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Incidental Modernism: Episodes of Symbolism in Modern Ukrainian Art Myroslava M. Mudrak

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Incidental Modernism: Episodes of Symbolism in Modern Ukrainian Art Myroslava M. Mudrak Harvard Ukrainian StudiesInc 36,Ident no. 3–4al modern (2019): 307–49.Ism 307 Incidental Modernism: Episodes of Symbolism in Modern Ukrainian Art Myroslava M. Mudrak IntroductIon r IgInally a lIterary concept, symbolism’s emphasis on sub- jective ideas and poetic form as opposed to the conventions of Orealistic depiction and imitation championed by academic painting offered an alternative, if elusory, entrée into modern visual expression. Because symbolist art utilizes visual metaphor to chart the transition from mimetic (or naturalistic) representation to the ideational level, it appealed to many artists across the European expanse whose philo- sophical relation to their socially and politically complex world could be expressed in a conceptual, rather than literal, manner. Indeed, the use of visual metaphor and pictorial metonymy—the key features of symbolism—functioned artistically to express the undercurrents of a modernist awakening among many national cultures seeking to define themselves in the years leading up to the Great War, not least of all in Ukraine. Since the turn of the century, many artists of Ukrainian origin living under the dominion of foreign powers found the use of picto- rial symbols helpful in braving the more ineffable aspects of cultural belonging. For some, symbolism helped to expose intangible, oftentimes deep-seated tensions lodged in their nation’s longstanding aspiration for modern statehood; for others, the philosophical aspects of symbolism spurred movements reacting against the status quo in order to staunchly define cultural singularity. Concerned less with process, and more with allusion, symbolism’s bent toward the intellectual appealed especially to a younger generation of Ukrainian painters, for whom to be modern was inextricably interwoven with the psychology of cultural self-identity. 308 mudrak More often than not, this meant reconciling a fragile and vulnerable modern self-awareness with the legacy of a robust national cultural past. The SymbolIsm of NatIonal RevIval and the UkraInIan Modern Stylе To the extent that before World War I Ukraine was divided between different imperial powers, artistic influences flowed from Poland, Rus- sia, and Austria as well as from Western Europe and were impossible for Ukrainian artists not to absorb. For those living in the Western Ukrainian lands, the vibrant Polish cultural revival directly informed their aesthetic choices. Specifically, the Młoda Polska (Young Poland)1 movement, which gained currency at the end of the nineteenth century, personified the enduring spirit of Poland in various hypostases—from nostalgic melancholy to a contemporary ideal of a unified nation. For as long as Poland was not a fully integrated polity (and wouldn’t become one until after World War I), the sense of cultural dislocation was pal- pable in the coded imagery used by the literary-artistic élite who formed the movement. Stanisław Witkiewicz’s (Witkacy’s) chaotic worlds and Witold Wojtkiewicz’s macabre depictions of children at morbid play point to a politically fractured country, while Jacek Malczewski’s trope of the country manor house implies a subversive insurgency over lost governance. Notable among such coded works is the wintry scene of Stanisław Wyspiański’s The Planty Park by Night: Straw-Men (1898– 1899) (fig. 1, at right) (the park was a popular summer gathering site in the center of Kraków). Here rosebushes, sheltered from the frost in casings of straw and looking like bogeymen, await their season of flowering. What appears to be an innocent postimpressionist landscape is transformed through symbolist inference to project an empyreal sense of hope. Its covert message reveals that the upcoming season will free the hibernating nation from its bindings. Indeed, the theme of springtime rebirth constituted a kind of belief system for artists who found redemption in an awakening civic con- sciousness. Expressing it through the metaphoric language of art was 1. Młoda Polska originated as a literary movement in Poland in the 1890s and expanded to accommodate visual artists as well. It lasted through World War I. Ukrainian poets formed a similar organization, Moloda Muza (Young Muse), in Lviv in 1906. It shared Młoda Polska’s goals: to experiment with artistic form and to employ synaesthetic imagery and the metaphysical as a means of addressing the decadence of bourgeois conformist attitudes while awakening a nation, through the mode of neoro- manticism, to its own, uniquely identifiable self-representation. IncIdental modernIsm 309 Figure 1. Stanisław Wyspiański. The Planty Park by Night: Straw Men (Chochoły). 1898–1899. Pastel on paper. 