Derusting Russian Art

Andy Warhol was definitely not Ukrainian. The artist was born in a household of Russian (lękowski) origin and raised in an cultural ghetto in Pittsburgh. By the time he reached his age, his ties with his homeland had already been broken. Warhol anglicized his name by abandoning his last “a” and had the ambition to break into the elite WASP circles in fresh York City.

His family, however, came from an area in Carpathians with unstable borders, and at any point the region was within the borders of Ukraine. So Google search for "Andy Warhol Ukraine" returns over a million results, any of them from academic journals.

To be honest with Ukrainians, they are not the only Slavs who claim to be associated with a large American artist, but, especially in the last year, Ukrainians were peculiarly aggressive in making amendments to online databases and asking Western museums to change the name of art – Polish, Jewish, and especially Russian – to “Ukrainian”. Many of these efforts can be attributed to the activities of 1 woman, Oksany Semenik. She is an influencer on Twitter who personally contacts curators, even if she directs her 24,000 followers to mark museums on social media, asking for amendments.

In a podcaster interview Jonathan Fink The activist explained that “Russian propaganda” is to mark certain works in American collections as Russian and even to service Russia as the birthplace of artists. Its aim is to “release and decolonize our [Ukrainian] culture from the Russian context”, comparing even to Ukrainian soldiers in trenches: They do an crucial occupation liberating the land, but her fight takes place in American and Western museums. Semenik lamented:

"Why do they have this large Russian culture? due to the fact that they spend quite a few money on cultural propaganda... they [Russians] promoted their alleged “culture”. But many of these artists were evidently stolen from Ukraine or Belarus." She added: “Russia has stolen all these artists, and global museums are inactive storing all this stolen art for Russia. By holding them hostage."

The language sounds perceptive, so I wanted to give Semenik the chance to express his thoughts again – possibly she would be able to explain herself better in her native language. She didn't answer my direct messages. I wanted to hear about her methodology. In an interview with the podcast she said she was studying the artists' genealogy to confirm their Ukrainian heritage. However, it seems that her most celebrated subjects usually do not have Ukrainian blood.

Following post-Soviet cultural trends in east Europe, I guess Semenik methodology: looking at the map. If he sees the artist set ft in the country within his 1991 boundaries, he describes him as a Ukrainian. But most of these artists lived before the uprising of independent Ukraine, graduated from Russian academy, were not part of any native Ukrainian artistic movements and communicated in Russian. The land, which is now Ukraine, was erstwhile diverse, and its largest cities, in which advanced culture flourished, were mostly Russian-speaking.

So the artists in question were not in any crucial sense Ukrainians. For example, 1 of Semenik's last tweets shows a image of a boy by Cerebriac zinaida with the signature: Here is “The Harvest” [sic] [sic] [Ukrainian flag] Zinaid Serebriakova. She did so in 1915 in the Kharkiv Oblast during planet War I. But Serebriakova (1884-1967) was a St. Petersburg educated daughter of the Benois family, Russian artists with French roots. Her works added a direct but delicate accent to the exhibitions of the Russian Art Nouveau Mir group. The Sieriebriakovos had a agrarian property in the village of Neskuchnoje, where the artist was born and where she later spent the happiest years of her life. At that time Neskucznoje was part of the Russian Kursk province, but is now in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine.

This should make the Serebrian colonist sent to russify Ukraine. 1 of Semenik's biggest bluffs is forced rusification. After the Serebriak Revolution, she moved to Paris, the eventual destination of many white migrants. She did most of her work in France. A free female in a free country, as far as I know, never called herself Ukrainian.

Whether Sepebriakova will be Ukrainianised is an open issue, but museums are already making dubious amendments. Metropolitan Museum from Art late changed signatures under the names of Kuinji, Repin and Ajwazowski, 3 artists from the 19th to early 20th century, all known in Russia. All 3 have ties to the territory of post-Soviet Ukraine and in the case of Repin blood ties. All 3 had commercial success and exhibited in Europe, where they became known as Russians; it was not a KGB plot. Depriving them of the Russian context, as activists intend, is stripping their work from the most crucial context.

