Critique d’art

Actualité internationale de la littérature critique sur l’art

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60 | Printemps/été
CRITIQUE D'ART 60

In the Eye of the Storm

Katia Denysova, Klara Kemp-Welch and Maria Mileeva

Electronic version
URL: https://journals.openedition.org/critiquedart/104414
DOI: 10.4000/critiquedart.104414
ISBN: 2265-9404
ISSN: 2265-9404

Translation(s):
In the Eye of the Storm - URL : https://journals.openedition.org/critiquedart/104401 [fr]

Publisher
Groupement d'intérêt scientifique (GIS) Archives de la critique d’art

Printed version
Date of publication: 1 June 2023
Number of pages: 115-127
ISBN: 978-2-9506293-2-6
ISSN: 1246-8258

Electronic reference
Katia Denysova, Klara Kemp-Welch and Maria Mileeva, “In the Eye of the Storm”, Critique d’art [Online],
60 | Printemps/été, Online since 01 June 2024, connection on 07 June 2023. URL: http://
journals.openedition.org/critiquedart/104414 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/critiquedart.104414

This text was automatically generated on 7 June 2023.

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 In the Eye of the Storm 1

In the Eye of the Storm

Katia Denysova, Klara Kemp-Welch and Maria Mileeva

1 What follows is an edited version of a roundtable held at the Courtauld Institute of Art,
London in February 2023 in connection with the publication of the book In the Eye of the
Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s (Thames & Hudson, 2022). The edited volume
accompanies a travelling exhibition, first presented at the Thyssen-Bornemisza
National Museum, Madrid in November 2022.1 In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in
Ukraine, 1900-1930s was organised in close partnership with the National Art Museum of
Ukraine (NAMU) and co-curated by Konstantin Akinsha, Katia Denysova, and Olena
Kashuba-Volvach.
2 Maria Mileeva: Russia’s unprovoked, full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022
was a huge impetus for the realisation of this important project in record time (just
over 7 months). Although an exhibition of modernist art in Ukraine at a major
European museum had been in planning for some time, there hasn’t been a show on
this scale or an equally significant scholarly publication until now. We are more
familiar with contemporary Ukrainian history and art produced during and after the
2004 Orange Revolution, the 2013-14 Revolution of Dignity and Russia’s ongoing war of
aggression. Looking back to the period of 1900-1930s, which is the focus of your book, is
instructive in helping us understand the historical causes and genealogies of cultural
imperialism, appropriation and violence that we are witnessing today.
3 Katia Denysova: Yes, the historical context is crucial. In the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, the territory of present-day Ukraine was split between two empires –
Russian and Austro-Hungarian. Western Ukraine, with Lviv as its capital, formed part
of the latter, while central and eastern regions were under the former. While the
officials in St Petersburg prohibited the Ukrainian language and suppressed local
culture, their counterparts in Vienna pursued a more lenient policy towards
Ukrainians, encouraging the development of a Ukrainian national project to counteract
the more active Polish nationalism. After the 1917 February revolution in the Russian
empire, Ukrainians on both sides of the border seized the opportunity to create their
own state. Initially, they envisioned Ukraine as remaining in a federative union with
Russia, but after the Bolshevik take-over in Petrograd and their ensuing military

