A Minor Incident During Wartime
Mariia Pryimachenko's art reportedly destroyed in fighting
The art sites finally have some war news to report! According to the Ukranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a museum in Ivankiv (about 50 km north of Kyiv) was damaged during fighting, resulting in the destruction of 25 paintings by Mariia Pryimachenko. The New York Times wrote that “The destruction of the artworks has not been independently confirmed by The New York Times.” It may be a case of the well-known fog of war.
This painting is called May That Nuclear War Be Cursed!, 1976. My unimpeachable sources (i.e., Twitter) says this painting is in the National Museum of Ukrainian Folk Applied Art in Kyiv, so it isn’t one of the 25 paintings that was destroyed.
This is Two-Headed Chicken from 1977. Again, I don’t know if it was destroyed.
Who was Mariia Pryimachenko? She was a Ukranian folk artist who was born in the Russian Empire in 1908 and died in the Russian Republic in 1997. So the entire history of the USSR happened during her lifetime, including the holodomor, the period of famine caused or at least exacerbated by Stalin in which at least 2.4 million Ukranians starved to death.
Pryimachenko was highly honored by the Soviet Union. I guess surrealist art produced by naive folk artists wasn’t bourgeois cosmopolitanism, so it was ideologically acceptable. I like the bright colors of the pieces I’ve seen reproduced, but I have no idea if these jpegs are an accurate representation of her work.
Artwork is always a casualty of war. One painting that I would have loved to see in person but can’t is The Stone Breakers by Gustave Courbet.
It seems trivial and heartless to worry about art when actual people are being killed. Art concerns me, so these kind of stories rise to the top of my awareness at such times.
On a related subject, I have a book by Ukrainian poet Lev Ozerov (1914-1996) called Portraits Without Frames, in which he write poems about Soviet artists whom he respected. Ozerov was a Ukrainian, and he decided to write about other Soviet artists—some of whom he met, others not—pretty much for himself. The entire book was published after his death in 1996.
Three of the poems are explicitly about Ukranians, including Oleksander Petrovich Dovzhenko. Dovzhenko was a pioneer film-maker, perhaps most famous for his silent epic, Earth. In the poem, Ozerov relates a visit he made (presumably towards the end of Dovzhenko’s life: he died in 1956). He talks about a soviet writer who denounced Earth.
[. . . ]
His whole life
is wound round with film stock,
newspaper condemnations,
and wretched versicles
by Demyan Bedny, who wanted
to raze his Earth to the ground
[. . .]
Dovzhenko’s cheeks are red
as poppies. He flares
with restrained fury. No sign
of tiredness or age.
He sits down, adopts the pose
and tone of a narrator:
“And then, many years later,
Demyan and I were neighbors
in a well-known hospital,
and he, who’d called my film a kulak fable,
comes to me and says
(I did nothing to prompt him):
I just don’t know
why I abused your splendid Earth . . .
I’ve never seen
a better picture in my life . . .”
A pause, artfully prolonged.
“What do you think
I said to him then?”
Doxzhenko continues.
Smolych and I say nothing.
Dovzhenko rises, paces about again—
and says, “Nothing. I said nothing.”
—1993, translated by Boris Dralyuk
As this goes on, we will remember the great Soviet artists who were from Ukraine. We think, for example, of Isaac Babel as a great Russian writer, but he was of course from Odessa and many of his most famous stories are set in the Odessa underworld. I think that as this awful war continues, Ukrainian pride will demand a reclamation of its great writers, artists, and musicians.
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Thanks for this post Robert, things to think about that I never knew existed.