One wall is covered with these images grouped into sets of four. This came about by accident. Mikhailov set out to wander the streets of Kharkiv and take photos of nothing, of non-events, designed to capture the boredom and emptiness of Soviet life. But when he came to make contact prints he realised he didn’t have small-format paper so he put four images together on one sheet. At a stroke he realised he’d created something: the multiple points of view of the same scene creates complex effects. Suddenly a boring scene becomes part of a fragmented, multi-angled world. Presented in this way, they can also have a cinematic effect, telling a story in snapshots. And another effect is to create out of a mundane non-space a kind of cocoon, creating a compression of space, imbuing an anonymous nowhere with strange fugitive meanings.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing some of the Series of Four photos (photo by the author)

Crimean Snobbism (1982)

Mikhailov went to Gursuf, a seaside resort on the Crimean Peninsula and took portraits of himself, wife and friends frolicking by the seaside, adopting holiday poses etc. As with many of his sets, Mikhailov gave them a sepia tone, making them feel historic and detached from the present, and also suggesting their subversive intent. Because the entire set is intended as a parody of the kind of carefree, bourgeois lifestyle then associated with ‘the West’ and far beyond the reach of your average Ukrainian citizen, and which he satirises in phrases: ‘We’re so happy. We’re so beautiful. We’re so in love etc’.

Viscidity (1982)

In another interesting experiment, in the early 1980s Mikhailov started combining text and image together in a conceptual way: he glued his photographs carelessly onto sheets of paper, then scribbled thoughts—banal, poetic, or philosophical—in the margins. His fragmentary thoughts were not intended as captions, nor to illustrate or elucidate the photographs; they were often utterly unrelated to them and intended to be equally important, a composite reflection on the social stagnation of the Soviet Union.

‘Viscidity’ is the word he used to describe the period the country was living through at the time — ‘a peaceful, quiet, featureless, dull life, a time of deep political stagnation, a frozen day-to-dayness. There was no catharsis, no nostalgia, just grey, everyday life. Nothing was happening, nothing was at all interesting.’ Hence ‘lousy photographs with these lousy texts’, ‘unchanging ordinariness and timelessness.’

Unfinished dissertation (1984-5)

On the back of the tattered pages of a stranger’s university dissertation found in a rubbish bin, Mikhailov pasted poorly printed black-and-white photos of inconsequential moments and then jotted down his thoughts about art and life in the margins. The photos don’t synch with the text, neither shedding light on each other, except obliquely.

Salt Lake (1986)

Mikhailov’s father used to tell him about a salt lake in southern Ukraine where people went to bathe in the 1920s and ’30s, believing that the warm, salty water had healing properties. When Mikhailov went to visit himself he found the crowds of people on the beach near to a disused old factory, washing themselves in the factory pipes and smearing themselves with mud.

He found it ‘the quintessence of an average person’s life in the Soviet context. Despite the horrible, polluted, inhuman environment, the people were relaxed, calm, and happy.’ To the modern Western ye, this looks like a gallery of grotesques in a grim, squalid environment.

Later Mikhailov toned his images sepia, like photographs from another era and explains: ‘There was a kind of an interplay there, a fusion between the old and the new. Old, because it was something my father had seen, and at the same time a reality that still existed… An elaboration of an idea I’d explored before: we’re both there and not there, it’s both today and a long time ago.’

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing some of the Salt Lake photos (photo by the author)

By The Ground (1991)

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Mikhailov took to the streets with his panoramic camera slung low around his waist. While the panoramic format is conventionally used for sweeping vistas and beautiful landscapes Mikhailov captured bleak street scenes which captured the shabby poverty of the streets.

Mikhailov also devised a protocol for installing the series: the prints are hung low on the wall, forcing the viewer to stoop down to see the images, as if to bring us closer to his subjects. As with previous sets, he also treated the images, toning the silver prints brown, imbuing them images with a sense of nostalgia. As always his own comments on his process are fascinating:

‘I “aged” the images by toning them in sepia… embedding the photos in layers of time to trigger parallel, photo-historical associations, to show that photography has become as elusive as existence itself.’

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing some of the By The Ground wide-angle photos (photo by the author)

I am not I (1992)

A series of nude self portraits in which Mikhailov parodies traditional masculine stereotypes. The stereotypes he mocks are those promoted by the recently collapsed USSR but they are also recognisable as American stereotypes too. Thus he photographs himself in a range of comic or demeaning poses, wearing an absurd curly wig, holding a toy sword or, most strikingly, an artificial phallus. Like all the sets, these gain in meaning and humour when you see 20 variations next to each other.

