Avant-Garde Art in Ukraine, 1910-1930: Contested Memory'

H-SHERA Ilnytzkyj on Shkandrij, 'Avant-Garde Art in Ukraine, 1910-1930: Contested Memory'

Review published on Monday, March 9, 2020

Myroslav Shkandrij. Avant-Garde Art in Ukraine, 1910-1930: Contested Memory. Brookline: Academic Studies Press, 2019. Illustrations. 202 pp. $99.00 (cloth),ISBN 978-1-61811-975-9.

Reviewed by Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj (University of Alberta)Published on H-SHERA (March, 2020) Commissioned by Hanna Chuchvaha (University of Calgary)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=54320

This collection—containing previously published but modified essays—is a study of Ukrainian avant- garde visual artists, many of whom have international reputations but are frequently identified as “Russian” (p. 5). Hence, the book has the subtitle “Contested Memory.” “Celebrated artists from Ukraine,” writes Myroslav Shkandrij, “seldom have their roots and sense of identity acknowledged” (p. xii). His aim is to present them as a “group” and in a “Ukrainian dimension” (pp. xi, xii). The book consists of eleven essays divided into four sections, with the first and last serving as a brief introduction and conclusion and supported by twenty-seven black-and- white illustrations (paintings, photographs, and film stills). Although the reader encounters the names of many people on these pages, five in particular are singled out for more comprehensive attention: David Burliuk, Kazimir Malevich, Vadym Meller, Ivan Kavaleridze, and Dziga Vertov.

The opening essay, “Kyiv to Paris: Ukrainian Art in the European Avant-Garde, 1910-30” (appearing under the section title “Forging the European Connection”) was originally published on a website—and it shows. Composed of short fragmentary vignettes, mostly brief biographies, but including entries like “Kyiv Milieu” and “Lviv,” these are encyclopedia-like annotations that never coalesce into a coherent essay. Among other things, Shkandrij notes the relatively easy access artists from Ukraine had to Western European centers like Paris, Munich, Berlin, and Geneva. With so many hailing from Ukraine, he concedes that it is difficult to pigeonhole artists in national terms, if only because they came from varied ethnic backgrounds and ended up pursuing careers in a variety of cities. “As a result, many figures simultaneously belonged to, and are claimed by, the Ukrainian, Russian, Jewish, and Western European avant-gardes,” he states, adding: “Nonetheless, it is clear that a number of the most prominent figures in this European avant-garde not only came from Ukraine but drew attention to this fact. Such a self-identification was made by Burliuk and Malevich. The work of a number of others, among them Sonia Delauney, [Alexander] Archipenko, [Alexandra] Exter and [Vladimir] Tatlin, can be linked to a Ukrainian inspiration. This raises some rarely examined questions. How was their work in Europe and interaction with Western artists influenced by their origins?” (p. 6). Shkandrij’s answers here amount to brief illustrations of the Ukrainian-Paris (and broader European) connections of Exter, Archipenko, Burliuk, Sophia Levyts’ka, Mykhailo Boichuk, Oleksandr Hryshchenko, and others. He characterizes these individuals stylistically and identifies them with specific avant-garde movements. The essay ends with a short

Next we have a section titled “Politics and Painting” that groups together four essays. The first of these, “Politics and the Ukrainian Avant-Garde,” establishes the historical context, the cultural- political dynamics in Ukraine from 1917 to 1933—largely from literature’s perspective. The reader learns about the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, the Communist Party’s policy of Ukrainization, and, toward the end of the decade, the gradual centralization of cultural activity. A second essay, “Political Posters 1919-21 and the Boichuk School,” focuses on the genre that fused politics with avant-garde artistic expression. Seven posters are reproduced here in black and white, accompanied by rather cursory, thumbnail characterizations. Although not all posters actually mentioned here were products of the Boichuk school, they nonetheless serve as a pretext for Shkandrij’s sketch of Boichuk’s artistic career, which began in the prerevolutionary period and ended with his execution in 1937. This essay is insightful but lacks unity. The longer excursus on Boichuk, for example, contains only one sentence about his posters and, strangely, translates one poster title in two different ways (pp. 54, 41). It happens to be the one on the cover.

