Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in New York for the United Nations Common Meeting, on Monday (23 September) strengthened the significance of defending Ukrainian tradition by formally opening Alexandra Exter: The Stage is a World on the metropolis’s Ukrainian Museum, which not too long ago employed Kyiv-based artwork historian Oksana Semenik as researcher to fight Russian cultural disinformation and decolonise Ukrainian artwork.
Zelensky met with Ukrainian People on the museum, based in 1976 by the Ukrainian Girls’s League of America within the East Village’s Little Ukraine. Museum director Peter Doroshenko led a tour for him and First Girl Olena Zelenska.
Semenik’s Ukrainian Artwork Historical past feed on X (previously Twitter), launched after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, has change into a go-to useful resource about Ukrainian artists whose work has been appropriated or destroyed by Russia, or who have been killed by Soviet assaults on Ukrainian tradition, together with dictator Joseph Stalin’s Holodomor mass hunger and Nice Terror.
The Zelenskys tour the Ukrainian Museum’s Alexandra Exter exhibition Courtesy the Ukrainian Museum, New York
In social media posts about their go to, the Zelenskys wrote that “it is very important return to Ukraine the artists appropriated by Russia” since “tradition is our psychological house”. They cited the cultural marketing campaign following the full-scale invasion when “for the primary time, the world’s main museums lastly rightly signed the works of [Ivan] Aivazovsky, [Arkhip] Kuindzhi, and Malevich with their true, Ukrainian origin.”
“At present we proceed the decolonisation of Ukrainian artwork in New York,” the Zelenskys wrote. “The Ukrainian Museum presents our modernist and avant-garde artists to the US and guests from everywhere in the world exactly as Ukrainian, not Russian or Soviet, because the empire has positioned them for years.”
Alexandra Exter, Masked Figures by the Banks of a Venetian Canal, round 1927-29, Personal Assortment Courtesy the Ukrainian Museum, New York
Exter’s first complete North American solo present traces the avant-garde pioneer’s early life in Kyiv, influenced by Ukrainian people artwork. It focuses on the interval from 1913 to 1934, her early avant-garde compositions and theatre artwork, and Martian costume designs for Aelita, Queen of Mars, a seminal Soviet silent movie. She had an “virtually renaissance lady method to artwork making”, says Doroshenko.
The exhibition of greater than 60 work and works on paper got here collectively by way of loans from San Antonio’s McNay Artwork Museum, the College of Texas, Austin and worldwide non-public collections and collaborations with Ukrainian museums. Two collectors with household ties to Russia pulled out over security issues.
Alexandra Exter, Costume designs for an unidentified manufacturing, round 1920. Assortment of Harry Ransom Middle, College of Texas at Austin, W.H. Crain Costume and Scenic Design Assortment Courtesy Harry Ransom Middle, College of Texas at Austin
Exter was born in 1882 in Białystok (now Poland), and spent years in Ukraine. An early Soviet-era stint on the Vkhutemas college in Moscow pegged her in Russian artwork historiography as a Russian artist. In 1924, Exter and her husband emigrated to France, the place she knew Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Gertrude Stein.
“She was initially essential by way of connecting and being a bridge between Ukrainian people artwork of the nineteenth century and the Ukrainian avant-garde and all of the artists,” says Doroshenko. “That story hasn’t actually been advised. It’s an vital one, as a result of proper now a whole lot of the avant-garde artists, it’s virtually as in the event that they have been born out of Venus’s head. There’s no grounding there. However there’s undoubtedly a grounding that comes from Ukrainian people artwork. I believe that’s an vital facet to Exter’s work. Even on her loss of life in Paris in 1949, quite a few buddies got here to her flat. She embellished it as if it was a small village room in Ukraine with vyshyvanki and pillows and varied ceramic works.”
Alexandra Exter, Composition, round 1926-28, Personal Assortment Courtesy the Ukrainian Museum, New York
The museum’s trilingual (Ukrainian, English and French) exhibition catalogue, revealed in Ukraine , seeks to set the file straight. Doroshenko advised The Artwork Newspaper in July: “Every little thing for the final 150 years that’s Ukrainian has been assimilated into Russian tradition.” To keep away from confusion, for now the museum makes use of the widely accepted spelling of Exter’s identify, which is Oleksandra in correct Ukrainian transliteration.
Exter’s life in Ukraine and inspiration from Ukrainian conventional artwork is “normally a blind spot for curators and artwork historians” influenced by Russian narratives, Semenik wrote by electronic mail from Kyiv final month. “I consider this occurs as a result of most of them use the data from the Russian artwork monographs, that have been translated into English and extensively unfold by means of Western academia.”
Alexandra Exter, Summary Composition, 1916, Personal Assortment Courtesy the Ukrainian Museum, New York
Semenik provides: “I’ve seen many books like this within the US college and museum libraries on my own. With no point out that Kyiv or Odesa are Ukrainian cities, or that the ‘people artwork that she was impressed by’ is Ukrainian people artwork.” Works by Malevich, Exter and different Suprematist artists have been rendered as embroidery by Ukrainian village artists and exhibited “even earlier than the legendary 0,10 exhibition the place for the primary time Black Sq. was proven,” she says.
Doroshenko and Semenik labored collectively in Kyiv in August on archival analysis for upcoming exhibitions about Ukraine people artwork’s affect on modernism and about Vladimir Tatlin, who had Ukrainian roots however is extensively considered a Russian avant-garde pioneer.
Nonetheless from Aelita, Queen of Mars (1924) Courtesy the Ukrainian Museum, New York
Tatlin’s three years as a instructor on the Kyiv Artwork Institute, ignored in earlier research of his life, have been the artist’s “most fruitful and thrilling time”, Doroshenko stated not too long ago from Kyiv. He was amazed each by town’s vibrant wartime cultural and mental life and the extent of the Soviet-era decimation, each bodily and ideological, of its archives.
“It’s taken me and Oksana Semenik actually two or three months simply to provide you with a partial listing of Tatlin college students on the artwork institute,” he stated. “The institute has no recordsdata. I’m coming throughout this analysis from newspaper articles written in regards to the institute. That’s form of loopy {that a} main artwork college doesn’t have lists of their previous college students.” Ukraine, he added, is the “Wild West of artwork historic analysis”.
- Alexandra Exter: The Stage is a World, 27 September-19 January 2025, Ukrainian Museum, New York
