The Royal Academy spotlights Ukrainian Modernism with In the Eye of the Storm
The RA turns its attention to a pivotal moment in the history of Ukrainian art with their latest exhibition...
July 24, 2024
Walking into The Royal Academy’s In The Eye of The Storm, visitors are hurled into a pictorial history of 20th-century Ukraine. The eye lurches from canvas to canvas through fragmented picture planes that mirror the tumultuous evolution of the nation-state since the turn of the century; a country constantly searching for its identity against invasion and oppression from external powers and internal factions. Despite this shadowy trajectory, the exhibition begins with vibrant optimism as early 20th-century artists embrace the Modernism flourishing across European cities.
Ukraine has been in constant flux, handed between kingdoms and empires. By 1900, when the exhibition begins, Ukraine is divided under the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. No Ukrainian city is permitted to found an art school, highlighting the power assigned to art — an undercurrent of the exhibition.
In the first room, painted a brilliant blue, hangs a Cubo-Futurist landscape by Oleksandr Bohomazov. A bucolic scene is cut through by a modern locomotive, embodying the process by which human progress punctuates the natural environment. Bohomazov was captivated by a world in constant motion, a central tenet of futurism. On a canvas nearby, a horse appears to break free from its carousel and fly against a geometric dreamscape painted by David Burliuk. Despite the fact many artists were forced to emigrate to study, Ukrainian art is characterised by vivid, complementary, and contrasting colours harking back to the country’s native folk art and design. The synthesis of the opposing forces of rapid industrialisation and vibrant peasant folklore propels Ukrainian visual identity with vehement energy.
The prominence of pattern and colour is embodied in a portrait of a peasant woman by Volodymyr Burliuk, who was tragically killed during the First World War. The traditional pattern of the woman’s dress is repeated in the background behind her. The construction of her face with blots of colour emulates the pattern while referencing the influence of pointillism, no doubt picked up from post-impressionist works exhibited in Russia at the time, such as those of Seurat and Signac. Her traditional bead necklaces are juxtaposed with the Orthodox cross she wears, in a way that echoes the title of one of Sonia Delaunay’s paintings Simultaneous Contrasts – a painting in the ‘Simultanism’ style she developed in the 1910s. The work in this exhibition is characterised by an exciting and, at times, uncomfortable hybridity of styles, reflecting the multicultural and ethnic makeup of the country in these formative years.
National identity was just as fragmented and unsettled as the Cubo-Futurist canvases. In Issachar Ber Rybach’s City (Shtetl), 1917, a town appears in a kaleidoscopic view. The name Shtetl refers to peaceful Jewish towns ravaged in anti-Semitic ‘pogroms’ — violent riots expelling Jews. A contemporary viewer could make a tenuous link seeing the distorted and disjointed houses as harbingers of upheaval or reflecting the unsettled cultural and racial friction. Ber Rybach produced a portfolio of lithographs entitled Shtetl. My Destroyed Home: A Remembrance (1922), made as a memorial to these massacred villages. On the opposite wall hangs Manuil Shekhtman’s Jewish Pogrom (1926), depicting victims of a pogrom, some dead in a red cloud above a group of survivors resting in exhaustion. Though the narratives are firmly Jewish, the style has strong aesthetic ties to the Boichukists.
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The same year Shtetl was painted, the Ukrainian War of Independence began. The Bolshevik Red Army defeated the national Ukrainian forces, and the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic was established with Kharkiv as its capital. The Soviets established a program of ‘Ukrainisation’ to appeal to local nationalist sentiment, conceding some cultural autonomy to the Republic. Under this, the Ukrainian intelligentsia, much like their forebears a century earlier, undertook a project of creating a new cultural identity, but this time both Soviet and Ukrainian. Mykhailo Boichuk’s studio of monumental art emerged in this period. Its members, known as the Boichukists (perhaps a play on Bolsheviks), were heavily influenced by Byzantine art and replicated their figures' flatness and sickly blue-green complexions. Much of the Boichukist art consisted of murals depicting a nation of workers; apple pickers, farmers, and sawyers at work. They were concerned with building a narrative rooted in Ukrainian folklore, which was ill-received by the Red Army. Boichuk and his circle were executed, and much of their art was destroyed in the Stalinist purges.
In the Eye of the Storm is a fascinating insight into a nation grappling with its identity and responding to the modern world as it navigates waves of cultural forces with a deep sense of indigenous selfhood. The final room pays tribute to ‘The Last Generation’ of Ukrainian modernists; he formation of a modern Ukrainian visual identity was curtailed in the 1930s. Hundreds of writers, theatre directors, and artists were labelled ‘bourgeois nationalists’ and executed, imprisoned, or sent to labour camps. The works in The Eye of the Storm survived the purges and have only recently been rediscovered, highlighting the complicated and little-known story of Modernism in Ukraine.
In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 13th October.
Walking into The Royal Academy’s In The Eye of The Storm, visitors are hurled into a pictorial history of 20th-century Ukraine. The eye lurches from canvas to canvas through fragmented picture planes that mirror the tumultuous evolution of the nation-state since the turn of the century; a country constantly searching for its identity against invasion and oppression from external powers and internal factions. Despite this shadowy trajectory, the exhibition begins with vibrant optimism as early 20th-century artists embrace the Modernism flourishing across European cities.
Ukraine has been in constant flux, handed between kingdoms and empires. By 1900, when the exhibition begins, Ukraine is divided under the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. No Ukrainian city is permitted to found an art school, highlighting the power assigned to art — an undercurrent of the exhibition.
In the first room, painted a brilliant blue, hangs a Cubo-Futurist landscape by Oleksandr Bohomazov. A bucolic scene is cut through by a modern locomotive, embodying the process by which human progress punctuates the natural environment. Bohomazov was captivated by a world in constant motion, a central tenet of futurism. On a canvas nearby, a horse appears to break free from its carousel and fly against a geometric dreamscape painted by David Burliuk. Despite the fact many artists were forced to emigrate to study, Ukrainian art is characterised by vivid, complementary, and contrasting colours harking back to the country’s native folk art and design. The synthesis of the opposing forces of rapid industrialisation and vibrant peasant folklore propels Ukrainian visual identity with vehement energy.