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 In the Eye of the Storm 2

campaign against Ukraine in December 1917, Ukrainian leaders had no choice but to
declare the full independence of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, with Kyiv as its
capital. This marked the start of the Ukrainian War of Independence that unfolded
alongside the Russian Civil War, when the territory of Ukraine became a battlefield
between competing forces – several Ukrainian governments, the imperial White Army,
the Bolshevik Red Army and regiments of the newly re-emerged Poland. The Ukrainian
People’s Republic officially lost its short-lived independence in March 1921, with the
establishment of a new Polish-Soviet border that effectively divided the majority of
Ukraine’s territory between these two countries. With the creation of the Ukrainian
Soviet Socialist Republic in 1922, Kharkiv became the capital of Soviet Ukraine. In the
1920s, Bolsheviks introduced the so-called policy of korenizatsiia [indigenisation] which
sought to promote the local culture and language of each Soviet republic. Known in
Ukraine as Ukrainisatsiia [Ukrainisation], this policy allowed the Ukrainian intellectuals
to develop their language and culture at last, after centuries of subjugation by imperial
rule. Kharkiv became the epicentre of these processes, with artists and writers
enthusiastically working to create a new identity that was both Soviet and Ukrainian.
4 Klara Kemp-Welch: Much of the important research gathered in the book is concerned
with expressing and addressing the question of national consciousness. Artists’ groups
were involved in different ways in Ukrainisatsiia. In parallel with a desire to promote
and develop Ukrainian culture domestically, artists were also interested in pursuing
international dialogues: these ambitions even went hand in hand. The journal Nova
Heneratsiia, for instance, included article summaries of everything in Esperanto. The
project of the production of national consciousness was by no means to the exclusion of
ambitions for modernist universalism.
5 Katia Denysova: Artists in Ukraine sought international cooperation. They followed
developments in western Europe. Their connections with the geographical west
provided possibilities to move away from Russia’s domination. Cooperation with
western practitioners was seen as a way to overcome the provincial status of Ukrainian
culture, inflicted by centuries of imperial rule. It is also important to note how
multicultural Ukraine was at the time. There were many competing, but
complementary, ideas of what the new Ukrainian and Ukrainian-Soviet identity should
look like and these were not exclusively nationalistic.
6 The journal Nova Heneratsiia was founded by Mykhailo Semenko, an Ukrainian Futurist
poet and an active participant in Ukraine’s cultural processes. It only ran for two years
but it produced a robust body of work, publishing translations of articles from art
magazines in France, Germany, the Netherlands and other countries, as well as
featuring a diverse array of Ukrainian practitioners. Malevych published a series of
articles in Nova Heneratsiia that were translated into Ukrainian.
7 Klara Kemp-Welch: In terms of historiography and methodology, one key problem is
that so little, if anything, was published in the Soviet Union itself on the art of the
1910s-20s. Western scholars were instrumental in constructing the first narrative of the
Soviet avant-garde, and they overwhelmingly referred to it as ‘Russian’. Key
contributions included The Great Experiment: Russian Art, 1863-1922 by Camilla Gray, 1962;
Andrei Nakov’s exhibition Russian Constructivism: The Laboratory Period, 1975; and
Christina Lodder’s Russian Constructivism, 1983, each in their own way important
scholarly works. From today’s perspective, though, we clearly need to challenge the
terminological shortcut that turned Soviet avant-garde and Soviet art into ‘Russian

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 In the Eye of the Storm 3

avant-garde’ and ‘Russian art’. Do you think that when art historians in the USSR began
working on the art of this period, they were more nuanced than their Western
colleagues?
8 Katia Denysova: It is true that the term ‘Russian avant-garde’ is a western construct
and one of our book’s objectives was to challenge this existing Russo-centric
interpretation of art history in the region. ‘Russian avant-garde’ as a concept is
problematic for two reasons. Firstly, it views art produced in the Russian empire and
the Soviet Union, both multinational empires, through a mono-ethnic, Russian, lens.
The habitual use of this misnomer, ingrained in contemporary scholarship both in
Russia and beyond, sits uncomfortably with efforts to decolonise the field of Russian
studies. Secondly, the umbrella definition ‘Russian avant-garde’ is historically
inaccurate since none of the artists branded as such referred to themselves as ‘avant-
garde’, opting instead either to identify as ‘leftist’ or choosing a designation from
among the various ‘isms’. Many of the artists presented in In the Eye of the Storm have
been historically viewed as members of such a fictionally monolithic ‘Russian avant-
garde’. While recognising the plurality of identities that existed in Ukraine in the early
20th century, our project shifts the focus to show that these artists belong to the
narrative of Ukrainian art and culture. The aim is not to appropriate names, but rather
to highlight the centrality of the local Ukrainian context in these artists’ work and life.
We were conscious not to use the term ‘Ukrainian avant-garde’, which has become
popular in Ukrainian scholarship since independence. In an attempt to counteract the
all-inclusive Russian definition, scholars working with Ukrainian art of the period
adopted, rather uncritically, the existing terminology.
9 Maria Mileeva: Soviet art historians writing about modern art in Soviet national
republics were confronted with a different problem. First of all, avant-garde art as a
topic of study was unavailable to Soviet scholars largely until the late 1970s. Unlike
Western scholars, they were not given access to the archives and secret repositories
that kept avant-garde art locked away. Only a few exhibitions of modern art were
staged, like the one of Oleksandr Tyshler at the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Art in
1966. This was an exception rather than the norm. Tyshler, who studied first at the
Kyiv School of Art and at Alexandra Exter’s studio in 1917-18, was categorised as a
Soviet artist. His Ukrainian origin was not concealed, and his place of birth was stated,
but he was still designated as Soviet. Whilst on the outside, USSR stood for anti-
colonialism and anti-imperialism, in reality its policies placed Russian and the Russian
language above all other nationalities. National art forms were either slowly eroded or
violently erased. This is something that scholars and curators today have the
responsibility to undo. A decolonial approach to Ukrainian art means revising
established narratives, rewriting labels and placing Ukrainian artists into our field of
vision.
10 Klara Kemp-Welch: Yes. We need to keep thinking seriously about how political
control and economic and physical violence continue and are translated into linguistic
and cultural categories. The rewriting of art histories that is taking place today
continues along the lines of the work that took place in the former Soviet satellite
countries after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. People began writing new local and
national art histories with a sense of freedom that they didn’t have before, and this was
an important and an essential first step. Until particular bodies of works have been
grouped and identified, it is difficult to put them into play with others. Several decades

