Art at the Crossroads: Konstantin Akinsha on Ukrainian Modernism

Interview on The Juncture: Ukrainian Artists in Search of Modernity and Identity Exhibition in Amherst College, May 24-October 13, 2024

Author

Olga Blackledge and Eva Zak

Abstract

In January 2025, the reviews editors of Apparatus sat down with Konstantin Akinsha, distinguished art historian and curator, to discuss his groundbreaking exhibition The Juncture: Ukrainian Artists in Search of Modernity and Identity at the Mead Art Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts that featured the works of three Ukrainian artists: Oleksandr Arkhipenko (known in the West as Alexander Archipenko) (1887–1964), Oleksandr Bohomazov (1880–1930), and Vasyl Yermilov (1894–1968). The exhibition was organised in connection with In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900–1930s, the sprawling exhibition of Ukrainian Modernism which has travelled to Madrid (29 November 2022-2 May 2023), Cologne (3 June - September 24, 2023), Brussels (19 October 2023-28 January 2024), Vienna (23 February - 2 June 2024), and London (29 June - 13 October 2024). The exhibition explored the complex intersections of Modernism, cultural identity, and national history. The conversation explores the themes which underpin Akinsha’s curatorial approach, particularly how the political and cultural upheavals of early 20th-century Ukraine shaped the Modernist movements of the time. Akinsha offers a compelling perspective on how the exhibition connects to broader cultural and political conversations in 2025, reflecting on how Modernism, particularly in Ukraine, continues to be an active force in understanding the intersection of local identity with global artistic movements. Through his insight, we are invited to reflect not only on the artistic legacies of Arkhipenko, Bohomazov, and Yermilov but also on the urgent role of art in the context of conflict, memory, and national resilience.

Keywords

Oleksandr Arkhipenko, Alexander Archipenko, Oleksandr Bohomazov, Vasyl Yermilov, Oleksandra Ekster, Alexandra Exter, Modernism in Ukraine, Eye of the Storm, Transnational Modernism, Curatorial Histories, Futurism, Cubism, Divisionism

Interview

Could you share the context in which the concept of the exhibition on Modernism in Ukraine was conceived?

I am an art historian and curator.¹ And for some time, before the beginning of the full-scale invasion, I was taken by the idea of organising a substantial exhibition of Ukrainian Modernism, at least in Europe. However, this idea was met with unexpected resistance. For instance, museum directors in Germany were telling me, “What are you talking about? It is all the same Russian art. It is nationalist to call it Ukrainian.” Others did not want to do it because they were afraid that it would complicate their relations with Russian museums. And some of them were warned by Russian museum directors not to touch anything related to Ukraine. So, it was a very complicated process. And it was a shame because we were ready. I completed the research, we developed a checklist, and we were ready to roll. At some point, we nearly took this exhibition to Hungary, but then there was a clash between Hungary and Ukraine about the clumsy Ukrainian law on education adopted in 2017, which at the last moment destroyed all our efforts, and the exhibition never travelled to Hungary. And then the full-scale Russian invasion started. And, sadly, the large exhibition which we have been touring around Europe became possible mainly because of the war.

The story of the exhibition was this: the Americans² were screaming every day that the invasion would start tomorrow, while the Zelensky government pretended that nothing would happen. No efforts to evacuate museum collections were undertaken. Probably two weeks before the beginning of the war, I wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal,³ declaring that it is time to relocate them, hoping that I could be more persuasive from the other side of the fence, but it made no difference. So, the full-scale invasion began. When the Russians were basically approaching the outskirts of Kyiv, I spoke with the director of the National Museum, and we decided that we would try to relocate an exhibition of the highlights of the Modernist collection. The exhibition attracted a lot of attention; there was even a long article in the New York Times.⁴ We had adventures we did not need, because we were under missile barrage and barely managed to leave Ukrainian territory. But after this exhibition was shown in Madrid in the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum, it was shown in Cologne in Museum Ludwig, in Brussels in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts, and in Vienna in the Belvedere, where we made it two times larger, adding a substantial part on Secession, or if you wish, Art Nouveau in Ukraine. Following Vienna, we divided it into two parts, because this is a Lego-type exhibition, which we can assemble and disassemble. One part focused on radical modernism and travelled to the Royal Academy in London, and the other part travelled to the National Gallery in Slovakia, which was the last exhibition organised by the National Gallery’s former administration. As of today, one hundred employees have resigned in protest of the National Gallery’s director's removal by the current Slovak government.

How did the exhibition travel to the US after Europe?

