“Slava Ukrayini!”, Glory to Ukraine. The expression that President Volodimir Zelenski has made famous, with which he ends his speeches on television and networks, resounded today at the Thyssen Museum in Madrid. Thanks to his own voice. Zelensky has sent a video thank you message to the press conference to present In the Eye of the Hurricane. Avant-garde in Ukraine, 1900-1930, the exhibition of Ukrainian art that the Madrid museum inaugurates today and with which it intends to protect the pieces and make Europe known -after Madrid the tour will continue at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne- the powerful creativity of the first vanguards of that country.
Discovering that names like Alexandra Exter or Sonia Delaunay are not Russian, but Ukrainian, and even Malevich was born in kyiv. A sample of 69 works that will be seen until April 30 and most of which come from the National Museum of Art and the National Museum of Theater, Music and Cinema of Ukraine and that have left under the bombs that punish the capital in a difficult epic.
The patron Francesca Thyssen, promoter of the Museums for Ukraine initiative and of this initiative that has had the support of the Office of President Zelenski, has recounted the epic that the works have experienced from the museums of kyiv and how they eventually reached mourn. “Last week we were all in tears because of the transport problems but with the challenges overcome we can now look back on Ukraine as a country of creativity in one of its darkest times. Paying tribute to Ukraine’s past, present and future,” she points out.
And remember what they have lived through. “Every Monday kyiv is bombed in the morning, it is the alarm clock they have, the week has just begun”, the baroness underlined sarcastically. And she explained that for this reason “we had planned the convoy for Tuesday, but on Monday there was not a bomb, we thought that there would be more calm but they had decided to change the bombardment.”
On the scheduled day, he received a mobile message from Konstantin Akinsha, one of the three curators in the exhibition, informing him that the paintings had already been packed the night before and that they had begun to bombard the capital but had left two hours ago. the trucks and they were already a few kilometers outside of kyiv, safe. “We talked to the drivers of the two trucks every 10 minutes to make sure everything was going well, and when they arrived in Lviv they had to move away from critical infrastructure because they were being bombed. But when they got close to the border with Poland they stopped”.
Then, says Francesca Thyssen, “I see in the Google alerts that a missile has just fallen on a Polish city, there are two dead. We were 50 kilometers from the border. It seems the beginning of the escalation of the military aggression, in which NATO is going to participate because it has no other choice and the tension is skyrocketing. We are aware that there is potential for escalation. The border is blocked and there is an impossible jam of traffic and refugees trying to cross the border. It took 12 hours. We woke up all the politicians we knew between Ukraine and Poland that night. In the end it was not a Russian attack, we breathed a sigh of relief, the borders were opened and the trucks were able to cross them.”
“Putin –says the patron- not only wants the Ukrainian territory but also to control the narrative of this country. 90 years ago the Holodomor famine genocide took place, now we are the same, and that includes the destruction of culture and museums, as Stalin did when he sent the gulags to die Ukrainian artists, destroyed murals and works of incalculable value ” .
The Ukrainian ambassador to Spain, Serhii Pohoreltev, has pointed out in this regard that “it is very important to have this support because Russia has always tried to steal our identity, in the cultural sense as well, stealing the names of artists from Ukrainian culture. In a certain sense it is a cultural genocide, now that it is 90 years since the Holodomor genocide that killed millions of Ukrainians, the cultural one does not kill, but it steals identity. It is very important to be able to identify Ukrainian artists.”
In Madrid, 69 paintings can be seen, some from the museum’s own collection – which has sought public sponsors, such as the Ministry of Culture, and private sponsors, such as MasterCard, to launch the entire operation – and private providers. Some seventy pieces that include artists such as Oleksandr Bohomazov, Vasyl Yermilov, Anatol Petrytskyi, Alexandra Exter, Sonia Delaunay or Malevich and that show an extremely fruitful period in which avant-garde art, isms, such as cubism and futurism, they mix with the folklore and traditions of the country, including the Byzantine influence.
A mixture of powerful works despite the historical vicissitudes of the moment, in which the country goes from tsarism to revolution, to a brief independence, defeat against Russia and destructive Stalinism. Despite all the tragic events, they created their groundbreaking works, although in the end they had to end up in socialist realism in which, yes, at the end of the exhibition, a painting of 193 by Semen Yoffe with two powerful Ukrainian women with guns in hand firing shooting practice.
Maryna Dobrotiuk, chief curator of the National Museum of Art of Ukraine, gives one more clue to the destruction of the era and the heroes who saved art then: “For a long time the international community knew these authors not as Ukrainians but as Russians, Russia has appropriated their names and included them in its vanguard. But the Ukrainian avant-garde is independent and deserves to be part of the world avant-garde of the early 20th century. Most of the masterpieces on display belonged to the so-called Special Fund, a secret fund that was formed in the museum between 1937 and 1939. This secret fund included authors whom the Soviet government considered nationalists and enemies of the people. His works had been put into category zero, which had no artistic value. Luckily, most of them have been preserved and we see them today”.