Archip Kuinji (1841-1910) He was a master of mysterious luminous landscapes, the subject of which covered both Russian and Ukrainian villages. erstwhile in 1904, the magazine “Mir Isculty” called it 1 of Russia’s prominent Jews, he immediately replied: “I feel obliged to tell the esteemed Mr. Mienszykow [author of the article] that I am Russian. My ancestors were Greeks who came from the confederate coast of Crimea during the reign of Empress Elizabeth and established the city of Mariupol, as well as 24 villages.”

Ivan Ajwazowski (1817-1900) was a prolific champion of the romanticist seascapes, who was appointed authoritative artist of the Russian Navy and became friends with the cultural, political and military elites of imperial Russia. cultural Armenian, was born and spent most of his life in the Crimean city of Theodosia.

Since 1954, half a century after the artist's death, The russian Union transferred the administration to Ukraine. Ukraine can now apply for any artist who lived on the peninsula, but Western Ukrainian cities of Lviv and Plains changed the names of their streets of Ajwazowski during the derusification campaign. From their point of view, the claims to the Ukrainianity of Ajwazowski are alternatively weak: Semenik points out that during the Crimean war the artist evacuated to (Russian-speaking) Kharkov, where he spent time with Ilja Repin, whom Semenik considers Ukrainian.

Ilja Repin (1844-1930) He was a large champion of Russian realism. He was born in the Cossack household in Czugujewo in the Cherk province, now Ukraine, where his father served in the Ulan regiment. Repin painted Russian historical and socio-political themes as well as portraits. He was a key associate of the highly influential Russian Pieriedwiżnik movement, i.e. the Wanderers, which organized travelling exhibitions allowing audiences in the province, including in many cities of modern Ukraine, to watch the play that was previously only available in St. Petersburg and Moscow.

If Russia "stealed" Repin Ukraine, the robbery was carried out in broad daylight – the Ukrainian roots of Repin were never a secret. He painted Ukrainian themes, including the "Reply of the Zaporosian Cossacks" (1871-72), a historical painting depicting the Cossacks writing a letter to the Turkish Sultan. This and many another Ukrainian works were celebrated during his life and later.

Repin knew key figures in the circles of Russian creative intelligence and wrote memories in Russian. Although, like Serebriakova, he was close erstwhile the Ukrainian People's Republic declared independency in 1918, the artist was a supporter of the Liberal Interim Government in Petrograd. He died in his property in the Finnish village of Kuokkala, 40 kilometres from Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg). If anything, his life shows how Russian and Ukrainian cultures were inseparable.

Efforts to relabel do not focus solely on Russians. Semenik resented many little celebrated Polish artists, specified as John D. Graham (Jan Dąbrowski) and Jacques Hnizdowsky (Jakub Nestowski). There are besides American Jews, Louise Nevelson, Louis Lozowick, Boris Margo, Jules Olitski, Todros Geller and Saul Rabino. Given that for centuries Cossacks and Ukrainian nationalists waged genocide wars against Jews and Poles, it seems insane.

Jews who fled the Russian Empire from the Settlement region in the early 20th century were not curious in the interior quarrels of east Slavs. On the another hand, the American artistic community was fascinated by the Russian avant-garde. If museums identify the birthplace of an American judaic artist of origin as “Russia”, it is most likely due to the fact that the artist himself believed so.

It gets even weirder erstwhile Ukrainians press on museums to change the title of Western works of art. The National Gallery in London changed Degas's "Russian Dancers" to "Ukrainian Dancers", and the Metropolitan Museum from Art changed its Russian dancers into dancers in Ukrainian outfits. What did Degas do, who never set ft in east Europe to deserve to be drawn into Russian-Ukrainian territorial disputes? Art museums be to celebrate artists and their vision, not to service the needs of nationalist movements. I am not convinced that Degas knew the word "Ukraine", and in any case the paintings were called "Russian Dancers" in his lifetime. If he believed, rightly or wrongly, that he drew Russian dancers, that is the title of the painting. Changing art labels based on the demands of activists makes curators look like amateurs not acquainted with artists' biography or the content of their works – or even basic historical facts. Ukrainians can watch Western museums, but no museum should subordinate its collections and artists to momentary politics.

Katya Sedgwick

The author is simply a author surviving in the San Francisco Bay area

Behind: The American Consevative