Of course, we wanted to do something in the United States, but my efforts to interest major museums in New York went nowhere, because they work more slowly than European museums, and everything is planned ten years in advance. However, I had for some time established connections with Amherst College and with the Mead Art Museum. And it made sense to have the Ukrainian exhibition there, because they have a huge collection of art from the Russian Empire and partly from the Soviet Union, the so-called Mellon Collection, which was, of course, classified as Russian art. It is a stunning collection that the museum finally started to sort out, again, because of the war. The Mead Museum got a very experienced curator from Moscow, Maria Timina, who came through the Scholars at Risk program. She started examining the collection in a serious way, particularly trying to distinguish fakes from authentic works. Like any private collection created in the 1970s and 80s, the Mellon Collection had a lot of fakes, but it also had real, critical pieces. For example, in our exhibition, we used two late but crucial works by Vasyl Yermilov, an key constructivist artist from Kharkiv, who continued - or returned - to his Constructivist inspirations in the late 1960s and 1970s. In Ukraine, art historians believe that these works are lost. But they have been quietly sitting in storage at the Mead Art Museum for eternity, and finally, we could show them. In a sense, what Yermilov was doing during that period was projects for projects’ sake. He worked on architectural models that had not even the slightest chance of realisation. And we have two such models in Amherst. One is a monument to Khlebnikov. What is interesting is that Yermilov was creating this model at that moment when people around Khlebnikov, or who were connected to his family, tried to install a monument to Khlebnikov in the Novodevichii cemetery, which ended up being a historical Kurgan stela (Balbal) from Tuva. And at that very time, Yermilov was in Kharkiv, fantasising about his monument to Khlebnikov, in the style of the architecture of Ledoux⁵ or other visionaries of the French Revolution period. As for the other model, Yermilov was dreaming about the construction of a memorial museum to Picasso, without thinking about a real place where this memorial museum could be realised. Both models are in Amherst, in quite good condition. We also chose some works by Oleksandr Arkhipenko from the Amherst collection. And the initial idea was to just focus on three extremely significant Ukrainian Modernists who are absolutely different in their approaches: Yermilov, Arkhipenko, and Bohomazov.

Oleksandr Bohomazov is likely the most important Ukrainian Modernist artist who lived all his life in Kyiv. He probably left Kyiv only a couple of times: once, before the October Revolution, for Finland, where he was sent to make sketches for a Kyiv newspaper; and from 1916 to the beginning of 1917 for Karabakh, Armenia, where he accepted a teaching position to survive, which proved to be not the easiest way of survival. But the rest of his life he lived in Kyiv. Bohomazov is unique because he belongs to the generation of the Kyiv futurist school.

Of course, now we have considerable problems with the efforts to nationalise Modernism. For instance, all these hysterical cries about Malevich, “Malevich is a Ukrainian artist,” or “Malevich is a Russian artist,” and so on. I am not interested in such a nationalisation. My conception, which was supported by my colleagues, was very simple. This exhibition is not called Ukrainian Modernism. It is called Modernism in Ukraine. Here, we do not focus on ethnicities. Our conception is that if an artist or a group spent some time in Ukraine or left an imprint on the development of Ukrainian art, it is relevant for the history of Modernism in Ukraine. And Malevich is included in the exhibition not because he was born in Kyiv or baptised in the catholic Church of Saint Andrew, but because he came back to Kyiv at the end of the 1920s, spent two years working in the Kyiv Art Institute, and left a very visible imprint on his pupils.

The Ukrainian-Canadian scholar, Oleh Ilnytzkyj, wrote an excellent article about the possibility of different cultures claiming the same figures depending on their imprint on the development of these cultures. He was focusing on Kazimir Malevich [Kazymyr Malevych], Oleksandra Ekster, and Davyd Burliuk [David Burliuk], who have both Ukrainian and Russian backgrounds. We can see certain differences within the Kyiv futurist group, which was basically inspired by Ekster. She became a bridge between the East and the West because she spent a lot of time in Paris and Italy, where she was the lover of Ardengo Soffici. She was, of course, an endless source of information about the development of Western Modernism, which we can see, for instance, in Benedikt Livshits’s memoir.⁶ Livshits describes going to Burliuk’s estate by train, and Burliuk proudly shows him a black and white photograph of Picasso’s painting, which Ekster had given to him. He immediately tries to use it to make something like Picasso, or, as Burliuk claims, better than Picasso. So, of course, Ekster was a significant source.

There are, however, differences in the general development of the stories of Futurism. Futurists in Ukraine are less provocative and controversial in what they do. It is a bit more about beauty, even. For instance, in their approach to folk art, which became an acceptable replacement for the so-called “Negro Art” in the Russian Empire. The artists felt they had no need to go to Africa, since they had Africa in their backyard. But in Ukraine, folk art is fetishistically treated as high culture, whereas in Russia, folk art is considered low culture, and its treatment is comparable to that of urban vulgar art.

I am working on a project on Arkhipenko, Bohomazov, and Ekster, and I hope to do this project in a large museum. They all went to the same art school, where the students organised an exhibition, the first for Bohomazov and Arkhipenko. It was the first time their works were exhibited publicly. Then they parted ways. Bohomazov is unique because he was probably the only artist from this group of Futurists of the Russian Empire who was indeed a Futurist. How he succeeded in this, I do not know. He could not have seen Italian Futurists’ works, because what the Italians exhibited at the Izdebski Salon⁷ was Divisionism, not yet Futurism. Obviously, he saw something in the reproductions which Ekster probably brought from abroad. And then he started to develop his own Futurist style. There are not many Bohomazov works in the United States, which, I think, is a problem for such museum collections as MoMA or the Guggenheim, or other main keepers of modern art in the United States. But there are some, mainly drawings. However, there are a few paintings in the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts (AMFA), which we used in the exhibition, but they did not suffice. There are also Bohomazov drawings in the Palace of the Legion of Honour Museum in San Francisco, but we had a limited budget, so we focused on the works from Arkansas.

