Mystetskyi Arsenal in Kyiv

Cubo-Futurism: Oleksandr Bohomazov

Cubo-Futurism as a phenomenon in European art arose from the intersection of two trends: French Cubism (Picasso, Braque, Gris and others) and Italian Futurism (Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà, Severini and others). The term itself appeared in late 1912, proposed by the French critic Marcel Boulanger. Some historians regard Robert Delaunay’s painting Cardiff Team from that year as one of the first works in this movement.

Oleksandr Bohomazov (1880–1930) was one of the fathers of Ukrainian Cubo-Futurism. He spent nearly all of his short life in Kyiv, apart from three relatively brief periods in Moscow, Finland, and the Caucasus. Unlike his friends Oleksandra Ekster and David Burliuk, Bohomazov lacked European studies and close contacts with the West. But his friendship with them inspired his pursuits, and it was no doubt partly thanks to Ekster, who traveled between Kyiv, Paris and Milan, that Bohomazov had an insight into Italian Futurism.

In his graphics and paintings from the 1910s, the analytic arrangement of forms achieves an artistic synthesis in which the object is shown in the dynamics of movement. Motion and rhythm are keys to his thinking about art. Prison in the Caucasus, Composition, Portrait, Portrait of a Woman and other paintings from the Mystetskyi Arsenal can be read—apart from their undisputed value in and of themselves—as a practical realization of Bohomazov’s concepts as an artist and theoretician. We see in them the movement and dynamic, the rhythm of lines and planes, and the juxtaposition of hues which Bohomazov wrote about in his treatise Painting and Elements from 1914. He traced there the birth of form from the motion of the ur-element, the point; he formulated his concept of rhythm, examined the properties of the line, and touched on the issue of the emotional aspect of color—an issue that became the subject of systematic study at the Bauhaus in Weimar in the 1920s. He was one of the first artists in the world to foresee the liberation of art from the material reference to reality, approaching the idea of objectless abstract painting. He called the simple square the perfect form in art—a year before Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square. He assigned to the artwork an autonomous place within the triad of “artist–painting–viewer.” In essence, Bohomazov proposed for the art of the 20th century not only a new form and style, but also a new concept of painting.

In his teaching, Bohomazov expanded on the thinking from his theoretical treatise. The course he developed in formal and technical disciplines became an essential part of modern artistic education. From the beginning of their studies, students were trained to think not in terms of plot or narrative, but in categories of art: color, line, form, space. Bohomazov’s theoretical achievements did not break through during his lifetime, but the issues he raised coincided with world-famous theoretical works of those years: Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911) and Point and Line to Plane (1926), and Malevich’s Suprematism (1920).

Unfortunately, the artist’s pedagogical ideas were not continued after his death. For a long time, in the USSR it was forbidden to mention the distinguished Cubo-Futurist. It was only in the late 1960s that his name was rescued from oblivion: people began to write about him, exhibitions of his works were held in Kyiv, and European avant-garde scholars such as Jean‑Claude Marcadé, Jean Chauvelin and Andréi Nakov drew attention to him. Today the work of this painter, theoretician and teacher is gradually approaching the recognition it deserves in the history of the global avant-garde. Works by Oleksandr Bohomazov can be viewed in such venues as the Guggenheim and MoMA in New York and Museum Ludwig in Cologne, in addition to valuable private collections of the avant-garde.

Kharkiv as the center of the avant-garde movement: Vasyl Yermylov

In the 1920s, Kharkiv briefly became the Ukrainian center of the global avant-garde. The new Ukrainian capital was garbed in a dream of reinforced concrete, boasted the biggest square in Europe, crowned by the “architecton” of the Derzhprom (State Industry) building, and brought together all of the artistic schools of Ukraine under the sign of Constructivism. The Kharkiv visual culture was born in the dualities of “nature—industry,” “Russian province—Ukrainian capital,” “gray city—center for the artistic avant-garde.” The energy from the collision of these opposites exploded every now and then in various manifestations of avant-garde art.

One of the emblematic figures of the Kharkiv avant-garde was Vasyl Yermylov (1894–1968), a universal artist identified with Constructivism. He practiced in nearly every field: painting, graphics for books and industry, and design, which he inclined towards in his youth as a student at art and industry workshops. He designed packaging, matchboxes, and factory signs. He created fonts and his own typography. In the 1920s, the peak of his career, the notions of the “Yermylov typeface” and the “Yermylov school” took root. At the start of the decade he moved from relief spatial painting to wood reliefs lasered with color. His explorations at that time fit into the general direction of the avant-garde toward new forms of art and departure from the easel painting. Texture, the use of local colors, and materials such as wood, metal, fabric, nails and screws, all became important. The reliefs are among the fullest realizations of his artistic thinking.

