#Kherson art museum

[vintage-ukraine]

Wooden decorative plate depicting a fox and a wolf by Ivan Skitsiuk, 1970s

[notwiselybuttoowell]

Earlier this month, Russian soldiers in Ukraine withdrew from the southern city of Kherson. It was the only regional capital Moscow was able to seize since the beginning of the war. But before retreating, Russian troops looted homes and businesses throughout the city and emptied one of Ukraine’s most valuable art museums. 

[anastasiamaru]

Museum and home of famous Ukrainian painter flooded

The home of famed Ukrainian painter Polina Raiko is under water as a result of the Kakhovka dam destruction.

Polina Raiko was a self-taught painter and an important figure in Ukrainian naïve artistry. Raiko passed away in 2004 at the age of 75 but her home became a museum and a national cultural monument of Ukraine.

[blueiscoool]

Russian Art Curators Have Helped Loot Dozens of Ukraine Museums

Russian art curators have reportedly led raids on approximately 30 Ukrainian museums since last years invasion, guiding the pilfering of ancient artifacts from the war-torn country.

Across Ukraine, museums have been looted of their famed Scythian artifacts, which were left behind when the Eastern Iranian nomadic people migrated from Central Asia to modern-day Ukraine and Southern Russia between the 7th and 3rd century BC, according to the Sunday Times of London.

The raids have reportedly led to the theft of Scythian ornaments, sculptures, paintings, icons and busts worth millions.

“The orders are coming from someone pretty high up in the Kremlin,” said Sir Antony Beevor, the historian and author of “Russia: Revolution and Civil War” told the Sunday Times. “Putin’s propaganda is that Ukraine as a country doesn’t exist, it’s part of Russia — so they can grab anything they want.”

Others see the raids as a way for Russia to wipe out Ukraine’s cultural identity.

“It’s a deliberate policy to destroy the historical memory of the Ukrainian people,” said Alexsandr Symonenko, a Ukrainian archaeologist and Scythian specialist at Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences.

The first raid came last March, shortly after Russia’s invasion, when a curator was kidnapped and thousands of pieces of artwork were stolen during the occupation of Mariupol and Melitopol.

Russian troops stole nearly 200 items from the Museum of Local Lore in Melitopol, including multiple 2,300-year-old gold pieces from the Scythian empire, according to the Museums Association.

The objects were reportedly selected by a man in a white coat who broke into the basement of the museum with Russian soldiers and selected what to steal with “long tweezers and special gloves,” said Leila Ibrahimova, the caretaker of the museum.

The largest Russian art heist targeted the Kherson Regional Art Museum where five trucks were used to steal over 15,000 pieces of artwork.

One canvas was too large to take, so it was left at the door, and an ancient cannon was also left behind because it was too heavy to move.

“It felt like I was losing my mind, that I was in a bad dream,” said the museum director, Alina Dotsenko. “It was terribly painful to see it so empty, this museum that was my pride, my love, my life.”

By Jacob Geanous.

[folklorespring]

Happy vyshyvanka day!

"Portrait of a girl in vyshyvanka" by Mykhailo Bryanksy/"Peasant woman from Ternopilshchyna" by Marta Makarenko

Both paintings were stolen by russians from Kherson Art Museum.

[mybonehouse]

Mykhailo Bryansky (1830-1908), Ukrainian artist, Portrait of a girl in an embroidered dress.

Along with this painting, the Russian occupiers stole more than 10,000 works of art from the Kherson Art Museum, and this is only what we know.

This is what so called 'great Russian culture' is built on: genocide, colonization, appropriation and violence.

[ohsalome]

[dontforgetukraine]

The Kherson Art Museum received a gift from the young Kherson artist Tamara Kachalenko (Тамари Качаленко).

These 35 graphic works makes up the series "The Face of War", the bulk of which was created in May 2024.

"Ukrainian art continues to live and develop despite the enemy's attempt to destroy our culture."