From the series ‘I am not I’ by Boris Mikhailov (1992) © Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

Green (1991 to 1993)

In the early 1990s Mikhailov produced a series of hand-coloured photographs known as the ‘Green’ series. The images are suffused with a lingering, toxic green tint to reflect the environmental decay and societal collapse following the fall of the Soviet Union. The series is represented here by a monumental triptych showing a decaying junkyard in an overgrown landscape. The colour green has a particular resonance for Mikhailov who says it is the colour of a swamp and indicates the moss which had grown on Soviet life, a metaphor for Soviet decay.

In earlier sets he had had photographed people living in poverty, drug addiction and social degradation using a disposable camera and cheap gelatin silver paper to evoke awkwardness and fragility. Here, he takes the concept further, using stains and drips of paint on the thin, crumpled paper as if to embody the worn, impoverished landscape and lives he saw around him.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing ‘Green’ (photo by the author)

At Dusk (1993)

Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union Mikhailov wandered the streets of Kharkiv with a swing-lens camera that took in a 120-degree panoramic view, capturing the life of destitute people on the streets. He tinted all the images a heavy cobalt blue. Why? Several reasons: the colour (along with the title) indicate the transition from day to night. But blue also represents his boyhood memories of the Second World War, of fleeing with his mother on one of the last freight trains out of Kharkiv to escape the Nazi advance. Blue, he explains, is the colour of blockade, hunger and war. Tinting these images of street people the same colour a) indicates the severity of the crisis of poverty which hit his country and b) also produces images of intense and haunting beauty.

From the series ‘At Dusk’ by Boris Mikhailov (1993) © Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

Case History (1997 to 98)

A few years after the collapse of communism, Mikhailov realised that in his hometown of Kharkiv, not only had a new ruling elite of millionaires emerged, but a significant part of the population had also been plunged into poverty. The mid-1990s produced a new group of people, the bomzhes or homeless.

So Mikhailov set about photographing these pitiful people, right at the bottom of society. He produced a series of 400 raw portraits. As with other sets, he deliberately transgressed the codes of photojournalism by paying his subjects, and he and his wife Vita also often offered them hot meals in exchange for posing. Some of the poses are stage in the manner of the Pietà or the Descent from the Cross.

This exhibition shows one image of one abject couple blown up on the wall and a display case of 100 small test prints from his archive. They are pitiful to look at.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing the one blown-up image and 100 test prints from ‘Case Study’ (photo by the author)

Reflecting on these images the next day, I realised that their abjectness is emphasised by their nudity. What I mean is that, unless you have a buff toned body, most of us already look a bit embarrassing when naked and caught in everyday postures, in the shower, getting out of bed etc. Many (half?) of the shots in the Case History exacerbate the poverty and squalor of the subjects by showing old, ugly, maimed or ill people, naked or half-clothed. What I’m trying to convey is how this nudity powerfully amplifies the general air of degradation and humiliation.

The Theatre of War, Second Act, Time Out (2013 to 2014)

Euromaidan or the Maidan Uprising was a wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in Ukraine, which began on 21 November 2013 with large protests in Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kyiv. The protests were sparked by President Viktor Yanukovych’s sudden decision not to sign the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement, instead choosing closer ties to Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union. Ukraine’s parliament had overwhelmingly approved of finalizing the Agreement with the EU but Russia had put pressure on Ukraine to reject it.

In late December 2013 Boris and Vita Mikhailov documented the protests, photographing protestors who had pitched their tents in the central square in Kyiv. Mikhailov comments that the situation was so tense that scenes felt like they had been staged. ‘The bonfires, the colours, the lights, the people sitting there exhausted — everything created a general feeling of tension. It was unclear how it would all end.’

The protests succeeded in forcing President Viktor Yanukovych to flee to Russia but soon afterwards, on 27 February 2014, Russian forces occupied the Crimea, starting the Russo-Ukrainian War which continues to this day.

Thoughts

Many of Mikhailov’s images are very strong in their own right, and display adeptness in an extraordinary range of styles, from the photojournalism of Salt Lake to the nostalgic surrealism of Yesterday’s Sandwich, the warlike intensity of the At Dusk series to the blistering poverty porn of the miserable Case Histories.