From Boichuk, Shkandrij moves to a chapter titled “Jews in the Artistic and Cultural Life of Ukraine in the 1920s,” beginning with pre-Soviet policies of the Ukrainian Central Rada and the Ukrainian National Republic that tried to build bridges to and alliances between Ukrainians and Jews, doing this by giving Ukrainian Jews autonomy in matters of education and culture. From there, his narrative quickly moves to the years 1923-28, the Soviet policy of Ukrainization, a period that also saw the rapid development of Jewish culture (Yiddish literature) and institutions (Kultur-Lige), including direct involvement of Jews in Ukrainian culture and literature, with many becoming prominent writers and critics, as well as contributors to the fledgling Ukrainian film industry. The Jewish- Ukrainian theme (with some repetition of information) continues in the next essay, “National Modernism in Post-Revolutionary Society: Ukrainian Renaissance and Jewish Revival, 1917-30,” but here the emphasis is more narrowly on modernist and avant-garde trends and their relationship to respective Ukrainian and Jewish national traditions. The writer Mykola Khvyl’ovyi becomes emblematic of Ukrainian literary efforts to escape Russian cultural domination and create a modern European culture. Kyiv’s Kultur-Lige is described as advocating “the idea of a secular Yiddish culture that would be international and modern,” with Boris Aronson as a case in point (p. 72).

A new section, “Artists in the Maelstrom: Five Case Studies,” opens with the essay “David Burliuk and Steppe as Avant-Garde Identity,” where Burliuk’s “mythologizing” of the steppe helps define “pre-revolutionary futurism and challeng[es] the symbolist aesthetic” with themes of vitality, strength, and primitivism (pp. 81-82). Additionally, the essay explores Burliuk’s Ukrainian identity. Citing work done by Dmytro Horbachov and others, Shkandrij outlines Burliuk’s Ukrainian family history, their ties to the Zaporozhian Cossacks, and his self-identification as a Ukrainian. A somewhat analogous essay, “Kazimir Malevich’s Autobiography and Art,” follows. Shkandrij previously published this piece in 2002 but there is no mention of that fact here.[1] Malevich is justly described “as a figure not formed exclusively by the atmosphere of Moscow and St. Petersburg” (p. 103). By examining Malevich’s two autobiographies for clues to his work and identity, Shkandrij posits that Malevich’s aesthetic was inspired by his early Ukrainian rural experiences. He also discusses Malevich’s last years in Kyiv (1928-30) and the late peasant paintings.

From Malevich, Shkandrij moves to Meller in “Vadym Meller and Sources of Inspiration in Theater

Art,” a text in which he recounts the life and work of one of Ukraine’s greatest and most versatile artists, in this instance focusing on Meller’s designs for the theater and ballet (costumes and stage sets). Meller is shown to be intimately connected with many other famous artists, among them Exter, Bronislava Nijinska, Les’ Kurbas, and his own talented wife Nina Henke, whose biography is conveyed here succinctly. Henke’s work with Yevheniia Prybyls’ka in the village of Skoptsi (the two organized the local cottage industry) is explored. Shkandrij points out that Meller creatively incorporated a myriad of stylistic trends, from cubism, suprematism, art deco, and constructivism to futurism. Sadly, he never alludes to Meller’s and Henke’s association with Mykhailo Semenko and Ukrainian futurist publications, which they helped design. The essay, somewhat eclectic in the variety of topics it covers, nevertheless provides a good picture of Ukraine’s dynamic theatrical life and Meller’s place at its center.

“Ivan Kavaleridze’s Contested Identity” examines the long life (1897-1978) and art of this famous but understudied sculptor and film director, who lived through so many historical and politically fraught periods that it is hardly surprising that he must be seen today as “a person of many faces” and his own work subject to a variety of explanations (p. 147). A survivor of several regimes, including the World War II German occupation of Ukraine, Kavaleridze’s artistic work fared less well than he himself, because many of his celebrated sculptures and films failed to pull through to the present. Shkandrij offers a very useful overview of this sometimes avant-gardist (cubist) and sometimes conformist artist, who created memorable images of Ukrainian national and cultural figures, as well as Soviet political leaders.

