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.

Related links

• In the Eye of the Storm Modernism in Ukraine, 1900 to the 1930s continues at the Royal Academy until 13 October 2024
• Six Ukrainian artists you should know (RA)
• Start here: Modernism in Ukraine (RA)

Press reviews

• Guardian review by Laura Cummings
• Comprehensive review of the exhibition when it was staged at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid

Related reviews

• The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov (1926)
• More Royal Academy reviews