The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has changed the classification of some of his paintings. Two artists previously identified as Russian are now classified as Ukrainian, and a painting by French impressionist Edgar Degas has been renamed from “Russian Dancer” to “Dancer in Ukrainian Dress,” CNN reports.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York Photo: Marco Brivio / imageBROKER / Profimedia

For the hammerhead, these changes are a kind of rehabilitation. Oksana Semenyk, a journalist and historian, has been campaigning for months to persuade institutions in the United States to rename historic works of art that she believes are being misrepresented as Russian.

Dancer in Ukrainian dress / Photo: MET/BOT / Alami / Alami / Profimedia

In Meta are the works of Ilya Repin and Arkhip Kuindzhi, artists whose native language was Ukrainian and who depicted many Ukrainian subjects, even though the region was part of the Russian Empire at the time.

Repin, a famous 19th-century artist born in what is now Ukraine, has been renamed in the Met catalog as a “Ukrainian born in the Russian Empire,” and every description of his work now begins with “Repin was born in the countryside. The Ukrainian city of Zhuyiv as part of the Russian Empire”.

On Semenyka’s Twitter History of Ukrainian artwho has more than 17,000 followers, she wrote: “All famous scenery [ale lui Repin] they were about Ukraine, the Dnipro and the steppes. But also about the Ukrainian people.”

One of Repin’s lesser-known contemporaries, Kuindzhi was born in Mariupol in 1842, when the Ukrainian city was also part of the Russian Empire, and his nationality was also renewed. Updated the text of Kuindzhi’s Red Sunset in Metropolis to add the following sentence: “in March 2022, the Kuindzhi Art Museum in Mariupol, Ukraine, was destroyed by a Russian airstrike.”

Regarding the recent relabeling process, the Met told CNN in a statement that the institution “constantly researches and studies the objects in its collection to determine the most appropriate and accurate way to catalog and present them. The cataloging of these works has been updated following research conducted in collaboration with researchers in the field.”