On November 15, Russia fired about a hundred rockets into Ukraine: at Kyiv, at Lvov in the west, and at Kharkov in the northeast of the country. Apart from the obvious dangers, the attempt to transport any important cargo by road to the Polish border on this very day was tantamount to madness. And yet, just hours before Russia’s missile strike that Tuesday, a truck convoy from the Ukrainian capital to Madrid attempted – and eventually succeeded – in removing a total of 51 of his works from the National Art Museum of Ukraine. modernism to be featured in an exhibition at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Spain under the ominously appropriate title “In the Center of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s”.

Translation

“We were very tense. All of Ukraine was under attack. We didn’t know whether it was more dangerous to stay in Kyiv or flee,” Svetlana Melnik, director of Kunsttrans Kyiv, an art transportation company involved in the project, told the New York Times. “a few days ago. Truck drivers,” Melnyk explained, “saw from one point on the road, and then Russian rockets flew overhead – no insurance company was ready for such a trip. And especially on Wednesday evening, November 16, when in the village of Przewodov, Poland, two people were killed by stray rocket fragments, which almost led to an international escalation of the war, the delay of the convoy at the border of the two countries reached 10 hours.

The shipment finally reached its destination in Madrid after a five-day journey. He was greeted by about twenty more works, including those from private collections that make up the exhibition “In the Eyes of the Storm”. From today, when the exhibition opens its doors, until April 30, 2023, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum will present, among other things, paintings, drawings, collages, which artistically range from fine art to futurism and constructivism and which were designed by representatives Ukrainian modernism, such as Oleksandr Bokhomazov, Vasily Yermilov, Viktor Palmov, Anatoly Petrytsky, David Burliuk, and others. The website of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum states that works in the neo-Byzantine style created by students of Mykhailo Boichuk, as well as other members of the socialist group will also be presented “Culture League”, which promoted the art of Ukrainian Jews. Also included are works by Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky who were associated with the Ukrainian avant-garde, as well as works by artists who made their first steps in Ukraine but established themselves abroad, such as Alexandra Ekster.

The shipment reached its destination in Madrid after a five-day journey, and today the exhibition opens at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum.

External identity

We read in the exhibition catalog that the art created in Ukraine in the first three decades of the 20th century reflected an attempt to form a national visual identity of the country, whose historical background at that time included the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire, World War II, the October Revolution, the struggle for independence, and then the persecution of its dissident artists (which led to the so-called “executed Ukrainian renaissance” of 1920), but also the Ukrainian famine, known as the Holodomor.

Several exhibits on display in Madrid fell into obscurity for decades, labeled “counter-revolutionary” by the Soviet authorities, and it was with the help of Yulia Litvinets, director of the National Art Museum of Ukraine, that they began to be re-examined.

Art collector Francesca Thyssen-Bornemiza (whose father founded the museum of the same name) played an important role in the project of transferring the works and the exhibition to Madrid, adding another aspect to the whole affair in an interview with The Guardian: “For us to move these works to a safe place “It was risky, but it was also our priority, especially because the Russian military showed systematic disrespect for the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Heritage in the midst of the war,” he said.