But as well as the appeal of individual images, or the impact of specific sets, the exhibition as a whole builds up into a powerful portrait of life in a Soviet state – to the shabby, unhealthy, stiflingly boring nature of life under communism – and then after 1990, to the catastrophic collapse in living standards for large swathes of the population in post-Soviet society.

It’s not only an impressive body of work by a consistently inventive and innovative artist, but a powerful portrait and indictment of life in Soviet and post-Soviet regimes.

Video

This is not the usual 30-second exhibition promotional video but an extended, 14-minute-long interview with Mikhailov which really brings over how articulate and interesting he is.

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Posted by Simon on January 12, 2026

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In the Eye of the Storm Modernism in Ukraine, 1900 to 1930s @ the Royal Academy

This is a thrilling, surprising, enchanting and worthwhile exhibition for four reasons:

One, although it is the most comprehensive UK exhibition ever devoted to modern art in Ukraine, it is still relatively small, with just 65 works. This gives you time to explore the whole thing, read all the captions, and then stroll back and forth focusing in on the ones you really like and/or discovering ones you didn’t really notice in your first go round. I.e. you can soak in it.

Two, most of us know nothing about Ukrainian art (or history) which means we come with few expectations. Entering an exhibition of Monet or Abstract Expressionism etc I’ve a) a good idea what to expect and b) feel a bit of pressure to live up to these Great Works. But I had no or low expectations for this show, and complete ignorance as to who the Ukrainian artists would be, and the result was that I was surprised and delighted by lots and lots of lovely paintings, drawings, theatre design, collage and (two) sculptures. Delight and surprise.

Three Female Figures by Alexandra Exter (1909-10) National Art Museum of Ukraine

Three, the period of art under review, the 1900s through to the mid-1930s, was the heyday of modernism. Ukrainian artists of these generations were fully aware of the modernist trends elsewhere in Europe (Germany, France, Italy, England) and copied and incorporated and innovated around the various movements of cubism, futurism, constructivism, simultanism, Orphism so it’s packed with works in these styles and, as this is probably my favourite period of art, what’s not to love?

Four, as doesn’t need much explanation, this is show in a good cause. We all support the Ukrainian people and Ukrainian army in their struggle against brutal Russian aggression. Simply getting them out of the country to England, presumably makes them safe. And 10% of the price of the exhibition’s handsome catalogues goes to the National Art Museum of Ukraine.

Brief history of Ukrainian art 1900 to 1935

Modernism in Ukraine unfolded against a complicated socio-political backdrop.

Geopolitically, Ukraine had for centuries been a borderland, with its territory divided between various empires and its people not perceived as a single nation until the late nineteenth century. Until the outbreak of the First World War the territory of Ukraine was divided between the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires.

When the Russian Empire collapsed in 1917 Ukrainian nationalists declared independence. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed at the end of the war, Ukrainian politicians seized back control of traditional Ukrainian land from that, too. And so Ukraine declared itself an independent republic (the Ukrainian People’s Republic) in 1918 and excited nationalists set up the Ukrainian Academy of Art, the first institution of higher art education in Ukraine.

However, the Russian Bolsheviks proceeded to invade, which led to four years of brutal civil war (1918 to 1921). The Bolsheviks won and proceeded to absorb the Ukrainian lands into the new Soviet Union.

As far as art went, in the first phase the newly independent Ukrainians had set up the Ukrainian Academy of Art. However, in 1924, after conquest by the Soviets, this was turned into Kyiv Art Institute. For the rest of the 1920s the Soviet masters promoted a policy of Ukrainisation’, an ideological concession to appease local national sentiment.

Then, at the start of the 1930s, the Bolsheviks, now firmly controlled by Stalin, announced the new doctrine of Socialist Realism. All forms of modernism and experiment were denounced as ‘bourgeois formalism’. Artists and designers were rounded up in their hundreds, shipped off to prison and murdered. It was the Russian way.

And so the story of modernist Ukrainian art came to a dead halt in the gulag and the execution chamber. Obviously its art continue, but in the heroic Socialist Realist style and then came the Second World War and it was a whole new thing. Which is why the exhibition stops here.

The show is divided into seven sections, each fairly manageable (the last one only has three paintings in it) and they are:

1. Introduction

Emphasises Ukraine’s troubled history but especially the way it included diverse ethnicities, namely Ukrainian, Polish, Russian and Jewish communities.

