Don’t let Ukraine’s culture be erased

Ukraine’s cultural autonomy is again under assault by Russia. Vladimir Putin appears to believe that ‘Ukraine and Ukrainian culture independent of “Mother Russia” do not exist’.

Travel to the Royal Academy of Arts on Piccadilly, to see the untruth of that statement. The exhibition, In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900 – 1930s, displays the works of various ‘exuberant, hyper-energetic artists in Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa amid the fevered optimism of socialist Ukraine’. Drawn from Ukrainian, Polish, Jewish, and Russian communities, the artists combine revolutionary, international, religious, technological, urban and rural themes with ‘the vivid colour and rhythmic compositions of Ukrainian folk and decorative art’. The effect is distinctly local, informed by the wider modernist movement but not beholden to it.

Throughout, the artists interact with a wider group of Ukrainian poets, writers, thinkers, and theatre directors, encouraged by Vladimir Lenin’s post-revolution policy of Ukrainianisation as a concession to nationalist sentiment.