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 In the Eye of the Storm 4

on, though, building on this groundwork, scholars have also opened back out, to
reinvest in exploring international relations and historical exchanges. In the Eye of the
Storm is structured by cities – Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa, echoing the late Piotr
Piotrowski’s call for ‘trans- cosmopolitanism’ as a pathway to a more ‘horizontal’ art
history, beyond national borders. Could you say more about the book’s structure and
what happens when you look at the art produced in Ukraine through the lens of these
cities, and what such an approach excludes?
11 Katia Denysova: What we are trying to achieve with our project is to shift centre-
periphery relations. We wanted to first look at Ukraine as a centre rather than it being
a periphery to Russia and secondly, we also wanted to look at some of the other places
in Ukraine that can be thought of as more peripheral. We didn’t want just to focus on
Kyiv as the capital and centre of artistic development because that would not be
historically true. Kharkiv was extremely important at one point and so was Odesa, so
there is a double shifting of the centre/periphery network. Overall, the project views
Ukraine as a space of encounter between peoples, concepts and empires, drawing
attention to the imperial matrix of cultural processes that conditioned the
development of art in Ukraine during this period. By focusing on the art production in
Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa, In the Eye of the Storm mirrors the historical split of the
country between the Russian empire/Soviet Union and the Austro-Hungarian empire/
Poland. More work needs to be done to bridge this divide and to present a more holistic
view of the modernist practices on the territory of present-day Ukraine and to further
explore networks of exchange and interconnectivity between practitioners working
across the Ukrainian lands.
12 Klara Kemp-Welch: I have found Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s 1975 work Kafka:
Towards a Minor Literature inspiring for thinking about the complexity of central
European identity and how cultural affiliations can be unbounded, contingent and
shifting. Kafka was a German-speaking Jew from Prague, navigating multiple cultural
and linguistic affiliations. This also applies to so many of the people in your book.
Kazymyr Malevych is an obvious example, born in Kyiv to Polish parents but so often
still categorised as a Russian artist. How do you think the work of reframing needs to be
pursued, going forwards?
13 Katia Denysova: Malevych is a particularly complicated case. As you say, he was born
in Kyiv into a Polish family. He grew up in Ukrainian villages and spoke a bit of
Ukrainian, but his mother tongue was Polish. He started studying art in Kyiv, but he
developed as an artist in Russia – first in Kursk and later in Moscow. His artistic career
as a professional artist and educator took him to various places such as Vitebsk (today’s
Belarus) and he was also in Kyiv for several years teaching at the Kyiv Art Institute.
Malevych is more complex than any notions of identity that we operate with today.
When we consider artists from this period and this region, we have to recognise the
imperial structures that existed back then. For example, we cannot ignore the fact that
there was no higher art education in Kyiv and so aspiring artists had to go elsewhere to
study. First, Moscow and St Petersburg were seen as places to go to, but gradually
centres in western Europe became more attractive. Young artists would travel to
Kraków, Vienna, Munich and Paris. The fluidity of movement that they had and also the
fluidity of different identities that they negotiated is something that needs to be
recognised. At the same time, we cannot talk about Malevych as solely a Russian artist,

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because such Russo-centric perspective narrows our view, disregarding all other
important influences that he absorbed during his life and career.
14 Maria Mileeva: I wanted to ask about the rehabilitation of Ukrainian artists and to
highlight Mykhailo Boichuk, who was executed alongside many of his students on the
accusation of ‘bourgeois nationalism’. The execution of Ukrainian artists and writers in
the purges by the Soviet state was accompanied by the destruction of cultural heritage
and the public murals of the Boichukists were painted over or destroyed. I am
interested to know when it became possible to talk about the purges and Boichuk in
Ukraine and to incorporate him into the historiography of Ukrainian art.
15 Katia Denysova: It was a patchy and problematic process. Some of the artists accused
of ‘bourgeois nationalism’ and ‘formalism’ were rehabilitated after Stalin’s death. A
handful of their paintings was even taken out of the so-called spetsfond [special secret
holdings], to which the regime relegated all artworks deemed inappropriate in the
1930s. Boichuk and his school, however, remained taboo for a long time. The first
official mention appeared in the fifth volume of The History of Ukrainian Art, published in
1967. But it only became possible to properly research and exhibit this school after the
independence of Ukraine. The first exhibition dedicated to Boichukism was staged in
Lviv in 1996 and the most comprehensive show was presented at the Mystetskyi
Arsenal in Kyiv a couple of years ago. But there are many more names that still need to
be reinstated in Ukrainian art history.
16 Maria Mileeva: The call to reinstate more names in Ukrainian art history leaves us
with a practical directive. One way to conceive of this could be within the framework of
what Ariella Azoulay has referred to as the practice of ‘potential history’.

NOTES
1. After Madrid, confirmed exhibition venues include: Museum Ludwig, Cologne (3 June – 24
September 2023) and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels (20 October 2023 – 28
January 2024).

Critique d’art, 60 | Printemps/été