We also borrowed very good works from the Modernism Gallery in San Francisco, whose founder and president, Martin Muller, was instrumental in introducing the art community to Bohomazov’s work. Nonetheless, we still needed loans from Europe. By sheer miracle, we succeeded in securing a group of loans from Europe. I believe that what we exhibited could give at least the feeling of Bohomazov. We had four oil paintings, which is not bad, and a lot of works on paper.

With Arkhipenko, we had another beautiful situation. Of course, Arkhipenko is present in many American collections and museums. We also learned about a private collection at the Ukrainian Institute of America, which had been given as a long-term loan from the family of Arkhipenko’s late Ukrainian friend. The Ukrainian Institute is not a museum organisation; it is a kind of NGO without much funding or experience in safekeeping artworks. But they were very generous. They put us in touch with the current owners of the collection, who were very excited about providing these works. We also wanted less-known, less-exhibited versions of Arkhipenko’s bronzes. Many of them, like all bronzes, exist in multiple casts. We received Arkhipenko’s lifetime casts, as well as some paintings, also from this collection. We also had other Arkhipenko’s works, which were bought by Katherine Dreier for the Société Anonyme,⁸ which are in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery. I am very happy that we were able to secure these loans, even though we could not obtain everything we wanted. But we got very good pieces which reflected the beginning of the discovery of Arkhipenko in the United States, which had been bought before he came to the United States.

For me, the most challenging and successful part of the exhibition was the collection of works by Vasyl Yermilov. I already told you I started this story with two architectural models from the Mead Art Museum. But MoMA also granted us two Yermilov’s loans: a work on paper and a relief that were key for this exhibition. And then, preparing the exhibition, I was stunned because Maria Timina found a Yermilov relief in the AKG Art Museum in Buffalo. In Yermilov’s catalogue raisonné prepared by Aleksandr Parnis^9, this relief was registered as lost. It arrived at AKG in the early stages, alongside a collection of Russian artworks, at a time when the term “Russian avant-garde” was becoming popular in the art market. However, demand was outpacing supply, so many Ukrainian artists were included in the pot and sold under the "Russian avant-garde" label. AKG did not pay too much attention to this relief; it seems they did not have a clear idea of what it was. They became excited about it when we explained it to them, and they restored it for the exhibition, for which we are extremely grateful.

For us, it was an unexpected return of a lost Yermilov. In addition, we had a bunch of works from the private collection of Muriel Berman, who was a famous collector of art from the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. So, we had a good variety of pieces. And I have to say that for a college museum, that was an impressive exhibition. It is unfortunate that we had no time to do a catalogue. We are still discussing a kind of posthumous catalogue. Now we are discussing the catalogue in an unusual form. Instead of paper, we are considering a website with interactive elements. We would like to use it for unpublished material, which may be a better idea than spending money to publish 1000 copies of a book which no one will be able to find or purchase.

As far as the exhibition itself, I am extremely happy with the results. Of course, it is not comparable to the exhibitions in the Museo Nacional Thyssen Bornemisza in Madrid, or the Belvedere in Vienna, or the Royal Academy in London, where the space for experimentation would be completely different, but it was still an excellent exhibition. We are proud of the quality of artworks and that in our exhibition, contrary to some other exhibitions that took place afterwards, we did not have one problematic painting. The works in our exhibition had absolutely stable provenance and did not provoke even the slightest doubt in authenticity. I still believe that we will somehow find a way to return to the United States and to do something a bit more monumental. On the other hand, I hope to pay even greater tribute to Bohomazov, Arkhipenko, and Ekster in Europe.

How do you think art historians should approach the issue of artists’ nationalities in the context of changing borders and political power structures historically, and, perhaps, now?

We are only at the beginning of the process of revising the narrative of the history of Ukrainian Modernism. Of course, we are in a complicated and emotional time. We are trying to avoid emotions within a very problematic narrative. Some of my compatriots bluntly accuse the Russians of having stolen Ukrainian art. In my opinion, the situation was a bit more complicated. I am not trying to whitewash Russian chauvinists. My stance here is connected to the whole conception of the so-called Russian avant-garde. I started this discussion before the full-scale invasion, with the Russian Avant-Garde at the Museum Ludwig: Original and Fake, an exhibition dedicated to fakes at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, of which there are many.¹⁰ Any museum collection created in the 1980s is susceptible to fakes, and fakes pop up in many museums. My dream is to create something like the Rembrandt Project and examine collections in the United States. You can find questionable artworks from Seattle to Cleveland. This is an ongoing problem, and it is necessary to deal with it.

I wrote “Naming the Russian Avant-Garde,” an article for the Cologne exhibition, where I analyse the art world after World War II, when art from the Russian Empire became fashionable, but this art had no style name. They were Modernists from Russia, and they never ever self-defined as the avant-garde. The world, “avant-garde” was used, to the best of my memory, only four times in the history of the period: once by Alexandre Benois, in a negative sense, once by Nikolai Punin in a positive sense, and twice in LEF journal, in the context of general speculations, so it was never self-descriptive. These artists were Futurists, Suprematists, and Constructivists, and they did not want to have an umbrella definition because they were fighting each other from absolutely different ideological platforms. So, this term “Russian avant-garde” was a very contradictory creation. If in the beginning it was called “avant-garde,” in the spirit of the 1960s revolutionary avant-garde, then step by step it became Russian, and it became an umbrella term for everything.