[mariacallous]

On a recent trip to Kyiv, I was fortunate enough to join a tour of the city led by Olena Zaretska, the granddaughter of the legendary Ukrainian artist and dissident Alla Horska. Horska was part of a generation of young writers, artists, and intellectuals who challenged the repressive cultural atmosphere of Soviet Ukraine in the 1960s and eventually paid a high price for their defiance. Some were banned from working, others imprisoned, and some – like Horska – murdered by the state.

The Soviet Union’s violent response to artistic defiance wasn’t new in the 1960s. One of Horska’s “crimes” had been to seek out traces of artists and writers purged in the 1930s. She, poet Vasyl Symonenko, and theater director Les Taniuk discovered a mass execution site at Bykivnia, on the outskirts of Kyiv. They knew they had found it when they saw children playing with a skull in the woods.

The soil at Bykivnia contained the remains of avant-garde writers Mykhail Semenko and Mike Yohansen, influential artist Mykhailo Boychuk, and many others. Of the trio who made this gruesome discovery in the early 1960s, only Taniuk would survive. Symonenko was beaten to death in 1963, and Horska was murdered in 1970.

Horska, Taniuk, and their dissident circle didn’t restrict themselves to seeking traces of the dead. In Kyiv in the early 1960s, some leading artists of the 1920s were still alive, holed up in their apartments, all but forgotten.

Zaretska’s tour group stopped outside an unassuming 1950s housing block in central Kyiv – this was the former home of Anatol Petrytskyi, a central figure in the Ukrainian avant-garde of the early 20th century. His work was shown at the Venice Biennale in 1930 and later exhibited in the U.S. Most of his fellow artists, like his close collaborator, theatrical genius Les Kurbas, had been murdered, but Petrytskyi survived. He died in 1964, his post-war career a faint echo of his early success. However, in his final years, he was moved to find himself rediscovered by a new generation once again pushing artistic and political boundaries.

“He spoke with tears in his eyes,” Zaretska told us, standing outside the hip coffee shop that now neighbors Petrytskyi’s old home, “about the hundreds of works of his that the authorities had simply destroyed.”

The conversations in Kyiv apartments of the early 1960s, between those repressed under Joseph Stalin and those soon to be beaten under Leonid Brezhnev, are part of a pattern in Ukrainian cultural life. Each generation salvages the works and memory of the previous one, while constantly fending off renewed attacks.

This cycle continues today: a groundbreaking exhibition of Horska’s work at Kyiv’s Ukrainian House Arts Centre took place in early 2024, in defiance of constant Russian air raids. Not long before, stunning murals by Horska, recently rediscovered by contemporary art historians under newer layers of paint and plaster, were destroyed by Russian missile attacks in eastern Ukraine. Regional art museums across Ukraine have been hit by Russian bombs or, as in the case of Kherson, looted by occupying forces.

Perhaps one of the most powerful acts of heritage preservation in the face of Russia’s war is the exhibition “In the Eye of the Storm,” which has toured Madrid, Vienna, and Cologne, and is now at London’s Royal Academy of Arts. The exhibition features important works of modernist art produced in early 20th-century Ukraine, mostly from Ukrainian collections. In late 2022, they were evacuated in secret by train via Poland, under Russian bombardment.

“We loaded the trucks with the paintings and sent them on their way with a military convoy and state guarantees instead of insurance,” curator Konstantin Akinsha told ArtNews. After narrowly avoiding Russian missiles and navigating border closures, “by some miracle, the trucks arrived in Madrid on time for the exhibition.”

The achievements of the team behind the exhibition (curators Akinsha, Katia Denysova, and Olena Kashuba-Volvach, National Art Museum of Ukraine director Yuliya Lytvynets, among others) were not only in preserving the physical works but also in reclaiming their story. After decades of being written out of art history, Ukraine’s artistic heritage must be reimagined and reclaimed. The place of Ukrainian cities – Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa – in the history of European modernism needs to be fully established, and the complex identities of Ukraine’s artists recovered.

This is difficult, given the dominance of the “Russian avant-garde” label, which obscures the identities of many artists from the imperial borderlands. Kazymyr Malevych, perhaps the most famous figure in the exhibition and a native of Ukraine, was known to his Polish parents as Kazimierz Malewicz. He worked in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine and was deeply influenced by the Ukrainian context (he even sometimes referred to himself as Ukrainian).

