In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, at the Royal Academy

[Quiggin]

Kasmir Malevitch (Kazymyr Malevych) and Alexandria Exter are repatriated to Ukraine in a current Royal Academy exhibition. Lots to see here on these links (including Vadym Meller's "Masks" sketch for Nijinska's School of Movements).

"Six Ukrainian Artists you should know:"

https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/six-ukrainian-modernists-you-should-know

"Visions from Ukraine," RA Magazine:

https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/ra-magazine-eye-of-the-storm

"How Ukraine Refashioned Modernist Art," in Hyperallergenic

https://hyperallergic.com/948128/how-ukraine-refashioned-modernist-art-royal-academy-london/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Amy Sherald%2C Getty Fireworks%2C US Elections&utm_campaign=W092124

 

 

Edited September 24 by Quiggin

[dirac]

Thank you for the links, Quiggin. A lot to unpack, as people seem to like to say, but i thought these were points that, while not new, you don't come across very often now:
 

Quote

 

....The third is that the Ukrainian peasantry and intelligentsia somehow knew in the 1920s that the Russian dominated, Soviet communist regime in Moscow was their greatest enemy. In fact, many artists in Ukraine, and certainly almost all modernists, saw their great enemies in the past, receding, beaten – the harsh, anti-Ukrainian, antisemitic chauvinists of the Tsarist Russian Empire – rather than in the future. The future, they assumed, was what they would build, not what their old comrades would destroy.

The Soviet Union of the 1920s was not Stalin’s but Lenin’s, where the constituent republics, Ukraine biggest among them after Russia, were grudgingly allowed to experiment and develop their own culture, as allies rather than subjects – under the aegis of communism, although Lenin started allowing capitalism into the mix, too. Russian chauvinism towards the presumedly primitive, rustic Ukrainians never went away, but the rise and nature of Stalin in the 1930s were hidden and unforeseeable. Simply put, the Ukrainian modernists of the 1920s were much less free than they believed – but made better use of illusory freedoms than many contemporaries in the West made of real ones.