The prominence of pattern and colour is embodied in a portrait of a peasant woman by Volodymyr Burliuk, who was tragically killed during the First World War. The traditional pattern of the woman’s dress is repeated in the background behind her. The construction of her face with blots of colour emulates the pattern while referencing the influence of pointillism, no doubt picked up from post-impressionist works exhibited in Russia at the time, such as those of Seurat and Signac. Her traditional bead necklaces are juxtaposed with the Orthodox cross she wears, in a way that echoes the title of one of Sonia Delaunay’s paintings Simultaneous Contrasts – a painting in the ‘Simultanism’ style she developed in the 1910s. The work in this exhibition is characterised by an exciting and, at times, uncomfortable hybridity of styles, reflecting the multicultural and ethnic makeup of the country in these formative years.
National identity was just as fragmented and unsettled as the Cubo-Futurist canvases. In Issachar Ber Rybach’s City (Shtetl), 1917, a town appears in a kaleidoscopic view. The name Shtetl refers to peaceful Jewish towns ravaged in anti-Semitic ‘pogroms’ — violent riots expelling Jews. A contemporary viewer could make a tenuous link seeing the distorted and disjointed houses as harbingers of upheaval or reflecting the unsettled cultural and racial friction. Ber Rybach produced a portfolio of lithographs entitled Shtetl. My Destroyed Home: A Remembrance (1922), made as a memorial to these massacred villages. On the opposite wall hangs Manuil Shekhtman’s Jewish Pogrom (1926), depicting victims of a pogrom, some dead in a red cloud above a group of survivors resting in exhaustion. Though the narratives are firmly Jewish, the style has strong aesthetic ties to the Boichukists.
The same year Shtetl was painted, the Ukrainian War of Independence began. The Bolshevik Red Army defeated the national Ukrainian forces, and the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic was established with Kharkiv as its capital. The Soviets established a program of ‘Ukrainisation’ to appeal to local nationalist sentiment, conceding some cultural autonomy to the Republic. Under this, the Ukrainian intelligentsia, much like their forebears a century earlier, undertook a project of creating a new cultural identity, but this time both Soviet and Ukrainian. Mykhailo Boichuk’s studio of monumental art emerged in this period. Its members, known as the Boichukists (perhaps a play on Bolsheviks), were heavily influenced by Byzantine art and replicated their figures' flatness and sickly blue-green complexions. Much of the Boichukist art consisted of murals depicting a nation of workers; apple pickers, farmers, and sawyers at work. They were concerned with building a narrative rooted in Ukrainian folklore, which was ill-received by the Red Army. Boichuk and his circle were executed, and much of their art was destroyed in the Stalinist purges.
In the Eye of the Storm is a fascinating insight into a nation grappling with its identity and responding to the modern world as it navigates waves of cultural forces with a deep sense of indigenous selfhood. The final room pays tribute to ‘The Last Generation’ of Ukrainian modernists; he formation of a modern Ukrainian visual identity was curtailed in the 1930s. Hundreds of writers, theatre directors, and artists were labelled ‘bourgeois nationalists’ and executed, imprisoned, or sent to labour camps. The works in The Eye of the Storm survived the purges and have only recently been rediscovered, highlighting the complicated and little-known story of Modernism in Ukraine.
In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 13th October.
Walking into The Royal Academy’s In The Eye of The Storm, visitors are hurled into a pictorial history of 20th-century Ukraine. The eye lurches from canvas to canvas through fragmented picture planes that mirror the tumultuous evolution of the nation-state since the turn of the century; a country constantly searching for its identity against invasion and oppression from external powers and internal factions. Despite this shadowy trajectory, the exhibition begins with vibrant optimism as early 20th-century artists embrace the Modernism flourishing across European cities.
Ukraine has been in constant flux, handed between kingdoms and empires. By 1900, when the exhibition begins, Ukraine is divided under the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. No Ukrainian city is permitted to found an art school, highlighting the power assigned to art — an undercurrent of the exhibition.
In the first room, painted a brilliant blue, hangs a Cubo-Futurist landscape by Oleksandr Bohomazov. A bucolic scene is cut through by a modern locomotive, embodying the process by which human progress punctuates the natural environment. Bohomazov was captivated by a world in constant motion, a central tenet of futurism. On a canvas nearby, a horse appears to break free from its carousel and fly against a geometric dreamscape painted by David Burliuk. Despite the fact many artists were forced to emigrate to study, Ukrainian art is characterised by vivid, complementary, and contrasting colours harking back to the country’s native folk art and design. The synthesis of the opposing forces of rapid industrialisation and vibrant peasant folklore propels Ukrainian visual identity with vehement energy.
The prominence of pattern and colour is embodied in a portrait of a peasant woman by Volodymyr Burliuk, who was tragically killed during the First World War. The traditional pattern of the woman’s dress is repeated in the background behind her. The construction of her face with blots of colour emulates the pattern while referencing the influence of pointillism, no doubt picked up from post-impressionist works exhibited in Russia at the time, such as those of Seurat and Signac. Her traditional bead necklaces are juxtaposed with the Orthodox cross she wears, in a way that echoes the title of one of Sonia Delaunay’s paintings Simultaneous Contrasts – a painting in the ‘Simultanism’ style she developed in the 1910s. The work in this exhibition is characterised by an exciting and, at times, uncomfortable hybridity of styles, reflecting the multicultural and ethnic makeup of the country in these formative years.
National identity was just as fragmented and unsettled as the Cubo-Futurist canvases. In Issachar Ber Rybach’s City (Shtetl), 1917, a town appears in a kaleidoscopic view. The name Shtetl refers to peaceful Jewish towns ravaged in anti-Semitic ‘pogroms’ — violent riots expelling Jews. A contemporary viewer could make a tenuous link seeing the distorted and disjointed houses as harbingers of upheaval or reflecting the unsettled cultural and racial friction. Ber Rybach produced a portfolio of lithographs entitled Shtetl. My Destroyed Home: A Remembrance (1922), made as a memorial to these massacred villages. On the opposite wall hangs Manuil Shekhtman’s Jewish Pogrom (1926), depicting victims of a pogrom, some dead in a red cloud above a group of survivors resting in exhaustion. Though the narratives are firmly Jewish, the style has strong aesthetic ties to the Boichukists.
