The Phenomenon of the Ukrainian Avant-Garde 1910-1935

Geoffrey James P. K. Page Don Reichert c R 0 S S 0 V E R s paint application is thinner, some- earlier "Concrete Cabin" series that continues to surprise us, just times drawn r ight across the can- drew on Le Corbusier's architec- as do Peter Doig's highly innova- vas. A police car and solitary figure tural inventions as source, his tive and original paintings. • top: Peter Doig, rim the distan t shore of the lake . Unite d 'Habitation apartment Figure in Mountain The dull sky and atmosphere con- buildings in particular, and this "Peter Doig" was in Ottawa at the Na- 1998, oil on canvas. jure a desola te setting, one that spurred Doig to depict isolated Private collection. Norwegian expressionist painter dwellings, shacks and cabins. tional Gallery of Canada, August 17 to October 28,2001, and is in Toron- Edvard Munch might have chosen Most of these scenes are not at all to at The Power Plant from Decem- for his angst-ridden scenarios of utopic; instead, oppressive and ber 8, 2001 , to March 3, 2002. Landscape, 1997- Photographs courtesy: The National Gallery of Canada below: Peter Doig, Canoe-Lake, 19971998,oil on canvas,The Ba iley Collection, Toronto the human condition. But Doig's laden with some immeasurable nature recreation is wholly con- burden of reality. In an earlier john Grande is a freelance writer who temporary in style, even if the work on vie~ lives in Montreal. landscape is still northern. Satu- (1993-94) , for instance, we look rated colours r esonate in 100 Years through a dense tangle of trees and Ago (2000), a composition domi- get only a partial glimpse of a nated by the Romantic scenario of building, like outsiders. Nature a bearded figure in a canoe. The becomes an obstruction that takes VISUAL ART The Phenomenon island that looms on the horizon, over and precludes a more com- of the Ukrainian the ethereal sky and ever-so-blue prehensive vision of the building. Avant-Garde 1910-1935 Oliver A.I. Bot ar lake waters further the other- We sense something of the na- worldly, post-Pop sensibility of a ture/culture pull here. Likewise, lost paradise. While Peter Doig lives and in Briey (Interior) (1999), the in- works in London, England, these large-format paintings deal with same foreboding feeling as the landscape works. But here the bar- the Canadian landscape as an in- rens are Bauhaus-inspired interi- terior of a designer house has the T he strongest impression this exhibition makes is of resolute modernity. The major ideologies and agendas of modernity are displayed in this ma- tangible source, a place we can ors, linear and textural, and there terial, in the full glory and horror dream of, but never actually be in. are no people in the scene. The of their jostling: nationalism ver- barrier, in this case, is no longer sus internationalism versus foreign the forest or trees or even a land- imperial hegemony; Marxism ver- scape, but a ladder that leads up- sus Christian and occult spiritual- wards to more emptiness. Ski ity; the jewish and the Gentile; the jacket (1994) is a more open, joy- urban and the rural; the industrial ful piece that fuses figuration and and the agricultural; the novel and abstraction, a treed mountain win- the traditional; rootedness versus ter landscape and the silhouette of a ski jacket. It may be less cum- free-floating agency The complexities of international bersome in a way than the other artistic Modernism are manifest just paintings, but there is less drama as clearly Some examples: the deli- than we sense in the majority of cate Cuba-Futurism of Alexander Peter Doig's art. This drama and Bohomuzov's portrait of his daugh- the level of tension stem precisely from the manner in which Doig ter is juxtaposed with the encrusted, muddy Primitivism of very contemporary manner. Paradise is lost, but so is any kind of exhumes and sifts through David Burliuk's Harvest. Alexandra themes and scenes dealing with Exter's innova tive and elegant utopian dream or project. Doig's nature and culture. It's a source Constructivist-inflected Parisian set Doig paraphrases the human condition in an altogether urban and 74 titled Cabin Essence B oRDER(ROSS I NGs 2002 designs jostle with the decorative awkwardness of her former protege, the St. Petersburg native Vadim Meller's costume designs for the Kiev stage; there's Mykhailo Boichuk's gorgeous, folksy