And, of course, all these Bohomazovs and Yermilovs were thrown into the pot as Russian art along with Georgian art, and many others. Nobody could understand any of the differences; everything was Russian art. In the Soviet Union, this avant-garde even after the war was politically dangerous, and nobody wanted to deal with it. And all these semi-compromises, like the Moscow-Paris Exhibition in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Art in 1982, were still compromises. After the fall of the Soviet Union, however, the Russian Federation inherited the Western conception of the Russian avant-garde, as an eye-opener and instrument of democratisation. In the late 1980s, there were multiple exhibitions in the Tretyakov Gallery, including the first big Malevich and Popova shows.¹¹ Step by step, however, it became a symbol of Russian revival. You can see the development of this ideology in the American exhibitions. It starts with The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915–1932¹² and progresses to Russia!,¹³ the opening of which was attended by Mr. Putin. So, this art became Russian in this all-inclusive model where anything Russian was good, a part of Putin’s ideological model that formed quite early and indeed might be considered a Soviet legacy. This worked up until Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It was like the Garden of Eden, where Sakharov and Kalashnikov were resting together on the green lawn. The Russian avant-garde was fully castrated of its political meaning because, as you remember, the R-word [Revolution] was not pronounced.

I remember running from one institution to another during the centennial exhibitions in London in 2017 at the Royal Academy of Arts, the Design Museum, and the British Museum, where I gave a lecture.¹⁴ In all of Russia, there was one exhibition dedicated to the killing of the Tsar and the Royal Family, in two rooms in the Museum of Contemporary History in Moscow. This was the only thing related to the Revolution mentioned in the Russian context at that particular moment. So, the Revolution was removed from the discourse, turned into some kind of nice decorative element without any kind of serious meaning. This led to the ingenious exploitation of the so-called avant-garde. For example, they decorated one of the terminals at Sheremetievo airport in Moscow with Suprematist motifs, seemingly paying homage to Malevich’s themes, while it was serving as an advertisement for the terminal.

And I understand why many Ukrainians were absolutely enraged by this. Even today, Russians cannot accept the idea that Malevich could be considered ‘not Russian’, despite Malevich being claimed by various countries, including Poland.¹⁵ However, I think that this is an absolutely unproductive approach. The situation with Ivan Aivazovskii at the Metropolitan Museum serves as a striking example; initially reclassified as a Ukrainian artist, he was re-designated as an Armenian artist in response to the outcry from the Armenian diaspora. This sequence of events evokes the absurdity of black comedy. But we somehow have to start thinking about this.

There are now a lot of attempts to revise the situation in Europe and the United States, but there seems to be a healthier radicalism in the European response. A sizable conference in Bremen¹⁶ explored what to do with the so-called Russian culture and the so-called Russian avant-garde. French museums – which are mostly state-owned – are trying to grapple with what to do with museum labels, which, as you know, are a problem.

The United States’ situation is different: every museum has its own approach, and the attempts to rewrite these labels became a sort of comedy, too. Now, on the label, we have artists who were born in countries that did not exist when they were born and died in countries that did not exist at the time of their death. The confusion is only exacerbated by the transliteration of the names of the cities.

For instance, and this is a recent story, in order to demonstrate their eagerness to change the old paradigm, a respected American museum described Mikhail Larionov in the following way. According to the museum label, he was born in Moldova. Indeed, Larionov was born in Tiraspol; however, Moldova did not exist at that moment as a political entity. So, it is very messy, and it is time to sort out this mess. And I think that we are only at the beginning of this process of clarification and understanding. The situation in cinema history is probably similar, because Ukrainians, with some justification, are claiming Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman, because they were working in Ukraine.

To follow up on the topic of labels, how would you adjust them to prevent potential confusion? For example, I recently overheard a family conversation in a museum where, after reading a label that said “Born in the Russian Empire,” the father told his family that Chagall was Russian. How would you handle this situation?

Chagall is a good example. The Chagall exhibition at the Albertina Museum in Vienna came up with an absolutely new set of definitions. Instead of writing “Russian Empire,” they wrote “Born in Tsarist Russia.” By this logic, we will not only have Tsarist Russia, but also Soviet Russia, Putin's Russia, and so on and so forth. My ideal model, unfortunately, is not realistic. It would be similar to that used in Museum Insel Hombroich in Westphalia in Germany. It is a beautiful private museum, established by a group of eccentric men¹⁷ who combined a beautiful collection of Modernism with Oriental art. In one room, there can be a beautiful Matisse and a beautiful 17th-century kimono, without a single label. And the conception of this museum is that those who know, know; those who do not know but want to know, will learn on their own; and those who do not know and do not want to know, do not need to know.

