Vivid utopias and bitter failure in the Royal Academy’s Ukrainian Modernism show — review

The room spins, the Earth moves, shapes float or soar, colours are a shifting rainbow prism, towns blend into rivers into countryside. Buildings abstracted into airy, blue-grey shards jolt against tilting roofs, and a lamppost just holds its ground above the rushing Seine in Alexandra Exter’s “Bridge. Sevres”. A thrusting blue train slices through rhythmic arcs of emerald fields in Oleksandr Bohomazov’s “Landscape, Locomotive”. Vadym Meller sets jagged cubes and triangles revolving round a pair of golden cones in “Composition”.

Our eyes settle on a figure, the orange-pink wooden horse carved with spirals in David Burliuk’s “Carousel”, but blink and he gallops away in a merry-go-round of gestural impasto and bold harsh lines. A black steed with purple eyes is up next on Burliuk’s canvas and, in the wings, a stunned-looking acrobat, haloed against a sky of turquoise pinwheels.

What a brilliant, opulent, dynamic first gallery greets the visitor entering the London Royal Academy’s small but revelatory new exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine 1900-1930s. Its core is works from Kyiv’s National Museum of Art, which embarked on a tour in November 2022, just before the city came under heavy bombardment, and have since crossed Europe: Madrid, Cologne, Brussels, Vienna. London is the final stop.

The show’s fascination is the convergence of familiar greats — Exter, Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitzky — with artists mostly obscure in western Europe, such as Bohomazov and Meller. All were variously connected, by birth, education or profession, to Ukraine, and were active during its period as an independent republic (1917-21), as well as in Moscow, St Petersburg and elsewhere.

The works starring in the opening Cubo-Futurist display, made between 1909 and 1921, herald or reflect the decade of upheaval during the first world war and the Russian revolution of 1917, when French Cubism, Italian Futurism and German Expressionism were assimilated to create the wilder, dissonant Russian avant-garde, including artists from right across the former Russian empire. It flourished briefly before Soviet repression took hold and is history’s most compelling example of radical art matching the political moment.

Issakhar Ber Ryback welcomes the revolution in 1917 with “Shtetl”, houses and synagogues of a Jewish village split into fragments, reeling, pulled apart, surging upwards to translucent clouds, propelled by a current that seems to send material existence to a new spiritual realm. Lissitzky anticipates an aggressive new machine age in unfurling metallic planes pierced by a Bolshevik red arrow in “Composition” (1919). Man as automaton becomes concrete in Vasyl Yermilov’s superb, gleaming yellow-green metal-mask “Self-Portrait” (1922) — a proletarian Everyman.

As these suggest, geometric abstraction rapidly became the revolution’s house style. Pioneered by Malevich’s reductionist icon “Black Square” and Suprematist monochrome forms, abstraction infiltrated even works by painters trying to stay representational. Marko Epshtein abbreviates everyday figures into rushing Malevich-like curves and triangles: “Woman with Buckets”, “The Tailor’s Family” (both 1920). Mykhailo Boichuk fuses Cubo-Futurism with flattened Byzantine styles and the simplicity of woodcuts and folk-art decoration in portraits such as “Dairy Maid” (1922-23).

The revolution, said Marc Chagall, “disturbed me with the prodigal spectacle of a dynamic force which pervades the individual from top to bottom, surpassing your imagination, projecting itself into your own interior artistic world”. Swept up in revolutionary spectacle, artists became performers, painted posters, organised parades, staged dramas.

A magical section, drawing on fragile pieces from Kyiv’s Museum of Theatre, Music and Cinema showcases Meller’s lyrical Cubist designs for Bronislava Nijinska’s ballet studio in Kyiv in 1919, and Anatol Petrytskyi’s exuberant Constructivist costumes, bodies divided into cylinders, semi-circles, rhomboids darting simultaneously in different directions, for Moscow Chamber Ballet’s Eccentric Dances (1922).

Revolutionary art never fails to thrill and move, for its utopian energy and hope and for the tragedy of its destruction from the mid-1920s. By this point, many artists — Burliuk, Ryback, Chagall, Nijinska among them — had left, sensing the way the wind was blowing. Among those who remained, figuration was renewed, anticipating 1930s Soviet socialist realism.

The famous examples are Malevich’s harrowing blank-faced late figures; here Cologne lends “Landscape (Winter)”, probably painted in the late 1920s when he was teaching in Kyiv. It marks a return to stylised figural forms: contrasting colour blocks conjure a village seen through colossal forbidding tree trunks, like bars, in snowy white-grey and revolutionary red, and looping Suprematist curves. A single chunky figure hurries past a pink house in an otherwise dehumanised scene, timeless, spaceless — the winter of repression. Perhaps for his own protection Malevich predated the canvas 1909.

The trajectory of the avant-garde was explored expansively in the RA’s landmark Revolution: Russian Art 1917-32 in 2017, which included important loans from Moscow and St Petersburg. The condensed narrative here is broadly similar and, though less grand, is desperately affecting: the murders and exiles — Boichuk was executed as a “formalist” in 1937, Exter fled in 1924 under pretext of exhibiting at the Venice Biennale — and the little-known journeys of surviving Ukrainian painters.

Bohomazov went from exhilarated Cubo-Futurism — swirling abstractions of mountains and fertile plains in summer hues in “Landscape, Caucasus”, made while teaching in Armenia in 1915 — to “Sharpening the Saws” (1927): construction workers whose huge acid-coloured serrated saws are bold semi-abstract diagonals in a canvas memorialising Soviet labour. After his death, Bohomazov’s widow secretly preserved his paintings from Soviet authorities and Ukraine’s Nazi occupiers.

The versatile Petrytskyi evolved from the pure lilting abstraction of “Constructivist Composition” (1923) to Expressionist renderings of war-wounded in “The Invalids” (1924) and the outstanding caricature-portrait of Futurist poet Mykhailo Semenko (1929) sitting in Kharkiv’s avant-garde hotspot, the noisy smoky mirrored Café Poc — inscribed in Roman lettering to indicate Ukrainian artists’ aspiration to join a European liberal atmosphere and community.

It was not to be. Semenko was shot in 1937, and much of Petrytskyi’s work was destroyed, especially his portraits of Ukraine’s intelligentsia. He survived as a set designer in Kharkiv, Kyiv, Moscow and Almaty, Kazakhstan, dying in 1964.

This is a rich, always enlightening exhibition — although I find it a stretch to define this epoch of Ukrainian art as distinctive from Russian. Identities, as well as national territories, were fluid. Exter, born in Bialystok, Poland, to a Belarusian father and Greek mother, trained in Kyiv and lived in Paris, where Picasso was a friend. Bohomazov, born near Kharkiv, died in Kyiv, signed his canvases in Russian even during Ukraine’s period of independence. Malevich was born in Kyiv to Polish parents, trained first in Kyiv then for eight years in Kursk, Russia, made his name in Petrograd with the 1915 exhibition of “Black Square”, worked in Moscow, Petrograd, Vitebsk (Belarus) and Kyiv, and was buried at his request at his beloved hamlet Nemchinovka outside Moscow.

The strength of this show is rather to illustrate how, for all artists of the former empire, the Russian revolution was defining. As Exter’s pupil Kliment Redko said, “The experience of the ideas of the revolution captured the mind, but even more the heart, because the intoxication of the revolution does not know any borders.”

To October 13, royalacademy.org.uk

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