69 x 107 cm. Collection of the National Museum in Warsaw. not lost on Ukrainian painter and writer Mykhailo Zhuk, whose large- scale painting White and Black (1912–1914) (fig. 2, below) shows the direct influence of Wyspiański, with whom Zhuk had studied at the Kraków Academy of Arts (his other teacher was the Polish symbolist Józef Mehoffer). Wyspiański had completed a famous cycle of stained- glass windows for the Franciscan Church in Kraków, which no doubt filtered into Zhuk’s own formalism. Combining separate sections of canvas (rather than segments of glass) to suggest the ramified lines of tracery, Zhuk pays particular homage to Wyspiański’s cross-medial method by building his painted composition along the principles of medieval stained glass construction. The fluid, almost calligraphic treat- ment of Zhuk’s flowers unifies the otherwise compartmentalized units of the composition and camouflages the sutures between the discrete forms. Dominant within the imagery is tender foliage that begins as naturalistically rendered tendrils but gradually transitions into small and separate abstract shapes of singular colors and flowing lines. A conspicuous transition from a mimetic representation of nature to pure abstraction brings together other dualities in Zhuk’s art that capture 310 Mudrak Figure 2. Mykhailo Zhuk. White and Black. 1912–1914. Paper, gouache, pastel, watercolor. 207 x 310 cm. Private collection of Taras Maksymiuk, Odesa. Image courtesy of Pavlo Gudimov Ya Gallery Art Center, Kyiv. Photography: Oleg Synkov. the very nature of symbolist expression. From the empirical to the sen- sorial, Zhuk registers oppositions and contrasts, along with slippages between space and time. In White and Black he paints two figures—a virginal female and her male counterpart moving from dark to light, from barren landscape to luscious garden, ultimately from botanical exactitude to nonreferential abstract units. The subtle depiction of the couple’s cadenced movement orchestrates the mood of the work as if to underscore a nebulous existential rite of passage. Indeed, the figures appear to be entering the thick of a lush Eden, the threshold to some kind of a paradisiacal abyss below the picture’s edge and part of the viewer’s own space.2 2. Zhuk’s positioning of the youthful (angelic) figures at the bottom of the compo- sition leaves open the question whether this work was designed as part of a specific commission, in which case its position in situ, as, for example, Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze in the exhibition hall of the Secession building in Vienna, would provide context for the enigmatic scene. The model for the youth was the young symbolist poet Pavlo Tychyna, who was known to play the flute as depicted in the painting. See Mykhailo Zhuk: Al´bom, ed. I. I. Kozyrod and S. S. Shevel´ov (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1987), 11. IncIdental modernIsm 311 Zhuk’s rural setting representing a phantasmagoric sanctuary of over- sized flowers through which the winged figures pass brings to mind the mystical and entranced landscapes of Mykhailo Kotsiubyns´kyi’s Tini zabutykh predkiv (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, 1913), which centers on chimeric ritual in the fantastic surroundings of the Carpathians. Black and White also relates, albeit tangentially, to Kotsiubyns´kyi’s Fata morgana (1903–1910), set in the season of autumn against a tempest of social change and describing, in a psychological treatment, the senti- ments of a confused agrarian population facing a brewing revolution.3 Indeed, the enchanted setting of Zhuk’s painting (whose own writings were modeled on Kotsiubyns´kyi) can be read symbolically as a refuge from the darkening turbulence pressing upon the horizon. On the other hand, the artist’s precise outlining of the contours of his forms, the meticulous treatment of the petals, stamens, and veined leaves of his succulent flowers removes us, as it were, from any outward connection with the encroaching menace and instead transports us to the realm of invulnerable interiority. Here Zhuk exposes the power of line to project “the critical essence of internal experience”4 and we enter the realm of sheer abstraction through his exquisite and refined drafting style. Zhuk’s abstraction of botanical motifs and febrile forms characterizes the aesthetic of a larger arts and crafts revival that originated in England and spread eastward far into the Russian Empire in the latter part of the nineteenth century. By hand carving his own frames or using collage strips of embroidery as borders for the portraits of his contemporar- ies, Zhuk exploited such symbolic ornamentation to express his own nativism—an idea widely embraced in the national art revival move- ments of French art nouveau, German Jugendstil, Viennese Secession, and, most especially, the Ukrainian Modern Style. Launched by Vasyl´ Krychevs´kyi in the first years of the twentieth century, the Ukrainian 3. Zhuk was close to the circles of modernist literati, including Mykhailo Kotsiu- byns´kyi, who commissioned Zhuk to design the cover for his famous Tini zabutykh predkiv. Zhuk’s macabre design carries the symbolist leitmotif of Mikhail Vrubel’s tormented demon. In the revolutionary year of 1905, Zhuk moved to Chernihiv, where he contributed to local newspapers and published stories and poems in the journal Literaturno-naukovyi visnyk. In 1918, he belonged to the symbolist literary organization that published the journal Muzahet (1919)—a reference to Apollo as the leader of the nine Muses (Mousagetes).
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