Carousel by Davyd Burliuk (1921) National Art Museum of Ukraine © The Burliuk Foundation

This is a brilliantly vivid painting by Davyd Burliuk which features in much of the exhibition’s publicity. I was surprised to find it is quite small, probably not two feet wide. And the other thing is how the surface is clotted with thick lumps of paint, a physicality I always find exciting in modern art.

Compare and contrast with Merry-Go-Round by the English artist Mark Gertler, painted in 1916. Stylistically they have nothing in common, I was just struck by the common subject matter. Stylistically, this has more in common with some of the more over-vivid paintings of the Blue Rider artists in Munich.

2. Cubo-Futurism

Young Ukrainian artists were plugged into the trans-European excitement caused by the modern breakthrough in art, not least because, as a subject people no Ukrainian city was allowed to have its own art academy. As a result aspiring artists had to move elsewhere to complete their studies and travelled to all the other art capitals of Europe. Thus they learned on the spot about movements such as the Fauves in France, the Blue Rider in Germany, the fragmentation and geometric shapes of cubism in Paris, the energy and movement of Futurism in Italy, and so on, and began experimenting with all these new visual languages. New ways of thinking about art as abstract, patterns and shapes, bold unnatural colours.

Composition (Genova) by Alexandra Exter (1912) Alex Lachmann Collection

I was surprised to see a work by Sonia Delaunay, well-known in her Paris incarnation but included here because she was born in Ukraine, originally named Sofia or Sarah Stern.

The curators talk repeatedly about the influence of Ukrainian folk and decorative art but, to be honest, this isn’t particularly evident in the first, modernist, room where the works mainly look like the local version of the cubo-futurisms sweeping the continent.

  • Alexandra Exter
  • Davyd Burliuk
  • Oleksandr Bohomazov
  • Vadym Meller
  • Volodymyr Burliuk
  • Alexander Archipenko

The standout piece for me in his section wasn’t a painting but a wonderfully smooth vibrant sculpture of a nude, Flat Torso, by Alexander Archipenko which combines Epstein abstraction with Art Deco sensuality. It’s more captivating than this reproduction makes it look.

Flat Torso by Alexander Archipenko (1914) Sladmore, London © Kendzia © Estate of Alexander Archipenko / ARS, NY and DACS, London 2024

3. Theatre

Explores the role of theatre design as one of the most vigorous expressions of modernism in Ukraine. This section has the most images in it, 20 or so costume and set designs drawn by Ukrainian artists involved with the First Taras Shevchenko State Theatre, the Kozelets Theatrez, the Youth Theatre and so on. They’re in a variety of modernist styles but lots of these are charming and entertaining, many made me smile.

Two figures stand out as leaders in the new theatre: Alexandra Exter and Les Kurbas. Exter’s pioneering theatre designs translated Cubist and Futurist principles into scenography. In 1918, she opened a private studio in Kyiv with a separate course on stage design and among her students were some of the most acclaimed theatre designers of the next generation including Anatol Petrytskyi and Oleksandr Khvostenko-Khvostov. Here’s one of Vadym Meller’s costumes for Bronislava Nijinska’s dance performances.

Sketch of the ‘Masks’ choreography for Bronislava Nijinska’s School of Movements, Kyiv by Vadym Meller (1919) © Vadym Meller

I really liked Anatol Petrytskyi’s series of constructivist costume designs, like a modernist Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Constructivism being ‘a functional, abstract art that rejected decoration and used industrial materials.’ I particularly liked Oleksandr Khvostenko- Khvostov’s guards for the opera A love for three oranges, with their geometric step and their fine curly moustaches.

Here’s an article which includes a representative selection.

  • Alexandra Exter
  • Les Kurbas
  • Anatol Petrytskyi
  • Oleksandr Khvostenko-Khvostov
  • Vadym Meller
  • Vasyl Yermilov

4. Kultur Lige

The organisation Kultur Lige (the Cultural League) was founded in Kyiv in 1918 to promote the development of contemporary Jewish–Yiddish culture. It operated within a unique socio-political context shaped by the independent Ukrainian People’s Republic, led by the short-lived government of the Central Rada (Council) that recognized the multicultural and multilingual nature of Ukraine’s society. It brought together young Jewish artists such as El Lissitzky, Issakhar Ber Ryback and Sarah Shor, to foster a synthesis of the Jewish artistic tradition and the European avant-garde. The Kultur Lige ceased to exist by the mid-1920s following growing pressure from the Soviet regime.