An undeniable success of Yermylov as a designer was his design for the Ukrainian section of the Soviet pavilion at the international exhibition Pressa in Cologne (Vadym Meller also participated in the exhibition). For the show, Yermylov made a special moving construction as well as two large-scale mock-ups of newspapers for the wall, Kanatka and Generator. But the most important exhibit proved to be a series of 20 albums titled Ukraine in a format of 60 × 50 cm (each weighing up to 10 kg), with wooden cladding covered in a traditional sash from a folk costume using leather and metal.

The work from 1924 known as Harlequin is one of the programmatic pieces from this period. The rhythmic construction of the composition and the sense of style combine here with fluency in the treatment of the materials. It is also a bow towards an earlier fascination with Cubism—an echo of Picasso’s “guitar series.” In 1925 Yermylov joined the Constructivist group Avanhard, led by Valerian Polishchuk, a poet and advocate for a synthesis of the arts. Soon Yermylov became a leader of the group, creating the cover and layout for the journal Avangarde.

A few words about Viktor Palmov

Four paintings by the theoretician and teacher Viktor Palmov are among the gems of the Mystetskyi Arsenal collection. Palmov was born in what is now Russia, but he developed fully as an artist in Kyiv, where he was invited in 1925 to become a lecturer at the Kyiv Art Institute alongside Vladimir Tatlin, Kazimir Malevich and Oleksandr Bohomazov. It was in Kyiv that he created a painting series in which he attempted to employ new means of expression, where color takes the lead and the theme follows. His formal explorations were captured in the notion of “color painting,” which he declared in the journal Nova Generatsiia. In quantity, Palmov’s legacy is modest, making each work exceptionally valuable. The four canvases from the collection of the Mystetskyi Arsenal, from various years, allow one to trace almost the entire creative path of the artist, who died from an unsuccessful operation in 1929, just when his activity as an artist and teacher was flourishing.

Variation on a Theme of Gauguin, from the early 1920s, is a Cubo-Futurist interpretation of the Gauguinesque Tahitian paradise, where it is as if time does not exist. Instead of peace and solace there is tension; instead of carefree beauties there is a man busy shoveling the ground. Also from this period is Ukrainian Village in Winter, impressions from the settlement of Priamurye, where fate would lead Palmov along with his friend David Burliuk. The painting was shown at a large exhibition of avant-garde artists in Japan, where it won the gold medal. Evident in the work is the characteristic painting style of Palmov, which would reach its definitive shape in his Kyiv period. An excellent example of that style is Beach from 1926. This spontaneous, childlike drawing is led by patches of color only suggesting a theme. The main weight is carried by color, of varying intensity and shades in different parts of the canvas. In Palmov’s work, color “steers” the viewer’s emotions, building the dynamics of the painting while leaving the impression of direct improvisation.

Neo-Primitivism: Mariia Syniakova

The name of Mariia Syniakova-Urechyna (1890–1984) links to a page, or indeed a chapter, in Ukrainian and Russian art, known as “Neo-Primitivism” or “Folk Futurism.” In the 1910s she exhibited with the art associations Soyuz Molodyozhi and Seven Plus Three, alongside works by Kazimir Malevich, David Burliuk, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov and Marc Chagall. She was the only woman among the five signatories of Velimir Khlebnikov’s Futurist declaration “The Trumpet of the Martians” (Kharkiv, 1916), and also belonged to the Presidents of Planet Earth, an association founded by Khlebnikov. Her style formed during those years. The “irregular,” rough drawing, the blurred “fluid contour,” and ornamental composition are the result of a fascination (perhaps under the influence of David Burliuk) with folk art, lubok printing, and Oriental art, which she studied during travels around Central Asia.

Her family home in the khutor settlement of Krasna Poliana near Kharkiv, where the Syniakova sisters lived during the First World War and the early 1920s, became a magnet for artists from Kharkiv, Moscow and Petrograd. It became a sort of artistic colony, visited by writers, poets and painters such as Velimir Khlebnikov, Boris Pasternak, Nikolai Aseyev, Hryhorii Petnikov, Evgeny Agafonov, Boris Kosarev, Vasyl Yermylov, and many others. Mariia Syniakova was the center of this Krasna Poliana colony, and she regarded the time she spent there as the most beautiful period of her life.