We cannot use this approach in major museums. In our situation, a correctly written label would say, for instance, Kazimir Malevich, born in Kyiv, Russian Empire, now Ukraine, died in Leningrad (not in Saint Petersburg!), Soviet Union, now Russian Federation. This could be minimally substantial. But even this approach to labels is very difficult to implement because of the problematic American tradition of treating artists by their nationality. So, in the best-case scenario, an American museum would write, “Oleksandr Arkhipenko, American, born in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine).” What is happening now is an unbelievable mess. One of my favourite examples is Wikipedia. In Ukrainian Wikipedia, Ekster is Ukrainian, in the Russian version she is Russian, and in the French version she is French. I do not know what the Belarusians are doing, why they have not nationalised her, since she was born in Białystok. She could also be considered Greek, since she was half-Greek, and so forth.¹⁸

Since this exhibition is related to The Eye of the Storm, the larger exhibition that travelled Europe, could you speak to the specific story that comes out of these three artists represented at the Amherst exhibition, Arkhipenko, Bohomazov, and Yermilov?

For me, it was really important to organise an exhibition in the United States. As I have already said, the Amherst collection was extremely interesting, with these two crucial pieces by Yermilov. And the fact that we found a Yermilov piece in Buffalo that had not been known, and that since our exhibition has returned to circulation, makes me very happy.

Also, I hope there will be more exhibitions like this. It is possible to make a good large exhibition of Ukrainian Modernism or Ukrainian connections to Modernism in the United States. Of course, using the Italian Futurist Boccioni’s titles in his “States of Mind,” these would be the works of “those who went.”¹⁹ For this exhibition, we could use the works of those who left. In American museums, there are works of artists from Ukraine who started their careers in Kyiv and were influenced by this early stage of Ukrainian Futurism. Through American museums, it is possible to make a quite decent exhibition of the works that have not been processed or have not been often exhibited. For example, the Hirshhorn Museum has a brilliant Baranoff-Rossiné.²⁰ There are works here and there, but many of them are spread around, misdated, and often wrongly described. For example, there is a misdated Yermilov relief in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that was made in the 1960s, but it is dated to the 1920s, and Yermilov is listed as a Russian artist there.

So, for me, this was a pilot project, or a first effort. I am hoping that we will return. A lot depends on the museum mammoths, which are very slow. It takes at least five years, if not longer, to prepare an exhibition in major museums in the US. In Europe, it takes an average of two years. In our case, we broke all possible standards because we prepared the large European exhibition overnight. And in Amherst, we did it quite fast, too, but it is a small museum, and it was a DIY effort. But I hope that we will be able to come back to an American institution with a Ukraine-related project. The possibility of such a project depends on innumerable factors that are not in my control, including the political situation. We do not know what will happen in a month or two, and what the approach to Ukraine will be in the United States.

You spoke earlier about Bohomazov as the only Futurist outside of Italy. Obviously, the term is complicated, and the definitions move, but its relationship to Italian Futurism is intriguing, with emphasis on movement and dynamism and action. But I am curious about the politics of Italian Futurism, and whether this is even relevant for someone like Bohomazov, who was, perhaps, the most adamant about Ukrainian independence.

This is a very compelling question, because we still need a better understanding of the connection between Futurism in Italy and Ukraine. We have an over-purified history of Italian art, and this creates a lot of problems. My dream, which for now is unrealizable, is a significant exhibition of Soviet and Italian Art. If there is a country where the so-called avant-garde developed similarly to that of the Soviet Union, it is Italy. In Italy, we had a kind of dramatic situation after the Second World War, when the popular idea was that fascism had no developed culture. This idea was popular until recently, and it was fully exploited by the left in the Communist Party at best. Italian Fascism was very complicated as a cultural phenomenon. It never had fully unified politics. It was regionalised, and depended on the opinions of gerarchi running different regions of the country. In one region, it could be Farinacci,²¹ who was pro-Nazi, and was doing his own biennial with pro-Nazi propaganda art. In a different region, it could be a revolutionary fascist like Bottai,²² who in Bergamo had his own biennial with his beloved artists Renato Guttuso,²³ who, as we forget, was not only communist but also a little fascist when he was young, Montsù,²⁴ and so forth. I remember this crucifix by Renato Guttuso from my childhood. In the Soviet Union, it was treated as a masterpiece of progressive anti-fascist art, while having been exhibited at the Fascist biennial in Bergamo, where it got an award. So, Futurism is a complicated story.

And if you remember, in the introduction to Livshits’ book, there was an interesting phrase that everyone criticised. He says that these people from Futurist circles were going in the wrong direction politically, and that they were approaching a nearly racist stance. I do not remember the actual phrase, but I think that Livschitz was absolutely right.²⁵ And I think that the clash with Marinetti when he came to Russia was not about the reactionary essence of Italian Futurism, but it was an absolute clash between two nationalisms.²⁶ And we somehow disregard this, we are forgetting the essence, we are just enjoying the form. All this First World War Malevich, lubki, and so on was absolute nationalism, jingoism, as much as in Italy. All these beautiful paintings of Aristarkh Lentulov, of Ilia Mashkov, and others were absolutely nationalistic. After the Revolution, however, the scene changed.