The same year Shtetl was painted, the Ukrainian War of Independence began. The Bolshevik Red Army defeated the national Ukrainian forces, and the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic was established with Kharkiv as its capital. The Soviets established a program of ‘Ukrainisation’ to appeal to local nationalist sentiment, conceding some cultural autonomy to the Republic. Under this, the Ukrainian intelligentsia, much like their forebears a century earlier, undertook a project of creating a new cultural identity, but this time both Soviet and Ukrainian. Mykhailo Boichuk’s studio of monumental art emerged in this period. Its members, known as the Boichukists (perhaps a play on Bolsheviks), were heavily influenced by Byzantine art and replicated their figures' flatness and sickly blue-green complexions. Much of the Boichukist art consisted of murals depicting a nation of workers; apple pickers, farmers, and sawyers at work. They were concerned with building a narrative rooted in Ukrainian folklore, which was ill-received by the Red Army. Boichuk and his circle were executed, and much of their art was destroyed in the Stalinist purges.
In the Eye of the Storm is a fascinating insight into a nation grappling with its identity and responding to the modern world as it navigates waves of cultural forces with a deep sense of indigenous selfhood. The final room pays tribute to ‘The Last Generation’ of Ukrainian modernists; he formation of a modern Ukrainian visual identity was curtailed in the 1930s. Hundreds of writers, theatre directors, and artists were labelled ‘bourgeois nationalists’ and executed, imprisoned, or sent to labour camps. The works in The Eye of the Storm survived the purges and have only recently been rediscovered, highlighting the complicated and little-known story of Modernism in Ukraine.
In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 13th October.
Walking into The Royal Academy’s In The Eye of The Storm, visitors are hurled into a pictorial history of 20th-century Ukraine. The eye lurches from canvas to canvas through fragmented picture planes that mirror the tumultuous evolution of the nation-state since the turn of the century; a country constantly searching for its identity against invasion and oppression from external powers and internal factions. Despite this shadowy trajectory, the exhibition begins with vibrant optimism as early 20th-century artists embrace the Modernism flourishing across European cities.
Ukraine has been in constant flux, handed between kingdoms and empires. By 1900, when the exhibition begins, Ukraine is divided under the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. No Ukrainian city is permitted to found an art school, highlighting the power assigned to art — an undercurrent of the exhibition.
In the first room, painted a brilliant blue, hangs a Cubo-Futurist landscape by Oleksandr Bohomazov. A bucolic scene is cut through by a modern locomotive, embodying the process by which human progress punctuates the natural environment. Bohomazov was captivated by a world in constant motion, a central tenet of futurism. On a canvas nearby, a horse appears to break free from its carousel and fly against a geometric dreamscape painted by David Burliuk. Despite the fact many artists were forced to emigrate to study, Ukrainian art is characterised by vivid, complementary, and contrasting colours harking back to the country’s native folk art and design. The synthesis of the opposing forces of rapid industrialisation and vibrant peasant folklore propels Ukrainian visual identity with vehement energy.
The prominence of pattern and colour is embodied in a portrait of a peasant woman by Volodymyr Burliuk, who was tragically killed during the First World War. The traditional pattern of the woman’s dress is repeated in the background behind her. The construction of her face with blots of colour emulates the pattern while referencing the influence of pointillism, no doubt picked up from post-impressionist works exhibited in Russia at the time, such as those of Seurat and Signac. Her traditional bead necklaces are juxtaposed with the Orthodox cross she wears, in a way that echoes the title of one of Sonia Delaunay’s paintings Simultaneous Contrasts – a painting in the ‘Simultanism’ style she developed in the 1910s. The work in this exhibition is characterised by an exciting and, at times, uncomfortable hybridity of styles, reflecting the multicultural and ethnic makeup of the country in these formative years.
National identity was just as fragmented and unsettled as the Cubo-Futurist canvases. In Issachar Ber Rybach’s City (Shtetl), 1917, a town appears in a kaleidoscopic view. The name Shtetl refers to peaceful Jewish towns ravaged in anti-Semitic ‘pogroms’ — violent riots expelling Jews. A contemporary viewer could make a tenuous link seeing the distorted and disjointed houses as harbingers of upheaval or reflecting the unsettled cultural and racial friction. Ber Rybach produced a portfolio of lithographs entitled Shtetl. My Destroyed Home: A Remembrance (1922), made as a memorial to these massacred villages. On the opposite wall hangs Manuil Shekhtman’s Jewish Pogrom (1926), depicting victims of a pogrom, some dead in a red cloud above a group of survivors resting in exhaustion. Though the narratives are firmly Jewish, the style has strong aesthetic ties to the Boichukists.
The same year Shtetl was painted, the Ukrainian War of Independence began. The Bolshevik Red Army defeated the national Ukrainian forces, and the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic was established with Kharkiv as its capital. The Soviets established a program of ‘Ukrainisation’ to appeal to local nationalist sentiment, conceding some cultural autonomy to the Republic. Under this, the Ukrainian intelligentsia, much like their forebears a century earlier, undertook a project of creating a new cultural identity, but this time both Soviet and Ukrainian. Mykhailo Boichuk’s studio of monumental art emerged in this period. Its members, known as the Boichukists (perhaps a play on Bolsheviks), were heavily influenced by Byzantine art and replicated their figures' flatness and sickly blue-green complexions. Much of the Boichukist art consisted of murals depicting a nation of workers; apple pickers, farmers, and sawyers at work. They were concerned with building a narrative rooted in Ukrainian folklore, which was ill-received by the Red Army. Boichuk and his circle were executed, and much of their art was destroyed in the Stalinist purges.
In the Eye of the Storm is a fascinating insight into a nation grappling with its identity and responding to the modern world as it navigates waves of cultural forces with a deep sense of indigenous selfhood. The final room pays tribute to ‘The Last Generation’ of Ukrainian modernists; he formation of a modern Ukrainian visual identity was curtailed in the 1930s. Hundreds of writers, theatre directors, and artists were labelled ‘bourgeois nationalists’ and executed, imprisoned, or sent to labour camps. The works in The Eye of the Storm survived the purges and have only recently been rediscovered, highlighting the complicated and little-known story of Modernism in Ukraine.
In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 13th October.
Walking into The Royal Academy’s In The Eye of The Storm, visitors are hurled into a pictorial history of 20th-century Ukraine. The eye lurches from canvas to canvas through fragmented picture planes that mirror the tumultuous evolution of the nation-state since the turn of the century; a country constantly searching for its identity against invasion and oppression from external powers and internal factions. Despite this shadowy trajectory, the exhibition begins with vibrant optimism as early 20th-century artists embrace the Modernism flourishing across European cities.