The theme of war, present in a series of works by Syniakova from the 1910s and early 1920s, sharpened the expression of her art. The phenomenon of the art colony on the Syniakov estate testifies to the activation in Kharkiv culture of the aspects of “feminized” and “warrior” aspects of the early avant-garde. The watercolor from the Mystetskyi Arsenal collection titled War is one of the works from this period. Soldiers in blue uniforms rape and kill. A severed head, bodies of the fallen lying in a row, an angel pointing out something to a woman in the upper part of the composition. Another angel with arms raised, from whose open mouth a yellow light gushes. Room for conjecture and interpretation. We witness a scene of the Apocalypse—a bacchanalia of violence among the flowers.

Syniakova’s artistic path is clearly divided into two periods: the Kharkiv or Krasna Poliana period (1908–1922) and the Moscow period (1922–1984), when she abandoned the avant-garde (working mainly as an illustrator of books, but often working side jobs as well). In the 1970s she participated in the dissident movement, which obviously irritated official circles, not just artistic ones. Her first individual exhibition was held at the Writers’ Union in Kyiv in 1969.

Projectionism: Solomon Nikritin

Solomon Nikritin, an avant-garde artist from Chernihiv, is known in art history for his painting, monumental murals, agitprop decorations of squares in Kyiv and Moscow, theater scenery, and particularly the philosophy and method of Projectionism.

Nikritin was tied to Kyiv by years of study and early work. He was trained in Oleksandr Murashko’s studio at the Kyiv Art School and also in Oleksandra Ekster’s studio. After several years in Moscow he returned to Kyiv and worked there during the turbulent years of 1917–1920. He supported the revolution, intensely studied Picasso, Matisse and Cézanne, sought to combine sounds and images, and was active in the Jewish Culture League (an organization promoting Jewish education and culture). At the same time, the idea was maturing in him of a new direction in painting—one that would not train craftsmen making decorative objects but new bearers and creators of culture. By 1922 he had formulated Projectionism (in opposition to Constructivism) and founded the Projection Theater based on concepts of biomechanics. The essence of this direction was to combine the achievements of science and art. According to Nikritin, the artist/projectionist would be like a Renaissance scientist/experimenter. In 1924 the group of Projectionists included such figures as Kliment Redko, Sergei Luchishkin, Oleksandr Tyshler, Mikhail Plaksin and Mykola Triaskin. The group clearly made a mark at the First Discussional Exhibition of Associations of Active Revolutionary Art in Moscow (1924), where Nikritin continued work on the program for a new analytical art. In 1925 he was officially named the director of the Analytical Cabinet at the Museum of Painting Culture, serving in this function until the institution was closed in 1929.

The painting A Trip Around the World from the Mystetskyi Arsenal collection probably dates to this Kyiv period of intense explorations. It was painted in oils on a nearly square board. Approximately in the center, against an orange and ocher background, we see two figures in full profile. A man with a long dark beard and mustache embraces a woman with his right arm, while in his left holding a blue globe crowned by a red banner—a symbol of the victorious revolution. The woman’s face is turned toward the viewer, and her short chestnut hair seems to flow. These figures “ride” in a tiny automobile, totally out of scale to themselves, while we clearly perceive movement from the left to the right. The figures’ poses create an impression of the grotesque—a combination of the real and the fantastical. As with many Jewish artists of that time, the painting combines avant-garde means with attention to the details of everyday life (often drawn from the world of Jewish shtetls). The naïveté of the drawing calls to mind another member of the Culture League, Marc Chagall. The protagonists’ faces are marked by a few lines, and warm tones predominate in the spare range of hues. The artist is not painting a landscape, and gives no indications as to the place, time or season. Together, the title, the globe and the round line of the horizon convey the motif of a circle, a sphere. Interestingly, Nikritin’s diary includes many entries about the relationship between form, harmony, numbers and sounds, as well as his own neologisms such as “circle joy,” “circle creation,” and “circle knowledge,” and sketches analyzing the movement of the human body inscribed in a circle, as in the work of Leonardo da Vinci.

Like many other avant-garde artists, Solomon Nikritin was criticized by the authorities, but fortunately he survived. Although he ceased to present his creative experiments publicly, he did not abandon his researches. He taught, and implemented his concepts in design. During World War II he served as a sergeant in an aviation technical unit. He died in Moscow in 1965.