I do not think that Bohomazov was very aware of these political issues, nor was he particularly interested in the politics of the movement. Bohomazov’s work is significant because he became the first urban artist in Ukraine during the pre-revolutionary period. But then, when he goes to Armenia, to Karabakh, to the mountains, he creates extremely curious works, in that he depicts what Futurists did not. He transforms this wild nature into Futurism, turning the landscape into constant and endless movement. He would also paint aeroplanes and machinery, but it is a world before technology to which he wants to give this twist, the same one as the Futurists gave to the mechanical world of contemporaneity.

There is also another pertinent story that we are trying to emphasise, but did not stress enough in the Eye of the Storm exhibition, of a more intertwined connection between Ukrainian art and Italian art than with Russian art. Of course, there are interconnections, influences, etcetera. Italians were looking at Russians or Soviets. For instance, Sironi came to Cologne to the first PRESSA exhibition,²⁷ which was one of the first impulses to create a fascist revolution. We also have this paradox of Deineka in Venice, which needs more scholarly attention (in Russia, this part of the history is not discussed that much).²⁸ When the Oborona Petrograda / Defence of Petrograd (Aleksandr Deineka, 1928) was exhibited in Venice, it seriously impressed the Italians. In addition, there were works by Sokolov-Skalia²⁹ taken to Venice from what was at the time the Museum of the Red Army and were later deposited at the Tretyakov Gallery. The Italians liked Deineka, but they were more impressed by the principle that the Soviets turned the recent history of the Russian Revolution and Civil War immediately into museum artefacts, this museumification of the movement. Not much has been published about the Soviet participation in the Biennale and its influence on it. One of the examples of such influence was the introduction of a prize for the best piece on current history. In 1940, this prize was awarded to Garzia Fioresi for his mosaic panel titled in the catalogue La Marcia su Roma / The March on Rome that allegorically depicted a Fascist parade. It did not survive, but it was as ‘good’ as Deineka, maybe even better. So we have these connections.

Ukrainian artists, starting from the late 1920s, have constantly discussed Italian art. For instance, in 1929 or 1930, one of the members of the so-called “Boichuk group” (boichukivtsi), Padalka,³⁰ wrote a sizeable article about Italian Futurism: two pages of text, in which he criticises it as fascist and reactionary, along with twenty-five page-size reproductions. There is an almost forgotten article by Charlotte Douglas³¹ on Malevich and de Chirico.³² I do not always agree with Charlotte Douglas, but here, I think, she nailed it. Because all the faceless Malevich creations emerged after he saw De Chirico’s works, which were reproduced with gusto in Ukrainian art magazines. These works were not reproduced in Russian or Moscow art magazines. So, there is an obvious fascination with Italian contemporary art in Ukraine in the 1920s.

In our exhibition, we have works by young, promising artists who, unfortunately, basically stopped painting as a result of repressions and the campaign against formalism. These works heavily resemble Novecento Italiano. I have no doubts that they saw Sironi; you feel these influences. So these connections are present, and they really must be analysed. But as far as Futurism goes, the Ukrainian artists learned about the beginning of its formation, right on the border between Divisionism and the first Futurism. They grabbed these first principles, and then they were too far removed from later developments.

Bohomazov never depicted aeroplanes and was not taken by the Aero Futurism of the later days, but he became Aero Futurist by definition posthumously. After he died in 1930, the Kyiv Art Institute had a meeting of professors and students, and they voted to collect money in lieu of flowers or funeral wreaths. They donated all this money to the construction of a military aeroplane for the defence of the motherland. So Bohomazov was flying over Kyiv in spirit, and that was his path to Aero Futurism, which will be reflected in the Ukrainian art of the period a bit later. I can say that OST (“Obschestvo Stankovistov” / “Society of Easel Painters”) is more connected with the Germans, and Ukrainians are more connected with Italians. Of course, there are exceptions, like Petrytskyi, who was closer to the Germans in his work, but also oscillated between the Expressionist movement and Neue Sachlichkeit, and Italians.³³ But overall, during the late 1920s in Ukraine, the predominant influence is Italian, and, of course, Kyiv Futurism, in a sense, is more European, here I am talking about Ekster and Bohomazov, than all these escapades of the Burliuks and people around them.

Arkhipenko’s career spanned continents, artistic movements, and major political shifts. How did his artistic style evolve over time, and in what ways did his Ukrainian heritage inform or complicate his international identity and legacy?

Arkhipenko made his choice; he became an international artist. One of “those who went.” During his early period, there was this explosion of beautiful works of the French period, the beginning of the Berlin period. This is what you would see if you went to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. They have one of the best collections of Arkhipenko’s works. The collection in Tel Aviv is more well-known, as is Saarbrücken, in the Saarlandmuseum, Moderne Galerie, where they mainly have works in plaster. And Arkhipenko influenced the Italians. For instance, Boccioni was fully under his influence. Now, there is a lot of new research on this topic. And then he goes to America, which I believe is not a very productive period for him. He was losing himself, falling into Art Deco, sometimes bordering on kitsch. And then, after the Second World War, there was an explosion in his creativity, when he returned to the best standards, and I think that his late works, in their power and value, are equal to his early work.

