Start here: Modernism in Ukraine
Published on 28 May 2024
Meet the artists who defined Ukraine’s culture at the start of the 20th century before you visit our latest exhibition ‘In the Eye of the Storm’.
Making art in the eye of the storm
The start of the 20th century was a period of revolutions and upheaval in Ukraine.
Empires collapsed, The Ukrainian People’s Republic rose and fell, and Ukrainian lands were absorbed into the Soviet Union.
Despite this turmoil, art flourished.
This exhibition tells the story of a group of modernist artists who helped to define Ukraine’s cultural identity in their time. Many combined international influences with national artistic traditions to create a distinctly local modernism.
Mixing European Modernism with Ukrainian folk art
At the turn of the 20th century, Ukrainian lands were divided between the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. No Ukrainian city had its own art academy, so artists went elsewhere to complete their studies.
Many of these artists were inspired by the creative experiments taking place in European capitals such as Munich and Paris, where Cubism and Futurism were flourishing. Those who returned to Ukraine shared these ideas with their fellow artists.
Meet the Ukrainian Cubo-Futurists
Three Female Figures, 1909-10
When in Paris, Alexandra Exter befriended many pioneers of Cubism and Futurism, art movements that she introduced to local artists on her regular returns to Kyiv. Exter combined elements of these radical art trends with Ukrainian decorative traditions.
Ukrainian Peasant Woman, 1910-11
Volodymyr Burliuk studied art in Kyiv, Munich, Moscow and Paris. He combined his interest in Post-Impressionism and Pointillism with his admiration for Ukrainian folk culture to make works such as Ukrainian Peasant Woman.
Carousel, 1921
Like his brother Volodymyr, Davyd Burliuk travelled widely: in Russia he mixed with Futurists and in Munich he befriended German Expressionists such as Wassily Kandinsky. Their influence can be felt in works such as Carousel with its angular composition and bold colours.
Landscape, Caucasus, 1915
Although he never travelled to western Europe, Oleksandr Bohomazov stayed up to date with the artistic developments that were happening across the continent. Like the Italian Futurists, Bohomazov was fascinated with speed in nature and man-made technical advancements.
Transforming theatre design
Under the Russian Empire, theatre in the Ukrainian language was banned, but the revolutions of 1917, the collapse of the Russian Empire and the foundation of the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic led to a liberation of theatre in Ukraine.
Writers, directors, choreographers and artists explored what was possible on stage. One such artist was Alexandra Exter, who applied Cubist and Futurist principles to the scenography she designed. In 1918 she opened a private studio in Kyiv with a separate course on stage design. Among her students were some of the most acclaimed theatre designers of the next generation including Anatol Petrytskyi and Oleksandr Khvostenko-Khvostov. Other artists, such as Vadym Meller were also closely affiliated with Exter’s studio.
Developing contemporary Jewish-Yiddish culture
Like other artists working in Ukraine during this period, the Art Section of the Kultur Lige understood the power of art to forge a modern identity. The organisation promoted the development of contemporary Jewish-Yiddish culture.
Members of the Kultur Lige like Issakhar Ber Ryback showed the daily life of Jewish people in works such as City (Shtetl), El Lissitzky incorporated Yiddish text into his semi-abstract compositions and Sarah Shor’s Sunrise places a praying figure among a geometric landscape.
It was founded in 1918 during the brief existence of the Ukrainian People’s Republic.
Its government led by the Central Council sought to protect the rights of national minorities, including Jewish people, however during the Ukrainian War of Independence, which saw vying forces and factions fight for control of Ukrainian territories, many Jewish people were victims to violent pogroms across the country.
Creating an identity that’s Ukrainian and Soviet
In 1921, after nearly five years of the bloody Ukrainian War of Independence, the Bolshevik Red Army defeated the national Ukrainian forces. The new Soviet authorities allowed Ukraine to have some cultural autonomy – a concession to appease local national sentiment.
During the early Soviet period, a group of artists led by Mykhailo Boichuk, known as the Boichukists, made art which was intended to appeal to everyday Ukrainians. The group’s distinctive style drew on Byzantine iconography, pre-Renaissance art and Ukrainian folk traditions. They snapped up state commissions to create murals for public spaces and buildings.
Nothing of the group’s public work survives. Following Stalin’s consolidation of power in the 1930s, Boichuk and his followers were accused of being ‘Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists’. They were executed, their murals were painted over or scrapped off the walls, and their canvases were either hidden away or destroyed.
Establishing the USSR’s leading art school
In the 1920s the development of the visual arts in Ukraine was driven by the Kyiv Art Institute. This was a successor to the Ukrainian Academy of Art, the first institution of higher art education in Ukraine which was founded when the country proclaimed its independence.
With a modern curriculum which included subjects like industrial design, the Institute became one of the USSR’s leading art schools.
The school hired instructors from across the Soviet Union, notably Kazymyr Malevych who had grown up in Ukraine but left to pursue his career as an artist in Russia. Malevych and fellow tutors such as Oleksandr Bohomazov and Viktor Palmov had been experimenting with abstraction but reverted to the more figurative work during their time at Kyiv Art Institute, producing pieces such as Malevych’s Landscape (Winter) and Bohomazov’s Sharpening the Saws.
Cut short by Stalin
The Soviet regime became increasingly distrustful of Ukrainian artists and their modernist experimentations. By the mid-1930s artists were required to make work in the Socialist Realism style which involved depicting idealised scenes of Soviet life.
Artists had to change their practice to fall in line with the Soviet regime, or risk unemployment, imprisonment or execution. These purges brought an end to what had been a vibrant, thriving moment of cultural activity in Ukraine.
Book tickets for
In the Eye of the Storm
Marvel at the groundbreaking modernist art made in Ukraine between 1900 and the 1930s.
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