Another star of the exhibition, Alexandra Exter, was born in what is today Poland to a Belarusian-Greek family and spent time in Kyiv, Paris, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. “In the Eye of the Storm” avoids the trap of nationalizing these artists; its subtitle is “Modernism in Ukraine,” not “Ukrainian Modernism.” Denysova notes that these artists worked with a “twofold agenda”: to assert Ukraine’s cultural autonomy while also engaging with international artistic trends.

The exhibition also highlights important, yet often neglected, cultural dialogues within Ukraine. The brief period of Ukrainian independence after 1917 was a time of cultural rebirth not only for Ukrainians but also for Ukraine’s Jews. While Ukrainian artists founded the Ukrainian Academy of Arts, Ukraine’s Jews created the Kultur Lige, an artistic organization aiming to forge a new Jewish culture for the modern world.

“In the Eye of the Storm” emphasizes this connection between these movements by juxtaposing two large canvases: Anatol Petrytskyi’s “The Invalids” (1924), depicting a family of disabled beggars, and Manuil Shekhtman’s “Jewish Pogrom” (1926), portraying a Jewish family recovering from one of the many anti-Jewish pogroms in Ukraine.

The striking similarity in the bold scale, powerful figurative work, and deep empathy of the pieces reflects their shared roots. Petrytskyi and Shekhtman studied together at the Kyiv Art School in the 1910s; their teachers there later helped found the Ukrainian Academy of Art. The influence of one of those teachers, Mykhailo Boichuk, who famously synthesized Ukrainian Byzantine iconography with modernist aesthetics, can be seen clearly in the stylized figures of Shekhtmen’s grieving pogrom victims.

Neither the Ukrainian Academy of Arts nor the Kultur Lige lasted long; both were absorbed into Soviet institutions within a few years of the Bolshevik takeover of Ukraine, and both modernist projects were annihilated by Stalin’s purges. In the 1930s, hundreds of writers, theater directors, and artists were labeled bourgeois nationalists and executed. Many more were imprisoned, and their manuscripts, books, and artworks destroyed.

Symbolic of this destruction is one of the most striking paintings in the Royal Academy exhibition: Petrytskyi’s portrait of futurist poet Semenko, who was shot by the NKVD in 1937 and buried in an unmarked grave at Bykivnia. The portrait was part of a series of one hundred images that Petrytskyi made of leading figures of the Ukrainian avant-garde movement. The fate of this series is a microcosm of the tragedy of cultural life in early 20th century Ukraine: only nineteen of the original one hundred survived.

It is difficult to maintain artistic institutions in regions under the control of aggressive empires, but Ukraine’s artistic legacy has repeatedly fought back and thrived despite every colonial assault by Russia. This multi-generational salvage operation ensures that art lovers worldwide can appreciate Ukrainian modernism.

Yet the story of survival is inseparable from the story of destruction. The joy of seeing Petrytskyi’s work in London is tempered by the knowledge that many of his works were lost forever. Similarly, the thrill of seeing Horska exhibited in Kyiv is overshadowed by the destruction of her murals in Donetsk by Russian shelling. Ukraine’s lost avant-garde artworks could fill an exhibition space far larger than the one at the Royal Academy.

The storm, clearly, is not over.

[unhonestlymirror]

At the exhibition in Tehran, a work from the collection of the Kherson Art Museum, which was stolen by a thief, was presented

The original painting, which is in the collection of the Kherson Regional Art Museum, was taken away by the russian occupiers in November 2022.

[vintage-ukraine]

Generosity by Mykola Pysanko, 1970s

The painting was stolen from the collection of the Art Museum in Kherson by the russian occupiers in 2022. Its location is now unknown.

[thegirlwhohid]

The Ukrainian brand of silk scarves OLIZ and the fundraising platform UNITED24 released a charity collection dedicated to works of art that were stolen or destroyed by Russia.

This collection includes prints with works of Polina Raiko (her house museum in occupied Oleshki was destroyed after russians blew up the Kahkovka dam), Arkhip Kuindzhi (the Mariupol museum was looted by russians and destroyed with an aerial bomb; the fate of his works is unknown), mosaics from Saint Michael cathedral (the mosaics were moved to Moscow while the cathedral was demolished by soviets in 1938) and paintings from the Kherson museum (almost all the exhibit were stolen by russians).