little tempera sketch of Four Women and a Cat; Anatol Petrysky's roaring20s photomontage reflects a completely different sensibility than does Maria Syniakova's folk-anlittle Rayonist gem referring to the This exhibition, then, curated Yermilov's accomplished and cool- work of the brilliant Russian artist by Myroslav Shkandrij, Chair of ly sophisticated Constructivist re- couple Mikhail Larionov and Na- the Department of German and lief and book designs harmonize talia Goncharova . The Russian Slavic Studies at the University of more with the determinedly ideo- painter Kuzma S. Petrov-Vodkine's Manitoba, and Mary-Jo Hughes, logical realist Utopianism of Kos- approach to both colour and style Curator of Historical Art at the tianytyn Yeleva's Head of a Man than is tangible in key passages of Semen Winnipeg Art Gallery, tells the it does with the occult-inflected Yaffe's At the Firing Range. The gift- story of a country decidedly part sketches for Suprematist wall dec- ed Exter student Anatol Petrysky of the international artistic dis- orations executed by Malevich in is thinking hard of Cezanne when course, and yet practically invisi- 1930 for a Kiev concert hall. painting a nude model in 1923 (the ble in it up to now. And that is erotic and decidedly "bourgeois" what makes it of international im- inspired watercolours , and Vasyl The artists are firmly rooted in top left:Viktor Palmov, A Woman, 1927, oil on the Modernist traditions of the touch of having her pulling on a port: it is the first time this work enormously creative Russian em- stocking must not have sat well is being shown in North America. the National Art pire, but they also display a keen with the puritanical Soviet author- The Winnipeg Art Gallery is to be Museum of Ukrai ne, awareness of Central and West ities), but offers a decidedly four- praised for taking on a task of this courtesy Wi nnipeg European Modernism, while self- square Ukrainian reformulation of complexity at a time when few in- A't Gallery consciously attempting to forge a the French master's off-kilter so- stitutions of the WAG's size would distinctly native art in some cases. lidity the following year, in his be willing to do so. canvas. Collection of Kyiv. Photographs top righ t: Mykhailo Boichuk, Four Women ond o Cot, 1912, Archipenko, for example, made his monumental Invalids. The Russian One of the remarkable aspects of career almost entirely in Paris; Exter transplant Viktor Palmov's original this art is that it was produced dur- pencil on card largely did so, as we can see in the and delicious oeuvre-which is, ing a time of cataclysmic turmoil- Collection of the 1930 suite of silkscreens of her late- along with Petrysky's work, a real of the Great War, the Bolshevik '20s Parisian theatrical designs. discovery of this exhibition-con- Revolution, the collapse of the Russ- David Burliuk co-founded Russian tains within it equal dollops of Ost- ian empire and the old social order, Futurism, though he was a Ukrain- waldian colour theory, child of the first Ukrainian Republic, the I S27, oil on board ian who worked in Ukraine before psychology, his close friend Civil War, the near destruction of Collecti on of the emigrating to the United States in Burliuk's Primitivism, a whimsical the Orthodox Church and the 1922; Fedir Krychevsky deftly Chagall-like sensibility for the rural famine of the early '20s-and then adapts Gustav Klimt's Secessionist and]aponisme. This heady brew re- within the context of a totalitarian painting style to Ukrainian peasant sults in luminous gems such as Shift state-in-the-making during the themes in his 192 7 Life triptych, Change, The Village and The Fisher- 1920s. This latter process finally de- updating it with subtle Byzantine man, which outpace many cele- generated during the peak Stalinist stylization and Cubist faceting, and brated works of French inter-war years of the 1930s into a nightmare Bohumazov's Train of 1913 is a Modernist painting. of massive, artificially induced BORDER(ROSSINGS 2002 tempera and graphite National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kyiv lower right:Viktor Palmov, Stone Masons, National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kyiv 75 c 76 0 s s 0 v R S famine, the arrest, torture and murder of artists, and the destruction been a more apt epithet, and I am dominant Western an-historical including the Modernist -inflected practice of identifying the emigre of artworks or their relegation to Socialist Realist work chosen for artists from Ukraine as "Russian," damp basements. Instead of the lock-step Nation- this show in the category The show and foregrounding attempts by is divided into comprehensible cat- Ukrainian artists to "paint back to alist and!or Socialist Realist art that egories, each provided with a clear the [Russian] empire," as Myroslav might have been expected from and concise wall text, even though these processes, this show speaks there is not always enough mater- ShkandriJ told the audience in his lecture at the WAG, it does not make of a despite-it-all heterodoxy that ial available to flesh out each of Ukrainians out of non-Ukrainians. is ethnic, aesthetic and ideologi- these units-hardly the fault of the The complexities of ethnicity and cal. While it includes major and curators, how~ver. The units are in identity are largely respected. The minor works by Malevich, Exter, turn arranged to communicate a BelorussianJew El Lissitzky is not Archipenko and El Lissitzky, prob- narrative of the passage from the claimed as Ukrainian; his gem of ably its most exciting aspect is the creative complexity of the teens and an abstract painting from his short bounty of art by lesser-known '20s, to the Totalitarian nightmare but decisive Kievan period is pre- artists who worked in Ukraine of early-morning arrests and the sented for what it is. Indeed, the during the inter-war period, in- Spetsfond, during the '30s. The final efforts to make a distinctly Jewish- cluding those who formed part of painting in the show, Petrysky's Ukrainian art during the brief Ukrainian independence and af- the Boichuk School of manu men- chilling Kharhiv at Night, may-ac- talist painting, others in the Jew- cording to Myroslaw Shkandrij, terwards are presented respectful- ish Kultur-lige, and those who first who lectured at the Winnipeg Art ly and with care, and this is done chose and then were required to Gallery in conjunction with the ex- within a context of historically dif- work in the approved Socialist hibition-contain cryptic refer- ficult Jewish-Ukrainian relations Realist mode (with varying degrees ences to the purges of the '30s. that are by no means resolved. of success from the point of view of the authorities). Many of the But it is not only the artworks that contain subtexts. There are at Malevich's Polish parentage (the family lived in Kiev but spoke Pol- more than 70 works were drawn least two, main, unspoken objeC- from the Spetsfond (special collec- tives to the exhibition as a whole. ish at home, as Shkandrij has pointed out) and his Russian ac- tion) of the National Art Museum On the one hand, there is the pro- tivity is not elided. Works such as of Kiev- the WAG's partner in this ject of the construction of a national Lev Kramarenko's monumental, show-and have never left art history, part of the larger efforts modernistically flat and tightly con- Ukraine before. Many were in towards nation-building currently structed Building the 'Komunar' Plant poor condition, and were careful- in operation in Ukraine, a country and Collecting the Harvest (both of ly stabilized and packed by where this process had been de- 1932) reflect a Communist ideal- Winnipeg Art Gallery conserva- layed, erased and interrupted by ism that is allowed to speak loud tors Jasmina Jovanovic-Vlaovic Russian domination. On the other, and clear. and Daniel Dell'Agnese in Kiev be- there is the presentation of this his- The blue and ochre walls, as it fore being shipped to Canada. tory on the international stage in happens, form an effective back- This was also a risky and expen- order to legitimize the operation of drop to the rich colourism that so sive undertaking that demon- nation-building itself. This essen- many of these works display Mary- strates the WAG's commitment to tially nationalist framework-sig- Jo Hughes's placement of the preservation and scholarship. nalled in the sequence of deep blue works is spare and elegant, and yet In any case, the material in this show is much more than "avant- and yellow-ochre galleries, reflect- does not lack in dramatic impact. ing Ukraine's national colours- I would take issue on a few points, garde" in the normal sense of that does not occlude heterodoxy, however. I would not exhibit term. "Modernism" would have however. While