Ukraine has been in constant flux, handed between kingdoms and empires. By 1900, when the exhibition begins, Ukraine is divided under the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. No Ukrainian city is permitted to found an art school, highlighting the power assigned to art — an undercurrent of the exhibition.
In the first room, painted a brilliant blue, hangs a Cubo-Futurist landscape by Oleksandr Bohomazov. A bucolic scene is cut through by a modern locomotive, embodying the process by which human progress punctuates the natural environment. Bohomazov was captivated by a world in constant motion, a central tenet of futurism. On a canvas nearby, a horse appears to break free from its carousel and fly against a geometric dreamscape painted by David Burliuk. Despite the fact many artists were forced to emigrate to study, Ukrainian art is characterised by vivid, complementary, and contrasting colours harking back to the country’s native folk art and design. The synthesis of the opposing forces of rapid industrialisation and vibrant peasant folklore propels Ukrainian visual identity with vehement energy.
The prominence of pattern and colour is embodied in a portrait of a peasant woman by Volodymyr Burliuk, who was tragically killed during the First World War. The traditional pattern of the woman’s dress is repeated in the background behind her. The construction of her face with blots of colour emulates the pattern while referencing the influence of pointillism, no doubt picked up from post-impressionist works exhibited in Russia at the time, such as those of Seurat and Signac. Her traditional bead necklaces are juxtaposed with the Orthodox cross she wears, in a way that echoes the title of one of Sonia Delaunay’s paintings Simultaneous Contrasts – a painting in the ‘Simultanism’ style she developed in the 1910s. The work in this exhibition is characterised by an exciting and, at times, uncomfortable hybridity of styles, reflecting the multicultural and ethnic makeup of the country in these formative years.
National identity was just as fragmented and unsettled as the Cubo-Futurist canvases. In Issachar Ber Rybach’s City (Shtetl), 1917, a town appears in a kaleidoscopic view. The name Shtetl refers to peaceful Jewish towns ravaged in anti-Semitic ‘pogroms’ — violent riots expelling Jews. A contemporary viewer could make a tenuous link seeing the distorted and disjointed houses as harbingers of upheaval or reflecting the unsettled cultural and racial friction. Ber Rybach produced a portfolio of lithographs entitled Shtetl. My Destroyed Home: A Remembrance (1922), made as a memorial to these massacred villages. On the opposite wall hangs Manuil Shekhtman’s Jewish Pogrom (1926), depicting victims of a pogrom, some dead in a red cloud above a group of survivors resting in exhaustion. Though the narratives are firmly Jewish, the style has strong aesthetic ties to the Boichukists.
The same year Shtetl was painted, the Ukrainian War of Independence began. The Bolshevik Red Army defeated the national Ukrainian forces, and the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic was established with Kharkiv as its capital. The Soviets established a program of ‘Ukrainisation’ to appeal to local nationalist sentiment, conceding some cultural autonomy to the Republic. Under this, the Ukrainian intelligentsia, much like their forebears a century earlier, undertook a project of creating a new cultural identity, but this time both Soviet and Ukrainian. Mykhailo Boichuk’s studio of monumental art emerged in this period. Its members, known as the Boichukists (perhaps a play on Bolsheviks), were heavily influenced by Byzantine art and replicated their figures' flatness and sickly blue-green complexions. Much of the Boichukist art consisted of murals depicting a nation of workers; apple pickers, farmers, and sawyers at work. They were concerned with building a narrative rooted in Ukrainian folklore, which was ill-received by the Red Army. Boichuk and his circle were executed, and much of their art was destroyed in the Stalinist purges.
In the Eye of the Storm is a fascinating insight into a nation grappling with its identity and responding to the modern world as it navigates waves of cultural forces with a deep sense of indigenous selfhood. The final room pays tribute to ‘The Last Generation’ of Ukrainian modernists; he formation of a modern Ukrainian visual identity was curtailed in the 1930s. Hundreds of writers, theatre directors, and artists were labelled ‘bourgeois nationalists’ and executed, imprisoned, or sent to labour camps. The works in The Eye of the Storm survived the purges and have only recently been rediscovered, highlighting the complicated and little-known story of Modernism in Ukraine.
In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 13th October.
Walking into The Royal Academy’s In The Eye of The Storm, visitors are hurled into a pictorial history of 20th-century Ukraine. The eye lurches from canvas to canvas through fragmented picture planes that mirror the tumultuous evolution of the nation-state since the turn of the century; a country constantly searching for its identity against invasion and oppression from external powers and internal factions. Despite this shadowy trajectory, the exhibition begins with vibrant optimism as early 20th-century artists embrace the Modernism flourishing across European cities.
Ukraine has been in constant flux, handed between kingdoms and empires. By 1900, when the exhibition begins, Ukraine is divided under the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. No Ukrainian city is permitted to found an art school, highlighting the power assigned to art — an undercurrent of the exhibition.
In the first room, painted a brilliant blue, hangs a Cubo-Futurist landscape by Oleksandr Bohomazov. A bucolic scene is cut through by a modern locomotive, embodying the process by which human progress punctuates the natural environment. Bohomazov was captivated by a world in constant motion, a central tenet of futurism. On a canvas nearby, a horse appears to break free from its carousel and fly against a geometric dreamscape painted by David Burliuk. Despite the fact many artists were forced to emigrate to study, Ukrainian art is characterised by vivid, complementary, and contrasting colours harking back to the country’s native folk art and design. The synthesis of the opposing forces of rapid industrialisation and vibrant peasant folklore propels Ukrainian visual identity with vehement energy.
The prominence of pattern and colour is embodied in a portrait of a peasant woman by Volodymyr Burliuk, who was tragically killed during the First World War. The traditional pattern of the woman’s dress is repeated in the background behind her. The construction of her face with blots of colour emulates the pattern while referencing the influence of pointillism, no doubt picked up from post-impressionist works exhibited in Russia at the time, such as those of Seurat and Signac. Her traditional bead necklaces are juxtaposed with the Orthodox cross she wears, in a way that echoes the title of one of Sonia Delaunay’s paintings Simultaneous Contrasts – a painting in the ‘Simultanism’ style she developed in the 1910s. The work in this exhibition is characterised by an exciting and, at times, uncomfortable hybridity of styles, reflecting the multicultural and ethnic makeup of the country in these formative years.