You can take a look, read more about each piece, and purchase shawls and scarves here: https://u24.gov.ua/stolenart

[manuhigueras]

Every painting, every graphic work, every piece of artwork, everything we identify, is indisputable proof that the stolen works (at least these) are in the hands of Russian art looters.

Ukraine’s Kherson Art Museum claimed 100 artworks were looted by Russian forces, citing a “propaganda video” filmed in a Crimean museum. This startling revelation allegedly represents only less than one percent of the cultural treasures plundered from Ukrainian institutions. Another 15,000 objects were reported missing amid extensive trafficking of cultural property during the ongoing war.

[blueiscoool]

Moscow Auction House Sells a $1 Million Painting Stolen from a Ukrainian Museum

In Russia, Ukrainian artist Ivan Aivazovsky’s painting “Moonlit Night” has been put up for auction, according to Ukraine’s former Deputy Attorney General and Prosecutor of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, Gyunduz Mamedov, who has reported the auction plans.

Russia’s looting and destruction of Ukrainian museums and cultural heritage sites have resulted in significant losses, with nearly 40 museums plundered and almost 700 heritage sites damaged or destroyed since the invasion began in February 2022, causing cultural losses estimated in the hundreds of millions of euros.

The first report that “Moonlit Night” will be the main lot of the auction, which will take place at the Moscow Auction House on 18 February, appeared on the Telegram channel by Russia’s state-funded news agency RIA Novosti, noting that the painting was estimated at 100 million rubles (approximately $1.09 million) before the sale.

‘In 2017, [Interpol], at the request of [Prosecutor’s Office of the Republic of Crimea], put the paintings on the international wanted list. Thus, Russia openly disregards [international law], as according to the 1970 UNESCO Convention, the export of cultural properties and transfer of ownership is prohibited,” Mamedov emphasized on X.

In 2014, during the early stages of Russia’s occupation of Crimea, Aivazovsky’s painting “Moonlit Night” was illegally transferred to the Simferopol Art Museum, along with 52 other artworks.

In 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, some of his works were destroyed in an airstrike on the Kuindzhi Art Museum in Mariupol, and others were looted by Russian forces from Mariupol and Kherson museums, including “The Storm Subsides,” which was moved to the Central Taurida Museum in Simferopol, Crimea.

[folklorespring]

RESOURCES TO LEARN MORE ABOUT UKRAINE IN ENGLISH:

1. News and articles

Hromadske

Kyiv Independent

Ukraïner

2. Twitter

Writings from the war

United24

Ukraine Explainers

Ukrainian Art History

Ukrainian LGBTQ+ Military

ukrartarchive

Alice Zhuravel

Тетяна Denford

Oriannalyla

ліна

Mariya Dekhtyaruk

3. Instagram

Libkos (war photography)

rafaelyaghobzadeh (war photography)

mariankushnir (war photography)

marikinoo (illustrator)

olga.shtonda (illustrator)

polusunya (illustrator)

4. Videos (subtitles)

One day of evacuation with combat medics

Testimonies of tortures and sexual assault done by russians

How village in Kherson region lived under occupation

"Winter on Fire" documentary

Mariupol before and after

Tragedy of Nova Kakhovka dam

City of Izium after deoccupation

Entire village that was held in a basement for a month by russians

Life near the frontline in Zaporizhzhia region

Vovchansk after heavy russian shelling

"20 Days in Mariupol" documentary

5. TikTok

qirimlia

yewleea

thatolgagirl

showmedasha

ukraineisus

new4andy (all of the above accounts are educational, this one funny)

6. Other

National Museum of Holodomor Genocide (Holodomor and Digital History sections on a website have a lot of sources to learn about Holodomor)

Izolyatsia Must Speak (information about torture chamber in the russian-occupied Donetsk)

War Stories from Ukraine

Virtual museum of destruction in Kyiv region

Chytomo (about books and publishing)

Free translated books

Old khata project (photography project about rural architecture)