Boychukism: Mykhailo Boychuk

Boychukism (Mykhailo Boychuk’s school of Ukrainian monumentalism) was an unusual but also tragic phenomenon in Ukrainian Modernism. The ideologue and promoter of the movement, Mykhailo Boychuk, developed his own artistic and aesthetic conception in which monumentalism is interpreted broadly. At first glance it seems like simply a variety of mural painting. But the specific organization of the image and condensation of form characteristic of these works—rejecting the incidental and irrelevant—can make even small artistic forms monumental.

The pursuits of the Boychukists fully accord with the modernist strivings of the turn of the 20th century, targeting anachronistic, realistic means of expression. Among the artistic movements of that time, Boychuk was probably most influenced by the members of the French group Nabis, professing ideas of the synthesis of the arts and eagerly employing religious motifs. A reference to the principles of Byzantine art, the frescoes of the Italian Proto-Renaissance, and national folklore, their selection and synthesis, combined with the latest artistic idiom, became the foundation of Boychukism. Unlike the Nabis group in France, Boychuk’s agenda was directly linked with social processes underway in Ukraine, typical for the art of stateless nations, which at the beginning of the 20th century sought to overcome the heritage of colonialism and create a national culture based on their own historical experience and tradition. The closeness between the works of the Boychukists and the work of the Mexican muralists, born out of similar historical circumstances, is no coincidence.

In Paris, where works by Mykhailo Boychuk, Mykola Kasperovych and Sofia Zengo were first shown at the Salon des Indépendants in 1910, the new direction was dubbed “Renovation Byzantine.” In 1917 Boychuk became one of the eight founding professors of the Ukrainian Academy of Fine Arts (from 1922 the Kyiv Art Institute, today the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture). In the 1920s he led the studio of monumental art. His students—boldly calling themselves “builders of the Universe”—formed a community, along the lines of a medieval guild, where works were created collectively, from the production of paints and brushes down to the finished piece. Focused around the charismatic master, they believed in the great mission of monumentalism, to embody the ideal model of a harmonious life. Their method sought to encompass all spheres of everyday life through a synthesis of various arts. At that time, with the support of the authorities they could implement their ideas in monumental groups of frescoes, in printing, applied design and scenography.

In 1919–1935 the Boychukists executed over ten ensemble compositions of monumental painting in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa and the Odessa region. The polychromes at the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee Peasant Sanatorium on the Khadzhibey Estuary near Odessa (1928) are regarded as the pinnacle of their work. Here the theme focuses on the everyday life of the Ukrainian countryside, transformed into a sacred act. But in the late 1920s the political winds shifted, as industrialization elevated the worker to the central position in social processes. The Boychukists began to be accused of propagating “bourgeois/kulak spontaneity,” were condemned as formalists, and ultimately were arrested for alleged “involvement in a counter-revolutionary nationalist fascist organization.”

Mykhailo Boychuk and his students Ivan Padalka, Vasily Sedlyar, Ivan Lypkivsky, Mykola Kasperovych, and Sofiia Nalepinska‑Boychuk were all executed in 1937–1938. The school of Ukrainian monumentalism was liquidated. Its adherents were persecuted and imprisoned, and their works destroyed. Their frescoes were chiseled from the walls. Even as late as 1952, some of Boychuk’s works from the collection of the State Museum of Ukrainian Art (today the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum in Lviv) were burned.

From the legacy of the “grand style” planned by the Boychukists, only a few sketches and small-scale projects have survived. Small fragments of polychromes were uncovered beneath layers of plaster in a studio at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv, at the Students’ Palace (now an office building) and at the Odessa Youth Theater.

A few fragments of the Boychukists’ legacy were retained in Poland, particularly works by three women artists from the Parisian “Renovation Byzantine.” From 1918 onward, Zofia Baudouin de Courtenay lived in Poland, where she executed frescoes and stained glass for churches in Gdańsk, Oliwa and Częstochowa. Her most famous work, the monumental At the Source, is found at the National Museum in Warsaw. The museum also has temperas by Helena Schramm from 1911–1925, and fragments of decorations by her can be seen at the church in Olchowa in Podkarpacie. Unfortunately, less is known about another participant in the “Renovation Byzantine,” Janina Lewakowska, who showed her works in 1924 at Czesław Garliński’s Art Salon in Warsaw. For some time these three women artists worked together, following the collective model proposed by Boychuk, but they pursued separate paths starting in the mid-1920s.

It is also worth mentioning Karol Hiller, better known as a Constructivist. In 1919–1921 he studied in Boychuk’s studio at the Ukrainian Academy of Fine Arts. Today we know his early works, influenced by Boychukism, from photographs. His only monumental work is the fresco Spring in the collection of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź.