National identity was just as fragmented and unsettled as the Cubo-Futurist canvases. In Issachar Ber Rybach’s City (Shtetl), 1917, a town appears in a kaleidoscopic view. The name Shtetl refers to peaceful Jewish towns ravaged in anti-Semitic ‘pogroms’ — violent riots expelling Jews. A contemporary viewer could make a tenuous link seeing the distorted and disjointed houses as harbingers of upheaval or reflecting the unsettled cultural and racial friction. Ber Rybach produced a portfolio of lithographs entitled Shtetl. My Destroyed Home: A Remembrance (1922), made as a memorial to these massacred villages. On the opposite wall hangs Manuil Shekhtman’s Jewish Pogrom (1926), depicting victims of a pogrom, some dead in a red cloud above a group of survivors resting in exhaustion. Though the narratives are firmly Jewish, the style has strong aesthetic ties to the Boichukists.
The same year Shtetl was painted, the Ukrainian War of Independence began. The Bolshevik Red Army defeated the national Ukrainian forces, and the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic was established with Kharkiv as its capital. The Soviets established a program of ‘Ukrainisation’ to appeal to local nationalist sentiment, conceding some cultural autonomy to the Republic. Under this, the Ukrainian intelligentsia, much like their forebears a century earlier, undertook a project of creating a new cultural identity, but this time both Soviet and Ukrainian. Mykhailo Boichuk’s studio of monumental art emerged in this period. Its members, known as the Boichukists (perhaps a play on Bolsheviks), were heavily influenced by Byzantine art and replicated their figures' flatness and sickly blue-green complexions. Much of the Boichukist art consisted of murals depicting a nation of workers; apple pickers, farmers, and sawyers at work. They were concerned with building a narrative rooted in Ukrainian folklore, which was ill-received by the Red Army. Boichuk and his circle were executed, and much of their art was destroyed in the Stalinist purges.
In the Eye of the Storm is a fascinating insight into a nation grappling with its identity and responding to the modern world as it navigates waves of cultural forces with a deep sense of indigenous selfhood. The final room pays tribute to ‘The Last Generation’ of Ukrainian modernists; he formation of a modern Ukrainian visual identity was curtailed in the 1930s. Hundreds of writers, theatre directors, and artists were labelled ‘bourgeois nationalists’ and executed, imprisoned, or sent to labour camps. The works in The Eye of the Storm survived the purges and have only recently been rediscovered, highlighting the complicated and little-known story of Modernism in Ukraine.
In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 13th October.
Walking into The Royal Academy’s In The Eye of The Storm, visitors are hurled into a pictorial history of 20th-century Ukraine. The eye lurches from canvas to canvas through fragmented picture planes that mirror the tumultuous evolution of the nation-state since the turn of the century; a country constantly searching for its identity against invasion and oppression from external powers and internal factions. Despite this shadowy trajectory, the exhibition begins with vibrant optimism as early 20th-century artists embrace the Modernism flourishing across European cities.
Ukraine has been in constant flux, handed between kingdoms and empires. By 1900, when the exhibition begins, Ukraine is divided under the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. No Ukrainian city is permitted to found an art school, highlighting the power assigned to art — an undercurrent of the exhibition.
In the first room, painted a brilliant blue, hangs a Cubo-Futurist landscape by Oleksandr Bohomazov. A bucolic scene is cut through by a modern locomotive, embodying the process by which human progress punctuates the natural environment. Bohomazov was captivated by a world in constant motion, a central tenet of futurism. On a canvas nearby, a horse appears to break free from its carousel and fly against a geometric dreamscape painted by David Burliuk. Despite the fact many artists were forced to emigrate to study, Ukrainian art is characterised by vivid, complementary, and contrasting colours harking back to the country’s native folk art and design. The synthesis of the opposing forces of rapid industrialisation and vibrant peasant folklore propels Ukrainian visual identity with vehement energy.
The prominence of pattern and colour is embodied in a portrait of a peasant woman by Volodymyr Burliuk, who was tragically killed during the First World War. The traditional pattern of the woman’s dress is repeated in the background behind her. The construction of her face with blots of colour emulates the pattern while referencing the influence of pointillism, no doubt picked up from post-impressionist works exhibited in Russia at the time, such as those of Seurat and Signac. Her traditional bead necklaces are juxtaposed with the Orthodox cross she wears, in a way that echoes the title of one of Sonia Delaunay’s paintings Simultaneous Contrasts – a painting in the ‘Simultanism’ style she developed in the 1910s. The work in this exhibition is characterised by an exciting and, at times, uncomfortable hybridity of styles, reflecting the multicultural and ethnic makeup of the country in these formative years.
National identity was just as fragmented and unsettled as the Cubo-Futurist canvases. In Issachar Ber Rybach’s City (Shtetl), 1917, a town appears in a kaleidoscopic view. The name Shtetl refers to peaceful Jewish towns ravaged in anti-Semitic ‘pogroms’ — violent riots expelling Jews. A contemporary viewer could make a tenuous link seeing the distorted and disjointed houses as harbingers of upheaval or reflecting the unsettled cultural and racial friction. Ber Rybach produced a portfolio of lithographs entitled Shtetl. My Destroyed Home: A Remembrance (1922), made as a memorial to these massacred villages. On the opposite wall hangs Manuil Shekhtman’s Jewish Pogrom (1926), depicting victims of a pogrom, some dead in a red cloud above a group of survivors resting in exhaustion. Though the narratives are firmly Jewish, the style has strong aesthetic ties to the Boichukists.
The same year Shtetl was painted, the Ukrainian War of Independence began. The Bolshevik Red Army defeated the national Ukrainian forces, and the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic was established with Kharkiv as its capital. The Soviets established a program of ‘Ukrainisation’ to appeal to local nationalist sentiment, conceding some cultural autonomy to the Republic. Under this, the Ukrainian intelligentsia, much like their forebears a century earlier, undertook a project of creating a new cultural identity, but this time both Soviet and Ukrainian. Mykhailo Boichuk’s studio of monumental art emerged in this period. Its members, known as the Boichukists (perhaps a play on Bolsheviks), were heavily influenced by Byzantine art and replicated their figures' flatness and sickly blue-green complexions. Much of the Boichukist art consisted of murals depicting a nation of workers; apple pickers, farmers, and sawyers at work. They were concerned with building a narrative rooted in Ukrainian folklore, which was ill-received by the Red Army. Boichuk and his circle were executed, and much of their art was destroyed in the Stalinist purges.