In this section I very much liked ‘Horse Riders’ by Sarah Shor (1897–1981). It’s not just the vibrant blue and the name which relates it to The Blue Rider artists but the almost complete abstraction which still feels like it’s sourced in something in the real world. That duality is part of what gives it its tremendous energy.

Horse Riders by Sarah Shor (late 1910s) © Sarah Shor, Alex Lachmann Collection

The curators say it ‘captures the optimism of the new age, while reworking Jewish artistic traditions’. I can see how ‘optimism’ might be encoded in the dynamic rearing abstract structures, as for the architecture of a brave new world. The ‘Jewish artistic traditions’ not so obvious, to me at any rate.

  • Issakhar Ber Ryback
  • El Lissitzky
  • Sarah Shor
  • Marko Epshtein

5. Ukraine under the Soviets

After nearly five years of the bloody Ukrainian War of Independence (1917 to 1921), the Bolshevik Red Army defeated the national Ukrainian forces, and the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic was established with Kharkiv as its capital.

In 1923, the Soviet authorities introduced the policy of ‘Ukrainisation’, an ideological concession to appease local national sentiment. This policy allowed for a level of cultural autonomy in the Republic, enabling the development of the Ukrainian language and culture. For the next decade, Ukrainian intelligentsia participated in the ambitious project of creating a new cultural identity that was both Ukrainian and Soviet.

During this period, Mykhailo Boichuk’s studio of monumental art emerged as the leading artistic group in Soviet Ukraine. Its members, known as ‘the Boichukists’, completed state commissions to create murals for public spaces and buildings. The school was short-lived, however. Labelled ‘Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists’, Boichuk and a close circle of his associates were executed during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, with most of their public art subsequently destroyed. The Russian way. If it’s a neighbour, invade it. If they’re making art or literature you don’t understand, lock them up and execute them.

This room contained depictions of peasants – farming, apple trees, swineherds with their pigs – done not in a bracing modernist but in a folk naive style, that I found boring.

Women under the Apple Tree by Tymofii Boichuk (1920) National Art Museum of Ukraine

However, next to these were works by Vasyl Yermilov which I loved. I love the use of industrial materials like the copper here, and moulded into such an incredibly evocative shape, it was then also painted. It feels completely novel and wonderfully inventive.

Self-Portrait by Vasyl Yermilov (1922) Alex Lachmann Collection

Yermilov was extremely versatile and worked on propaganda art that combined agitational imagery with Ukrainian decorative traditions. There’s a great set of designs with a chessboard background he made for the Chess Room at the Central Red Army Club, Kharkiv. And alongside them, are some great constructivist magazine covers, featuring a modernist typeface he created for the Ukrainian script. Good man.

  • Anatol Petrytskyi
  • Mykhailo Boichuk
  • Mykola Kasperovych
  • Tymofii Boichuk
  • Ivan Padalka
  • Kyrylo Hvozdyk

6. Kyiv Art Institute

Soon after independence the Ukrainians had set up the Ukrainian Academy of Art, the first institution of higher art education in Ukraine’s history. However, once the Bolsheviks had conquered Ukraine, and in order to conform to the Soviet system of higher education, the Academy was restructured into the Kyiv Art Institute. The Institute became one of the USSR’s leading art schools. It also hired instructors from across the Soviet Union so that such progressive and well-known artists as Kazymyr Malevych, Viktor Palmov and Vladimir Tatlin joining its faculty.

The two works which grew and grew on me each time I came back to look again, are both by Viktor Palmov. From 1921 there’s his catchily cartoon-like group portrait. It’s big and a peculiar bend of naturalism and abstraction, with an odd colour palette i.e. the acid greens and yellows of the face on the right. Like the Burliuk it, also, has gobs and snags of oil paint sticking up from the surface in the semi-industrial way I always like.

Group Portrait by Viktor Palmov (1921) National Art Museum of Ukraine

His other painting is the big propagandist 1 May from the end of the decade (1929). Again with the vivid palette, dominated, now, by that vivid green, with secondary patches of yellow. And these big swathes of colour contrasted with the cartoon outline of, presumably, figures at a political rally, with anecdotes of a mother and child and two lovers at the bottom.

May the 1st by Viktor Palmov (1929) National Art Museum of Ukraine

Strange, isn’t it? The more times I looked the more I became entranced. I noticed the white bicycle at the bottom. And then I wondered why the worker standing in the middle left has his buttocks outlined quite so clearly in light green – which made me smile.