It is hard to point to any other school of Ukrainian art that experienced similar persecution, even in totalitarian times. The Boychukists were both the creators and the victims of a utopia—part of the new Ukrainian myth. They joined in the creation of the “grand style” embodying the era of national rebirth in the first three decades of the 20th century. This generation of artists, nourished by the hope of revolution—national and spiritual—failed to foresee the consequences of social eruption, and paid the ultimate price for the opportunity of artistic experimentation.

Suprematism: Kazimir Malevich

Suprematism, the school of avant-garde art launched in 1915 by Kazimir Malevich, took its name from the Latin supremus (the highest). It has to do with the “elevation of pure artistic sensation” over the realistic depiction of an object, and ultimately the rejection of depicting the real world. Suprematism is characterized by abstract forms and pure colors. Juxtapositions of squares, circles and rectangles, and contrasting colors, create a simultaneous sense of equilibrium and dynamic motion. Malevich believed that the new visual language, situated outside of reality, would become an instrument of pure emotion and spirituality, consequently opening up access to a higher dimension of human existence. Unlike the ideologues of other trends from the early decades of the 20th century, who perceived art as an instrument for social transformation, Malevich sought “pure art for art’s sake.” The radicalism of its ideas and the absolute rejection of the physical world made Suprematism one of the formative concepts of 20th-century art, and it still influences the artistic landscape today. Its visual manifesto is Black Square, which scholars regard as the second most famous painting in the world, after the Mona Lisa.

Malevich’s life was strongly tied to Ukraine in two periods. He was born in Kyiv in 1879, and until age 17 lived with his parents in villages and small towns in Podolia and in the Kharkiv and Chernihiv regions. During this early period, which shaped his view of art, the influence of the Ukrainian element was decisive, as the artist himself often stressed. His contacts with Ukraine revised in the late 1920s. He regularly visited Kyiv and became a professor at the Kyiv Art Institute, lecturing in the teaching division. As he put it, he “cured” students of realism, “painterly neurasthenia,” and “color phobia.” He also published in Nova Generatsiia and Avangard: Almanakh. Thirteen of his articles, mainly transcripts of his lectures, involved the history and theory of 20th-century art, including the function of art.

In those years, Malevich was working on his second peasant series, combining the formal inventions of Suprematism with figuration. According to researchers, it was these excursions to Ukraine, where the traditional rural world was disintegrating under the pressure of economic changes, that inspired him to create this series.

A Malevich exhibition was held in 1930 at the Kyiv Art Gallery—the last retrospective of his works during his lifetime. To this day, it remains the sole individual show of the artist’s works ever held in Ukraine. In Ukrainian museum collections, there are only a handful of works by Malevich, graphics, and thus a show could not be put together there without foreign loans. Against this background, the search for his paintings in Ukrainian collections has been a true sensation. One of these stories involves the painting now held by the Mystetskyi Arsenal.

Suprematist Composition 1 from 1916 is undoubtedly the most widely discussed art object in the Mystetskyi Arsenal collection. It reached the institution along with the collection of Ihor Dychenko (1946–2015), which his widow, Valeriya Virska‑Kotlar, donated to the Ukrainian people in October 2015. The provenance of the work is particularly intriguing, and entirely organic given the realities of the Soviet era, when art collecting was seemingly tolerated but remained a marginal activity. Under the letter of the law, art collecting could have been treated as illegal financial transactions or speculation. Antique stores and spontaneous “fairs” formed their own quasilegal microcosm. Truly valuable items were offered at unofficial auctions, during underground meetings arranged by personal contacts. According to the memoirs of the art historian Dmytr Horbachov, during such a “marginal” meeting in Kyiv in the 1970s, Ihor Dychenko purchased Suprematist Composition 1 from Moscow collectors who regarded it as a work from the school of Malevich. A few years later, citing research by the Grabar Art Conservation Center in Moscow, Dychenko announced that the painting was a work by Kazimir Malevich himself. It was displayed with this attribution at several exhibitions in the UK and Poland in the 1980s and 1990s. The motivation for collectors was clear—it was tempting to have the only Malevich painting in Ukraine in one’s own collection. But today we have grounds for challenging this version, primarily due to the uncertain provenance. Expert instruments based on artificial intelligence, which have recently become popular, have also undermined Malevich’s authorship. Examinations performed during conservation work in 2023 by specialists from the National Research and Restoration Center of Ukraine revealed the artist’s layer corresponding to the dating, but also numerous later layers. For now, this canvas should thus be referred to as a clear example of Suprematism whose author remains undetermined.