This is how art reflected a century ago

Nothing more terrible than wars: deaths, violent destruction, profound denial of human differences as something worthy of respect. Given this, the horizon of knowledge and the arts has always been one of the greatest impulses for peace: the positivity of coexistence and the recognition of diversity as something positive.

In the eye of the hurricane, the title of this exhibition, immediately puts us before a central question: if we are located in Ukraine, is it about what we live in today or about the art that took place between 1900 and 1930, as the second part of the title states? As soon as we started the tour, we understood that yesterday and today Ukraine was and is in the eye of a hurricane unleashed by the extreme violence of militarist domination.

The exhibition takes us to a set of works from the first three decades of the 20th century, when the artistic vanguards, a plural set of movements that sought to change art and transform society at the same time. For centuries, Ukraine's existence unfolded as a territory divided between different empires and did not consolidate itself as a nation until the end of the 19th century.

[The master works of Ukraine arrived at Thyssen: they survived Stalin and Putin's missiles]

And then, at the time of the avant-garde, what happened there was a series of ferocious hurricanes: the outbreak of First World Warthe proclamation in June 1917 of the Ukrainian People's Republicwhich a few months later, after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, gave rise to a war of independence, whose territory would end up being divided in 1921 between Russia and Poland, and in 1922 Ukraine would end up being part of the Soviet Union under the Stalinist regime.

If Ukraine now lives in the eye of a deeply destructive hurricane, historical data tells us that I had experienced such a terrible situation before like the current one. And that is where we should focus our attention on this excellent exhibition that takes us to art as a record and testimony of what was experienced in Ukraine in the first three decades of the 20th century. This allows us to travel back in time through art, and visit that Ukraine that today resonates incessantly in our sensibility, but about which, in general, we have no knowledge.

One of the goals is to recover Ukrainian specificity, not through the Russian filter

Structured into a tour with seven sections ordered chronologically, the exhibition brings together 69 works, including paintings and works on paper or cardboard (in these cases, drawings, watercolors and collages). In addition to some pieces from the Thyssen Museum, most of the works come from National Art Museum of Ukraine It's from Museum of Theatre, Music and Cinema of Ukraine, both based in Kyiv. At that time, artistic activities took place in the most populous Ukrainian cities: Kiev, Kharkiv and also Odesa.

There is a significant aspect to note here: the exhibition's curators use different transcriptions, more precisely Ukrainian, it seems, of these first two names: Kiev and Kharkiv, which are the ones we encounter along the way. And this is related to one of the objectives of the exhibition: the desire to recover Ukrainian specificitynot through the Russian filter.

This idea of recovery is understood in depth with the names of the artists, generally very little known in the West. We are looking at the works of those who are considered “masters” of the Ukrainian artistic avant-garde: Oleksandr Bohomazov, Vasyl Yermilov, Viktor Palmov, Anatol Petrytskyi, davyd burlyuk It is Mykhailo Boichuk. Of course, they are very well known. Kazymyr Malevych and El Lissitzky, Russians who worked in Ukraine and of whom two small plays are presented. And two female artists are also present, Sonia Delaunay and Alexandra Outdoorborn in Ukraine but developed his career abroad.

The works convey to us a very intense mix of artistic lines and themes, these very determined by the political situations that were going on. Before our eyes, echoes of Expressionism, Futurism, Cubism, Constructivism and finally Realism. All of this, with an intense force in paintings and drawings for the theater: dresses, choreography, curtains... In short, the exhibition is an excellent argument about the vitality of art. An intense example of how art transmits and demands life even in difficult situations.

Russia-Ukraine War

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