challenging the Yaffe's At the Firing Range without BORDER(ROSSINGS 2002 C R 5 0 v 0 R 5 a wall text explaining why this in- 10, 2001, to january 13, 2002, and violence. Patrons appear little dis- triguing but unresolved work is turbed as three men shove one an- here, and what it might signify I will be travelling to the Art Gallery of Hamilton, February 9 to April 7, other, a table is overturned, and would not have included Sukher 2002, and Edmonton Art Gallery, then righted again. The video-loop Ber Rybak'sl917 painting The City. june 21 to September 15, 2002. The format ensures that this scene is Not only is it out of place themat- accompanying exhibition catalogue repeated ad infinitum. Through the ically in a gallery that focusses was published in October 2001 (196 multiple perspectives represented , on-in the eyes of the Soviet au- pp, 75 illustrations, $30). Mik violates the convention of rep- Oliver Botar is an assistant professor to master what they see by placing thorities-defective Socialist Realism, but its amateurishness is also resentation that allows the viewer out of place. Including Burliuk's of art history at the University of them at the apex of a singular Fishermen is not JUstified on the Manitoba. perspective. The other diners' im- grounds that it brings the number placability contributes to the of this crucial artist's works to two: it is a later emigre work that is not feeling of unease, a confusion VISUAL ART up to the level of quality of his tural components. Viewers enter work done at home . This exhibition is an active and Aernout Mik the piece via a path composed of Rosemary Heat her low-level walls of a height equal to vital tool of the agendas mentioned above, agendas that form part of the often troubled internal development of Ukraine today What is more, it includes paintings and the- compounded by the work's sculp- the video projections, which are ecause of their unknow- installed on the floor. To empha- able historical significance, size that the space of each video is the events of September equal to the space of the viewer, ll th appear to exist in a time two glass-enclosed rooms abut the B atre designs of originality, invention frame of deferred comprehension. projections, one containing a chair, and sophistication that might well It is as if what is required-a god- the other a door that goes speak to the cultural consciousness like point of view-is distinctly nowhere. By creating a tension be- of Ukrainian-Canadians, as well as unavailable. In light of September tween the sculptural flow of the in- to many of the artists and theatre llth, the work of Dutch artist stallation that surrounds the viewer people in a town as grounded in Aernout Mik seems unnervingly and a sort of stasis the videos por- painting practice, and as enam- relevant. It is difficu lt to imagine tray, the artist replicates in abstract oured of live theatre, as Winnipeg artworks that could better encap- form the envelope of an incom- still is today In short, this is a show sulate the historical moment. prehensible reality that is of relevance to several con- Constructing a hybrid form A lack of dialogue or even am- stituencies. And as far as the of video-installation/sculpture, bient noise further distances the Ukrainian agenda goes, let us hope Mik's works offer a proto-realist viewer from the expectation of un- that it is the heterotopian model immersion in events that are derstanding. The overall effect is described by the actual works in profoundly ungodly in their that of a curiously mesmerizing this show that is adopted for the perspective. kind of estrangement. The work is development of a new culture for In Reversal Room (2001) the independent Ukraine, rather than artist creates a vaguely plausible, feels a part of the action. You are, any ethnic, economic or social Chinese restaurant scenario that in effect, inside the scene-in a utopian one. • one would hope never to experi- restaurant-and can accept your ence. Portrayed from multiple per- place within it in the same way that "The Phenomenon of the Ukrainian spectives, on five different screens, you accept what you don't know Avant-Garde 1910-1935" was at the a scene of diners eating unravels about the lives of the people who Winnipeg Art Gallery from October into inexplicable-if low-grade- surround you. Your attention is convincing to the extent that one BoRDER(ROSSINGS 2002 77