On the basis of these two works Palmov emerges as maybe my favourite artist in the show, alongside the more understandable constructivist Yermilov. Then again, Anatol Petrytskyi. Hmm. Tricky.

  • Viktor Palmov
  • Kazymyr Malevych
  • Oleksandr Bohomazov
  • Anatol Petrytskyi
  • Manuil Shekhtman
  • Vasyl Sedliar

The curators go big on the work of Oleksandr Bohomazov who taught at the Kyiv Art Institute from 1922 until 1930, when he died from tuberculosis. His final major work was intended to be a three-part cycle depicting the labour of sawyers, for which he completed two canvases – ‘Sharpening the Saws’ and ‘Sawyers at Work’. While retaining experimentation in the use of vivid, hyper-bright colour and the geometrised background, Bohomazov returns to figuration to make his art more accessible to a broader, proletarian audience. Fair enough, but I didn’t really like it. To make a punning reference to the saws, it didn’t have enough ‘edge’ for me.

Sharpening the Saws by Oleksandr Bohomazov (1927) National Art Museum of Ukraine

No, the other standout work in this room if Big Paintings, was The Invalids by Anatol Petrytskyi. We’ve already met Petrytskyi through his attractive constructivist theatre designs in the ‘Theatre’ section, and his excellent soft-cubist Portrait of Mykhail Semenko in the ‘Ukraine under the Soviets’ section. Here he appears in a new guise, with a monumental paintings, maybe three yards wide, in the kind of stylised realism which resurfaced as the modernist tide withdrew.

The Invalids by Anatol Petrytskyi (1924) National Art Museum of Ukraine

This reproduction is too bright and colourful, the original is more sombre. And it’s big, really big. The result is that the blotched hands and feet of these people really stand out and slowly, the faintly abstract angularity of their bodies and postures began, for me, to dominate the room. The mottled fleshtones reminded me of Lucien Freud. The depth and sombreness of the (original) colouring gives it real pathos.

7. The Last Generation

Just three big, big oil paintings by Oleksandr Syrotenko, Kostiantyn Yeleva and Semen Yoffe. The Yeleva is the most striking with its very 1930s worship of The Aeroplane going on in the background (plane at top right, windsock at bottom left), but obviously the great big mug of a Hero of Soviet Labour in the foreground.

Portrait by Kostiantyn Yeleva (late 1920s) National Art Museum of Ukraine

The last wall caption is tragic:

The policy of ‘ukrainizatsiia’ was curtailed in the 1930s amidst purges of the Ukrainian intelligentsia. Hundreds of writers, theatre directors and artists, including Mykhailo Boichuk, Mykola Kasperovych, Les Kurbas, Ivan Padalka, Mykhail Semenko and Vasyl Sedliar, were labelled as ‘bourgeois nationalists’ and executed. Many more were imprisoned and sent to labour camps. Manuscripts, books and artworks were destroyed. Murals were overpainted or scraped off walls. Canvases that were not destroyed were sent to secret repositories.

The great Russian soul in action.

And they end with a rationale for the entire exhibition which, arguably, should have been at the start:

In the 1960s and 1970s, Western countries rediscovered the revolutionary art of the late Russian Empire and early Soviet period. Since then, artists born or living in Ukraine have been considered under the catch-all mono-ethnic term ‘Russian avant-garde’, yet their artistic experimentation was integral to the development of Ukrainian culture. ‘In the Eye of the Storm’ seeks to contribute to evolving scholarship around this historical oversight, highlighting the complicated and little-known story of modernism in Ukraine, as well as its many links to European culture.

So the exhibition represents not only a collection of very good, charming, funny, inspiring, beautiful art, but also sets out to rewrite the art history books. Who knows what the outcome of the current war will be (a ceasefire line somewhere inside Eastern Ukraine?). Meanwhile this is a really good exhibition, full of wonderful surprises and really good works, and all in a noble cause.

Gaps and absences

You know what isn’t depicted in any of these images? War and famine. The curators tell us about the Soviet invasion of Ukraine and the ruinous civil war which ensued and yet…there are no images at all of this conflict, nor of the Great War which preceded it. Maybe paintings were made of these events but, I’m guessing, maybe in the older, realist style which is outside the scope of this show and explains, maybe, why they’re not included. Feels like a glaring omission, though.

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by Simon on September 7, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on September 7, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/09/07/in-the-eye-of-the-storm-modernism-in-ukraine-1900-1930s-the-royal-academy/