So the thirties were somewhat of a pause in the circuit or an attempt to find a new dimension for his art. Arkhipenko’s story is very interesting. He learned Ukrainian when he was in America. He even took language classes. I cannot say that his national sentiments were not situational because when he could milk the Ukrainian community, he happily did so. And you know, at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago in the 1930s, the whole so-called Ukrainian Pavilion was basically his personal exhibition. He also produced significant works on Ukrainian topics, for instance, a huge bust of Shevchenko that the Ukrainian National Chorus of America commissioned, which is now in the Detroit Institute of Arts.³⁴ Nevertheless, what happened after the Second World War is impressive because he came into harmony with time, he deeply felt the moment, and produced stunning, unbelievable works. That is not something we can say about Ekster.

By the 1930s, Ekster had lost her artistic voice, and all her Venetian paintings were extremely commercial. She fell under the spell of Art Deco and lost the path. She did not create anything of note at the end of her life, whereas Arkhipenko returned with an unbelievable force. Bohomazov’s life was too short; he died not having completed the third part of his most important triptych, Sawyers, that, in my opinion, is problematic. It is important, but it is also a compromise. Yermylov was ostracised after the war, not only because of his Modernism, but also because he stayed in Nazi-occupied territory. But he had a personal renaissance, developing this imaginary architecture and trying to involve young artists who were his students. It was an interesting period which witnessed an attempt to translate some Constructivist practices into the visual language of the 1960s, and it was a worthy effort.

We concentrated on the LA period of Arkhipenko in our exhibition, but now we are facing a kind of return of Arkhipenko, unconnected to Ukraine. He is being rediscovered in exhibitions in increasing numbers. He was always in American collections, but somehow the interest in him withered away, and now it is coming back in both America and Europe. Recently, Italians became more interested in him, too, and there is new research into his connections with and influence on Italian Futurism. The Estorick Collection in London had a solid Arkhipenko exhibition.³⁵

Of course, in the Ukrainian context, there are many other gifted artists, but if we take Ukrainian Modernists of the first half of the century, the main figures are: Bohomazov, who is number one, Arkhipenko, who is an international star, and Ekster, especially her LA period. It is somewhat funny that Ukrainian Burliuk became the father of Russian Futurism, and Greek-Jewish Ekster became the mother of Ukrainian Futurism. Multiple artists, including Meller³⁶ and many others, went through the exhibition that was initiated by her. So, her influence was immense.

Can we briefly discuss the contemporary situation with Ukrainian art? As you have already mentioned, you had written and published on the dire situation of the preservation of Ukrainian art even before the Russian invasion. Now, more and more museums are being destroyed. What do you think should be done?

This is a very painful question. The barbaric destruction continues. We have more and more explosions in Kyiv near museum structures. And unfortunately, Ukrainian art is not well known. Even the transportation of this exhibition was not an easy effort. I am absolutely grateful to the institutions that cooperated with us, but it was not easy to convince them to do it. Of course, it depends on the museum administration. Now we are counting the days until we move to Poland. For obvious reasons, I cannot name the museums that hold Ukrainian art now, but there is at least one museum in the neighbouring countries that holds collections from Kyiv or is in the process of evacuating them right now. We had a lot of international efforts to help, which, unfortunately, were not well coordinated. It became quite chaotic because different people were doing the same things and duplicating efforts. For instance, last week the exhibition from the collection of the Odesa Museum opened in Berlin; the collection from the Khanenko Museum is exhibited in one Polish museum after another.³⁷ But in my opinion, there have to be blanket evacuations for the whole eastern part of the country, because it is more vulnerable than western Ukraine. Ultimately, for various reasons, we did not manage to evacuate full collections, which I regret.

Your question got me thinking about another issue. We do not know what will happen in two or three months. I do not have much hope for a successful resolution of this war in any form. The directors of all the Berlin museums have maintained that they could not have imagined that Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovskii was not a sound European museum director but endorses a nationalist-imperial cultural agenda.³⁸ What will we do the next day, after this is all somehow finished, the sanctions from Russia are lifted, and all of this will come back? How will we deal with maybe not Mikhail Borisovich, but Boris Mikhailovich Piotrovskii, who by that time will be the director of the Hermitage? Or someone else. What will happen then? Will we just continue working with them?

There are many scary questions. I live in Italy, and I can very well imagine what could happen in Italy. It is happening even now. But the postwar landscape is extremely important. I can imagine a triumphant return of the Russians to the international museums circuit. I can imagine what kind of exhibitions would be sent to the West, and what kind of approaches they may take. I am absolutely sure that everyone, from the Louvre to Palazzo Pitti, will be happy to accept them, without a drop of criticism. I can imagine Russians sending exhibitions of Modernist artists to Venice who come from, for instance, Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan, fully curated and processed by Russia to demonstrate the Russian civilisational mission. They framed the exhibition Uzbekistan: The Avant-Garde in the Desert,³⁹ (curated by Silvia Burini and Giuseppe Barbieri) this way, but essentially, it is a Russian exhibition. This will happen more and more as time progresses, and we will need to think about how to confront it, after all this effort to revise the narrative of Russian colonial art.

How did the exhibition change as it moved across Europe?

