The tiny shred of good that has come out of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been the raising of awareness it has prompted of this fascinating and crucial corner of Europe. Before Putin began his mad war, many among us would have had difficulty pointing to Ukraine on the map, let alone understanding its complex past. The notion prevailed that it was somewhere in the distance, somewhere insignificant, somewhere on the fringes. It isn’t.
We now realise that the drawing of the Iron Curtain across Europe forced us to lose sight of the vast slab of our continent that lay to the right of Berlin. These huge territories, once imagined as central, were exiled in our imaginations to the distant east and, basically, forgotten. Europe was France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the UK. Not Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Estonia and Ukraine. Putin’s war, in its only positive, has promoted a shift to the east in this instinctive map.
It’s a point that is never stated but keeps being made by the involving selection of Ukrainian modernist art that has arrived at the Royal Academy. Until recently, this show would not have happened. Not just because Ukraine was a foggy blob in our lopsided imagining of Europe, but also because the story of modernism that has been repeated in our art books has never contained a single paragraph, sentence or whisper about the contribution of Ukraine.
In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine 1900-1930s rights this wrong by unveiling a complex artistic tale that keeps bumping tragically into the harsh world of politics. Having long existed as a people, Ukraine had to struggle mightily to become a nation. This struggle for identity is paralleled in the story of its art.
The first notable painter we encounter, Alexandra Exter (1882-1949) was born in Poland (Bialystok) to a Belarusian father and a Greek mother. She studied in Kyiv, moved to Paris, returned to Kyiv, moved to Moscow and got lost somewhere under the giant tarpaulin we call Russian avant-garde art.
But Kyiv was where she returned to and Kyiv was where she had her impact. This show duly insists on the Ukrainian version of her name instead of the Russian Aleksandra Ekster or the flamboyantly French Alexandra d’Exter.
I dwell on this changing nomenclature because it is so telling. Anyone coming to this event expecting a clearly defined Ukrainian identity will be disappointed. From the off, Ukrainian modernism was profoundly international, dramatically up-to-date and stylistically variable.
Exter’s large cubist landscape of a bridge at Sevres, painted in 1912, is a beautiful re-imagining of nature’s geometry and an impressively au courant piece of artistic mimicry. Her Parisian buddies, Picasso and Braque, had only just invented this new style, yet Exter was already fluent in it.
This sense of Ukraine in general and Kyiv in particular being up-to-date and fully international in its early modernism sets the tone for the opening room. Oleksandr Bohomazov gives us a fiercely futurist locomotive speeding blurrily through a pulsing landscape. Vadym Meller takes a can-opener to a blue and yellow still life and opens it out into flat rectangles of cubism.
So strikingly progressive is the awareness displayed here of the latest developments in European art that I found myself drawn to those stretches of the show that appeared to be striving for something more tangibly Ukrainian. Volodymyr Burliuk’s sad and thoughtful Ukrainian Peasant Woman, from 1910-11, is a touching piece of national embodiment that seems to have sourced its patterns and emotions in local folk art rather than the cafés of Paris.
Drawn mainly from the holdings of the National Museum in Kyiv, smuggled out of Ukraine in secret trucks, the show is both a story of Ukrainian modernism and an effort at keeping that story safe from Russian missiles. Helpful clusters of material add useful chapter headings to the unfolding tale.
A section devoted to theatre design of the 1920s is especially lively as Ukraine’s modernists set about turning the action on stage into crazy patterns of kaleidoscopic geometry. Where the theatre of today concentrates mostly on meanings and performances, Kyiv’s theatre in the 1920s put most of its effort into dynamic and extraordinary visuals.
Another section devoted to a specifically Jewish grouping called Kultur Lige has the show’s colour scheme turn abruptly dark as Issakhar Ber Ryback looks down on the fractured jumble of a Jewish shtetl and El Lissitzky, not yet transformed fully into his Russian self, gives us a twilit cluster of brooding triangles with a legible Jewish text at the centre.
As the show progresses, the effort to produce a specifically Ukrainian variant of modernism increases with recurring scenes of folk life. Unfortunately, the simplifications inspired by folk art have dated less well than those prompted by international modernism. As a journey, the one traced here becomes a decline.
Shifting politics have, of course, played a fierce part in this fall-off. The captions make sure we notice it. As the excitement of Ukraine’s independence gave way to the increasing control of the Soviet Union, the art grew less happy, less adventurous. In the final room, Stalin-imposed social realism has become the house style, and the final drops of Ukraine’s artistic independence dribble away poignantly.
As much an education as an art show, this is an important event. Pausing on its way to Britain at various European museums, this is the final stop. In its previous incarnations it was considerably larger. I would have liked to have seen that.
In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900–1930s is at the Royal Academy, London W1, to Oct 13