In the Eye of the Storm is a fascinating insight into a nation grappling with its identity and responding to the modern world as it navigates waves of cultural forces with a deep sense of indigenous selfhood. The final room pays tribute to ‘The Last Generation’ of Ukrainian modernists; he formation of a modern Ukrainian visual identity was curtailed in the 1930s. Hundreds of writers, theatre directors, and artists were labelled ‘bourgeois nationalists’ and executed, imprisoned, or sent to labour camps. The works in The Eye of the Storm survived the purges and have only recently been rediscovered, highlighting the complicated and little-known story of Modernism in Ukraine.
In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 13th October.
Walking into The Royal Academy’s In The Eye of The Storm, visitors are hurled into a pictorial history of 20th-century Ukraine. The eye lurches from canvas to canvas through fragmented picture planes that mirror the tumultuous evolution of the nation-state since the turn of the century; a country constantly searching for its identity against invasion and oppression from external powers and internal factions. Despite this shadowy trajectory, the exhibition begins with vibrant optimism as early 20th-century artists embrace the Modernism flourishing across European cities.
Ukraine has been in constant flux, handed between kingdoms and empires. By 1900, when the exhibition begins, Ukraine is divided under the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. No Ukrainian city is permitted to found an art school, highlighting the power assigned to art — an undercurrent of the exhibition.
In the first room, painted a brilliant blue, hangs a Cubo-Futurist landscape by Oleksandr Bohomazov. A bucolic scene is cut through by a modern locomotive, embodying the process by which human progress punctuates the natural environment. Bohomazov was captivated by a world in constant motion, a central tenet of futurism. On a canvas nearby, a horse appears to break free from its carousel and fly against a geometric dreamscape painted by David Burliuk. Despite the fact many artists were forced to emigrate to study, Ukrainian art is characterised by vivid, complementary, and contrasting colours harking back to the country’s native folk art and design. The synthesis of the opposing forces of rapid industrialisation and vibrant peasant folklore propels Ukrainian visual identity with vehement energy.
The prominence of pattern and colour is embodied in a portrait of a peasant woman by Volodymyr Burliuk, who was tragically killed during the First World War. The traditional pattern of the woman’s dress is repeated in the background behind her. The construction of her face with blots of colour emulates the pattern while referencing the influence of pointillism, no doubt picked up from post-impressionist works exhibited in Russia at the time, such as those of Seurat and Signac. Her traditional bead necklaces are juxtaposed with the Orthodox cross she wears, in a way that echoes the title of one of Sonia Delaunay’s paintings Simultaneous Contrasts – a painting in the ‘Simultanism’ style she developed in the 1910s. The work in this exhibition is characterised by an exciting and, at times, uncomfortable hybridity of styles, reflecting the multicultural and ethnic makeup of the country in these formative years.
National identity was just as fragmented and unsettled as the Cubo-Futurist canvases. In Issachar Ber Rybach’s City (Shtetl), 1917, a town appears in a kaleidoscopic view. The name Shtetl refers to peaceful Jewish towns ravaged in anti-Semitic ‘pogroms’ — violent riots expelling Jews. A contemporary viewer could make a tenuous link seeing the distorted and disjointed houses as harbingers of upheaval or reflecting the unsettled cultural and racial friction. Ber Rybach produced a portfolio of lithographs entitled Shtetl. My Destroyed Home: A Remembrance (1922), made as a memorial to these massacred villages. On the opposite wall hangs Manuil Shekhtman’s Jewish Pogrom (1926), depicting victims of a pogrom, some dead in a red cloud above a group of survivors resting in exhaustion. Though the narratives are firmly Jewish, the style has strong aesthetic ties to the Boichukists.
The same year Shtetl was painted, the Ukrainian War of Independence began. The Bolshevik Red Army defeated the national Ukrainian forces, and the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic was established with Kharkiv as its capital. The Soviets established a program of ‘Ukrainisation’ to appeal to local nationalist sentiment, conceding some cultural autonomy to the Republic. Under this, the Ukrainian intelligentsia, much like their forebears a century earlier, undertook a project of creating a new cultural identity, but this time both Soviet and Ukrainian. Mykhailo Boichuk’s studio of monumental art emerged in this period. Its members, known as the Boichukists (perhaps a play on Bolsheviks), were heavily influenced by Byzantine art and replicated their figures' flatness and sickly blue-green complexions. Much of the Boichukist art consisted of murals depicting a nation of workers; apple pickers, farmers, and sawyers at work. They were concerned with building a narrative rooted in Ukrainian folklore, which was ill-received by the Red Army. Boichuk and his circle were executed, and much of their art was destroyed in the Stalinist purges.
In the Eye of the Storm is a fascinating insight into a nation grappling with its identity and responding to the modern world as it navigates waves of cultural forces with a deep sense of indigenous selfhood. The final room pays tribute to ‘The Last Generation’ of Ukrainian modernists; he formation of a modern Ukrainian visual identity was curtailed in the 1930s. Hundreds of writers, theatre directors, and artists were labelled ‘bourgeois nationalists’ and executed, imprisoned, or sent to labour camps. The works in The Eye of the Storm survived the purges and have only recently been rediscovered, highlighting the complicated and little-known story of Modernism in Ukraine.
In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 13th October.
Walking into The Royal Academy’s In The Eye of The Storm, visitors are hurled into a pictorial history of 20th-century Ukraine. The eye lurches from canvas to canvas through fragmented picture planes that mirror the tumultuous evolution of the nation-state since the turn of the century; a country constantly searching for its identity against invasion and oppression from external powers and internal factions. Despite this shadowy trajectory, the exhibition begins with vibrant optimism as early 20th-century artists embrace the Modernism flourishing across European cities.
Ukraine has been in constant flux, handed between kingdoms and empires. By 1900, when the exhibition begins, Ukraine is divided under the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. No Ukrainian city is permitted to found an art school, highlighting the power assigned to art — an undercurrent of the exhibition.
In the first room, painted a brilliant blue, hangs a Cubo-Futurist landscape by Oleksandr Bohomazov. A bucolic scene is cut through by a modern locomotive, embodying the process by which human progress punctuates the natural environment. Bohomazov was captivated by a world in constant motion, a central tenet of futurism. On a canvas nearby, a horse appears to break free from its carousel and fly against a geometric dreamscape painted by David Burliuk. Despite the fact many artists were forced to emigrate to study, Ukrainian art is characterised by vivid, complementary, and contrasting colours harking back to the country’s native folk art and design. The synthesis of the opposing forces of rapid industrialisation and vibrant peasant folklore propels Ukrainian visual identity with vehement energy.