When I started to prepare the international operation, I was certain that Poland would be the easiest and the most logical country for a Ukrainian exhibition. I was proven to be absolutely wrong. Poland, for two years, told me, “Maybe in five years.” Instead, Slovakia took this exhibition. Of course, internal Polish politics were at play. The Kaczynski government installed all these museum directors; after the government shifted, the directors were fired and replaced with progressive museum directors, but so far, they all remain temporary, and none has kept a permanent post. After trying Warsaw and Kraków, I came to the place where I should have gone from the very beginning: to Łódź. The Łódź Museum of Art is a great museum. It is one of the first museums of modern art in the world, established by artists in the 1920s, even before MoMA. Part of the collection disappeared during the war, but a significant part survived. It is a beautiful museum of modern art with recognised loan agreements with MoMA and many other museums. I talked to the director, and he said, “I want to do it, but I am temporary, I cannot even sign contracts”. And by sheer miracle of God, Anne Applebaum came to see the exhibition in London, and she became very excited about it, wrote about it on Facebook, and connected me with the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of Poland, Hanna Wróblewska, who helped to organise the exhibition here.

Everywhere we move the exhibition, however, we change it, to some extent. For example, in London, we have great loans from private collections that we cannot take to other locations because they have astronomical insurance prices. But we somehow succeeded in solving this problem with the Royal Academy. In Germany, we added works from the Ludwig Museum collection and private collections. But in Poland, we are in a sense rethinking this exhibition. When we were doing it in 2022, we concentrated on Kyiv museums. Because of this, our exhibition became Ukrainian Modernism in the sense of pre-1939 borders, and so western Ukraine was not included. Now we have a chance to expand our geography and include artists from Lviv. I am absolutely thrilled about this. I am not sure we will be able to take loans from Lviv, but what we have in Poland is enough, and these pieces are not even well known in Poland because these extremely interesting artists are only now being discovered. They have a different orientation; this is a group of young artists who came to Paris and were around Fernand Léger, the so-called Léger group. And we also have the group that came to Berlin to study with Arkhipenko at his school. We can see different influences: Léger, for some reason, became a God for the city of Lviv; Italian artists, especially de Chirico with whom they were fully taken; and the Surrealists. They started to develop Surrealism quite early, from about 1928. And for me, it is an absolute pleasure to include this material.

Could you say a few words about the exhibition you are working on now?

Currently, I am beginning another project that is in its early stages, but it has been officially announced. I am working on an exhibition on Jewish Modernism in Ukraine, preliminarily called The Temptation of Modernity. It will be organised according to the regional principle, discussing what was Ukraine, what was Poland, and what became Ukraine later. It starts with the first artists who are rising as models of assimilation, like Manievich, who became famous in the east of Ukraine,⁴⁰ or from the west, like Lille.⁴¹ This was different for Kultur Lige,⁴² which was established in Kyiv and has a key function in our exhibition. It included the lesser-known Jewish artists of the 1920s, like, for instance, Yoffe⁴³ and such Jewish Boichukists as Manuil Shechtman,⁴⁴ and, similarly, in Lviv, for instance, Bruno Schulz.⁴⁵ I really wanted this exhibition to cover the period from Lille and Manievich to the Holocaust. There will be a section on the Holocaust, which will not focus much on Modernism, but it will showcase the artists in Kyiv who reacted to the Holocaust almost immediately. We have a huge painting, Babyn Iar, created in 1945-46. It had been exhibited by Vasyl Ovchinnikov,⁴⁶ who was Ukrainian, and Iosif Kuzkovskii,⁴⁷ who was Jewish. Ovchinnikov was accused of cosmopolitanism. But by some unexplainable miracle, all three principal paintings of the period survived. One is in the Knesset in Jerusalem, one is in the National Art Museum of Ukraine, and the other is in Poland, in the Treblinka Museum. We are currently in discussion with the Museum of Art and History of Judaism in Paris, which is not a huge exhibition facility, so we will have to abbreviate the exhibition. I have also started to speak with the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, and they also want to collaborate with Jewish museums in New York and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the easiest. New York is the most complicated, as usual. But it could lead to the inclusion of lesser-known and lesser-shown material. For instance, when I talk to the people at POLIN, there are multiple brilliant Jewish artists whom they do not know. So, this is another story I am working on now, and it is very interesting, because it is roughly the same time when we start to see assimilation through the arts.

In the Russian Empire, Ukrainians were becoming professional artists nearly at the same time as Jews. This happened because of the history of Ukraine, which has been nicely summarised by Hrytsak;⁴⁸ Ukrainians started as Scots and ended up as Irish. For a long time, Ukraine was a nation of serfs, but then, at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, artists appeared in the Academy, and Jewish artists were going from Ukraine to Munich to study, and so forth. So there are interesting parallel processes.

Olga Blackledge
University of Pittsburgh
olb11@pitt.edu

Eva Zak
Adelphi University
ezak@adelphi.edu

Bio

Olga Blackledge is a visiting assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Eva Zak is an assistant professor of art history at Adelphi University.

Suggested Citation

Blackledge, Olga and Eva Zak. 2025. “Art at the Crossroads: Konstantin Akinsha on Ukrainian Modernism”. Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 20. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2025.00020.391.

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/

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