The last essay in this section, “Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm, Kharkiv and Cultural Revolution,” is partly about Ukraine’s first sound film (1931) and partly the entire post-1928 period, which it encapsulated. Shkandrij argues for considering the years of the first Five-Year Plan (1928–32) as a new phase of the avant-garde, a Stalinist revolution in the arts, with its own aesthetic, which he describes as “robotic, sometimes infantile” (p. 155). The film itself, which rises well above the constraining times in which it was made, is interpreted as a fusion of earlier and current trends in Soviet Ukrainian society: Ukrainization, proletarian culture, and Stalinist uniformity.

In a short coda to the volume, “Remembering the Avant-Garde,” Shkandrij notes the still ongoing projects of “restoring neglected chapters of cultural history” and the “vigorous debate over cultural memory and identity” that started more than three decades ago (p. 166). He observes that some, artists (Archipenko, Oleksandr Bohomazov) “have been restored to a position of prominence in Ukrainian cultural history,” but the position of others (Burliuk, Malevich, Vertov) is “more problematic” since scholars in both Russia and the West “show little awareness of the Ukrainian context in the artist’s work” (p. 167). Malevich, for example, is regularly promoted as a “renowned Russian artist” (p. 168). Shkandrij encourages further study of biographies, identities, and works of art to resolve these issues.

There is no question that this is a genuinely informative book that sheds a revealing light on the Ukrainian avant-garde, especially for the English reader. Not all the essays are of equal quality; there is some repetition and minor typos (“myst” for mysl’ [p. 117]; “Provision Government” for Provisional Government [p. 138]; and “serious” for seriously [p. 147]). In aggregate, however, the volume constitutes a worthy anthology of Shkandrij’s work on the subject of Ukrainian art. The incorporation of Jewish culture into the broader narrative of Ukrainian cultural processes is a welcome aspect. The

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Ilnytzkyj on Shkandrij, 'Avant-Garde Art in Ukraine, 1910-1930: Contested Memory'. H-SHERA. 07-18-2021. https://networks.h-net.org/node/166842/reviews/5984176/ilnytzkyj-shkandrij-avant-garde-art-ukraine-1910-1930-contested Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3 H-SHERA book, however, is not really about “contested memory,” despite the subtitle, simply because it does not overtly contest hegemonic theories about the so-called Russian avant-garde, although, it must be said, Shkandrij offers a lot of ammunition toward that end. While biographies and the Ukrainian context have an important role to play in conceptualizing a “Ukrainian avant-garde,” perhaps more important is a theoretical framework that interrogates Russian positions, explaining why cultural events on Ukrainian soil are habitually relocated to “Russian” culture. While Ukrainian self- identifications, like Burliuk’s or Malevich’s, are important facts that deserve wider dissemination and recognition, personal identity is only the beginning. The site where debate and contestation must take place is in the multiethnic, transcultural space of the two empires that gave birth to the avant- garde and where they developed: tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union. As I have suggested elsewhere, it is rather scandalous that even now some cultural opinion makers and major museums are still presenting the broad, multinational, and transcultural processes of empires as a “Russian” avant- garde, legitimizing in that way Russian nationalist views that hold the deceased empires as Russian national states and cultures.[2] Russians, of course, deserve prominent recognition for their contributions to the avant-garde, but they hardly own the whole story. A book like Shkandrij’s, with its factual and biographical evidence, historical contextualization, helps to remind us that local, national, developments like the Ukrainian within the empires were not “Russian” and had more impact on artistic international development than is generally acknowledged.

Notes

[1]. Myroslav Shkandrij, “Reinterpreting Malevich: Biography, Autobiography, Art,”Canadian- American Slavic Studies 36, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 405–20.

[2]. Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj, “Ukrainian Futurism: Re-Appropriating the Imperial Legacy,” inInternational Yearbook of Futurism Studies, ed. Günter Berghaus (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 1:37-58; and Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj, “Under Imperial Eyes: Ukrainian Modernist and Avant-Garde Publications,” inModernist Magazines: A Critical and Cultural History, vol. 3, pt. 2, Europe 1880-1940, ed. Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker, and Christian Weikop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1341-62.

Citation: Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj. Review of Shkandrij, Myroslav, Avant-Garde Art in Ukraine, 1910-1930: Contested Memory. H-SHERA, H-Net Reviews. March, 2020.URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54320

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.