The prominence of pattern and colour is embodied in a portrait of a peasant woman by Volodymyr Burliuk, who was tragically killed during the First World War. The traditional pattern of the woman’s dress is repeated in the background behind her. The construction of her face with blots of colour emulates the pattern while referencing the influence of pointillism, no doubt picked up from post-impressionist works exhibited in Russia at the time, such as those of Seurat and Signac. Her traditional bead necklaces are juxtaposed with the Orthodox cross she wears, in a way that echoes the title of one of Sonia Delaunay’s paintings Simultaneous Contrasts – a painting in the ‘Simultanism’ style she developed in the 1910s. The work in this exhibition is characterised by an exciting and, at times, uncomfortable hybridity of styles, reflecting the multicultural and ethnic makeup of the country in these formative years.
National identity was just as fragmented and unsettled as the Cubo-Futurist canvases. In Issachar Ber Rybach’s City (Shtetl), 1917, a town appears in a kaleidoscopic view. The name Shtetl refers to peaceful Jewish towns ravaged in anti-Semitic ‘pogroms’ — violent riots expelling Jews. A contemporary viewer could make a tenuous link seeing the distorted and disjointed houses as harbingers of upheaval or reflecting the unsettled cultural and racial friction. Ber Rybach produced a portfolio of lithographs entitled Shtetl. My Destroyed Home: A Remembrance (1922), made as a memorial to these massacred villages. On the opposite wall hangs Manuil Shekhtman’s Jewish Pogrom (1926), depicting victims of a pogrom, some dead in a red cloud above a group of survivors resting in exhaustion. Though the narratives are firmly Jewish, the style has strong aesthetic ties to the Boichukists.
The same year Shtetl was painted, the Ukrainian War of Independence began. The Bolshevik Red Army defeated the national Ukrainian forces, and the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic was established with Kharkiv as its capital. The Soviets established a program of ‘Ukrainisation’ to appeal to local nationalist sentiment, conceding some cultural autonomy to the Republic. Under this, the Ukrainian intelligentsia, much like their forebears a century earlier, undertook a project of creating a new cultural identity, but this time both Soviet and Ukrainian. Mykhailo Boichuk’s studio of monumental art emerged in this period. Its members, known as the Boichukists (perhaps a play on Bolsheviks), were heavily influenced by Byzantine art and replicated their figures' flatness and sickly blue-green complexions. Much of the Boichukist art consisted of murals depicting a nation of workers; apple pickers, farmers, and sawyers at work. They were concerned with building a narrative rooted in Ukrainian folklore, which was ill-received by the Red Army. Boichuk and his circle were executed, and much of their art was destroyed in the Stalinist purges.
In the Eye of the Storm is a fascinating insight into a nation grappling with its identity and responding to the modern world as it navigates waves of cultural forces with a deep sense of indigenous selfhood. The final room pays tribute to ‘The Last Generation’ of Ukrainian modernists; he formation of a modern Ukrainian visual identity was curtailed in the 1930s. Hundreds of writers, theatre directors, and artists were labelled ‘bourgeois nationalists’ and executed, imprisoned, or sent to labour camps. The works in The Eye of the Storm survived the purges and have only recently been rediscovered, highlighting the complicated and little-known story of Modernism in Ukraine.
In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 13th October.
Walking into The Royal Academy’s In The Eye of The Storm, visitors are hurled into a pictorial history of 20th-century Ukraine. The eye lurches from canvas to canvas through fragmented picture planes that mirror the tumultuous evolution of the nation-state since the turn of the century; a country constantly searching for its identity against invasion and oppression from external powers and internal factions. Despite this shadowy trajectory, the exhibition begins with vibrant optimism as early 20th-century artists embrace the Modernism flourishing across European cities.
Ukraine has been in constant flux, handed between kingdoms and empires. By 1900, when the exhibition begins, Ukraine is divided under the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. No Ukrainian city is permitted to found an art school, highlighting the power assigned to art — an undercurrent of the exhibition.
In the first room, painted a brilliant blue, hangs a Cubo-Futurist landscape by Oleksandr Bohomazov. A bucolic scene is cut through by a modern locomotive, embodying the process by which human progress punctuates the natural environment. Bohomazov was captivated by a world in constant motion, a central tenet of futurism. On a canvas nearby, a horse appears to break free from its carousel and fly against a geometric dreamscape painted by David Burliuk. Despite the fact many artists were forced to emigrate to study, Ukrainian art is characterised by vivid, complementary, and contrasting colours harking back to the country’s native folk art and design. The synthesis of the opposing forces of rapid industrialisation and vibrant peasant folklore propels Ukrainian visual identity with vehement energy.
The prominence of pattern and colour is embodied in a portrait of a peasant woman by Volodymyr Burliuk, who was tragically killed during the First World War. The traditional pattern of the woman’s dress is repeated in the background behind her. The construction of her face with blots of colour emulates the pattern while referencing the influence of pointillism, no doubt picked up from post-impressionist works exhibited in Russia at the time, such as those of Seurat and Signac. Her traditional bead necklaces are juxtaposed with the Orthodox cross she wears, in a way that echoes the title of one of Sonia Delaunay’s paintings Simultaneous Contrasts – a painting in the ‘Simultanism’ style she developed in the 1910s. The work in this exhibition is characterised by an exciting and, at times, uncomfortable hybridity of styles, reflecting the multicultural and ethnic makeup of the country in these formative years.
National identity was just as fragmented and unsettled as the Cubo-Futurist canvases. In Issachar Ber Rybach’s City (Shtetl), 1917, a town appears in a kaleidoscopic view. The name Shtetl refers to peaceful Jewish towns ravaged in anti-Semitic ‘pogroms’ — violent riots expelling Jews. A contemporary viewer could make a tenuous link seeing the distorted and disjointed houses as harbingers of upheaval or reflecting the unsettled cultural and racial friction. Ber Rybach produced a portfolio of lithographs entitled Shtetl. My Destroyed Home: A Remembrance (1922), made as a memorial to these massacred villages. On the opposite wall hangs Manuil Shekhtman’s Jewish Pogrom (1926), depicting victims of a pogrom, some dead in a red cloud above a group of survivors resting in exhaustion. Though the narratives are firmly Jewish, the style has strong aesthetic ties to the Boichukists.
The same year Shtetl was painted, the Ukrainian War of Independence began. The Bolshevik Red Army defeated the national Ukrainian forces, and the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic was established with Kharkiv as its capital. The Soviets established a program of ‘Ukrainisation’ to appeal to local nationalist sentiment, conceding some cultural autonomy to the Republic. Under this, the Ukrainian intelligentsia, much like their forebears a century earlier, undertook a project of creating a new cultural identity, but this time both Soviet and Ukrainian. Mykhailo Boichuk’s studio of monumental art emerged in this period. Its members, known as the Boichukists (perhaps a play on Bolsheviks), were heavily influenced by Byzantine art and replicated their figures' flatness and sickly blue-green complexions. Much of the Boichukist art consisted of murals depicting a nation of workers; apple pickers, farmers, and sawyers at work. They were concerned with building a narrative rooted in Ukrainian folklore, which was ill-received by the Red Army. Boichuk and his circle were executed, and much of their art was destroyed in the Stalinist purges.
In the Eye of the Storm is a fascinating insight into a nation grappling with its identity and responding to the modern world as it navigates waves of cultural forces with a deep sense of indigenous selfhood. The final room pays tribute to ‘The Last Generation’ of Ukrainian modernists; he formation of a modern Ukrainian visual identity was curtailed in the 1930s. Hundreds of writers, theatre directors, and artists were labelled ‘bourgeois nationalists’ and executed, imprisoned, or sent to labour camps. The works in The Eye of the Storm survived the purges and have only recently been rediscovered, highlighting the complicated and little-known story of Modernism in Ukraine.
In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 13th October.
Walking into The Royal Academy’s In The Eye of The Storm, visitors are hurled into a pictorial history of 20th-century Ukraine. The eye lurches from canvas to canvas through fragmented picture planes that mirror the tumultuous evolution of the nation-state since the turn of the century; a country constantly searching for its identity against invasion and oppression from external powers and internal factions. Despite this shadowy trajectory, the exhibition begins with vibrant optimism as early 20th-century artists embrace the Modernism flourishing across European cities.
Ukraine has been in constant flux, handed between kingdoms and empires. By 1900, when the exhibition begins, Ukraine is divided under the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. No Ukrainian city is permitted to found an art school, highlighting the power assigned to art — an undercurrent of the exhibition.
In the first room, painted a brilliant blue, hangs a Cubo-Futurist landscape by Oleksandr Bohomazov. A bucolic scene is cut through by a modern locomotive, embodying the process by which human progress punctuates the natural environment. Bohomazov was captivated by a world in constant motion, a central tenet of futurism. On a canvas nearby, a horse appears to break free from its carousel and fly against a geometric dreamscape painted by David Burliuk. Despite the fact many artists were forced to emigrate to study, Ukrainian art is characterised by vivid, complementary, and contrasting colours harking back to the country’s native folk art and design. The synthesis of the opposing forces of rapid industrialisation and vibrant peasant folklore propels Ukrainian visual identity with vehement energy.
The prominence of pattern and colour is embodied in a portrait of a peasant woman by Volodymyr Burliuk, who was tragically killed during the First World War. The traditional pattern of the woman’s dress is repeated in the background behind her. The construction of her face with blots of colour emulates the pattern while referencing the influence of pointillism, no doubt picked up from post-impressionist works exhibited in Russia at the time, such as those of Seurat and Signac. Her traditional bead necklaces are juxtaposed with the Orthodox cross she wears, in a way that echoes the title of one of Sonia Delaunay’s paintings Simultaneous Contrasts – a painting in the ‘Simultanism’ style she developed in the 1910s. The work in this exhibition is characterised by an exciting and, at times, uncomfortable hybridity of styles, reflecting the multicultural and ethnic makeup of the country in these formative years.
National identity was just as fragmented and unsettled as the Cubo-Futurist canvases. In Issachar Ber Rybach’s City (Shtetl), 1917, a town appears in a kaleidoscopic view. The name Shtetl refers to peaceful Jewish towns ravaged in anti-Semitic ‘pogroms’ — violent riots expelling Jews. A contemporary viewer could make a tenuous link seeing the distorted and disjointed houses as harbingers of upheaval or reflecting the unsettled cultural and racial friction. Ber Rybach produced a portfolio of lithographs entitled Shtetl. My Destroyed Home: A Remembrance (1922), made as a memorial to these massacred villages. On the opposite wall hangs Manuil Shekhtman’s Jewish Pogrom (1926), depicting victims of a pogrom, some dead in a red cloud above a group of survivors resting in exhaustion. Though the narratives are firmly Jewish, the style has strong aesthetic ties to the Boichukists.
The same year Shtetl was painted, the Ukrainian War of Independence began. The Bolshevik Red Army defeated the national Ukrainian forces, and the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic was established with Kharkiv as its capital. The Soviets established a program of ‘Ukrainisation’ to appeal to local nationalist sentiment, conceding some cultural autonomy to the Republic. Under this, the Ukrainian intelligentsia, much like their forebears a century earlier, undertook a project of creating a new cultural identity, but this time both Soviet and Ukrainian. Mykhailo Boichuk’s studio of monumental art emerged in this period. Its members, known as the Boichukists (perhaps a play on Bolsheviks), were heavily influenced by Byzantine art and replicated their figures' flatness and sickly blue-green complexions. Much of the Boichukist art consisted of murals depicting a nation of workers; apple pickers, farmers, and sawyers at work. They were concerned with building a narrative rooted in Ukrainian folklore, which was ill-received by the Red Army. Boichuk and his circle were executed, and much of their art was destroyed in the Stalinist purges.
In the Eye of the Storm is a fascinating insight into a nation grappling with its identity and responding to the modern world as it navigates waves of cultural forces with a deep sense of indigenous selfhood. The final room pays tribute to ‘The Last Generation’ of Ukrainian modernists; he formation of a modern Ukrainian visual identity was curtailed in the 1930s. Hundreds of writers, theatre directors, and artists were labelled ‘bourgeois nationalists’ and executed, imprisoned, or sent to labour camps. The works in The Eye of the Storm survived the purges and have only recently been rediscovered, highlighting the complicated and little-known story of Modernism in Ukraine.
In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 13th October.
