Ostap Vyshnia (perhaps best described as the Ukrainian Will Rogers —Ed.) wrote a satirical essay titled “On Ukrainian Studies,” about all those becoming “overly interested” in Ukraine, meaning flag-waving patriots who, driven by an uncontrollable urge to assert themselves, would lose common sense and awareness of reality, discrediting their own culture with all-embracing militant ambitions: “What is Ukraine? Mother-Ukraine is a state stretching from the Bay of Biscay to the Gobi Desert or Shamo [in Chinese]. It was founded 5,000 years before the autocephalous God created the world. The first man’s name was Ostap (not Ostap Vyshnia, for there were no last names at the time), and his wife was Chornobrova [Black-browed] Halia.” Funny? Remind you of anything? Suppose we look up the magazine Obrazotvorche mystetstvo [Fine Arts]. Here we find phrases such as “supremacy of the Ukrainian national idea” and “the Great Style of the Ukrainian arts”; culture of “the First Chosen People on earth,” a culture which is “the mother of all cultures of the world... whose language is the mother of all languages of the world...” (2001, No. 2). Or that “all crowns originate from the Aryan astrakhan hat.” We also find the “structure of the Ukrainian eye” (1994, No. 2) allowing the Ukrainians to see the world differently than the other peoples; even mythologizing allegations that “we are convinced that the Ukrainians are older than the Greeks,” or that “we are the carrier of the Mediterranean Tradition with its Atlantic-Daric sources and the Sumerian-Cretan-Frankish-Gatae-Cimmerian-Ukrainian chain in the Indo-European natural habitat” (1993, No. 3). Indeed, Ostap Vyshnia was brilliantly prophetic, forestalling today’s mind-boggling assumptions in his burlesque well over half a century ago: “Egyptian pharaohs, Henry of Navarre, the Bourbon dynasty, Roman Pope, and Ivan Kalita all lived in Ukraine. They were all Ukrainian hetmans, a fact concealed by Ilovaisky at one time...”
It is high time the Obrazotvorche mystetstvo’s performance were analyzed. It has been necessary since 1992 when M. Marychevsky became its editor, a man completely without professional training and adequate academic background. Ever since the periodical has consistently and insistently waged a policy of national aloofness, undisguised xenophobia, and obscurantism. Year in and year out its pages burn with an ardent search for enemies of Ukrainian culture and the editors find them in “Jewish-Freemason secret rites,” “everyday Muscovite mentality,” even in “the sinister role of the avant-garde.” Ukrainian art is threatened by the Devil, cosmopolitanism, the denationalizing “itinerants” movement [i.e., the “itinerant” artists of Russia — Levitan, Makovsky, Perov, Kramskoi, Riepin — setting forth the romantic tradition in the 1870s], distorting spirituality during the Renaissance, “degradation and inferiority of the Western arts,” and other “horrors.” The art studies and criticism department of the National Artists Union of Ukraine has on more than one occasion warned the union leadership to pay serious attention to the outrageous and impermissible policy of the magazine, stressing that the editors, using patriotic slogans, actually take an anti-Ukrainian position, instilling in the public mind a programmed conservative and shallow image of Ukraine, a far cry from its actual creative range. Regrettably, all such warnings have fallen on deaf ears.
Meanwhile, Obrazotvorche mystetstvo is Ukraine’s only periodical conceptually dedicated to the visual arts. It is financed by the National Artists’ Union including authors representing different ethnic groups and a variety of trends. Various events are held within and without its framework (e.g., exhibits, discussions, festivals, conferences) that are ignored by the magazine. The latter’s credo is clearly formulated by its editor-in-chief: “We are laying the foundations of the Ukrainian caste, including culture, particularly in the arts.” Nor is there anything coincidental about the way the magazine selects cultural phenomena in building its model of Ukrainian art, distorting the modern creative process and aggressively setting artists from different regions of Ukraine against each other. “It is only where the Ukrainian mentality is solid — for instance, in Zhytomyr, Kyiv, and Chernihiv oblasts — that the form of creation is truly national,” reads the issue of 1996, No. 1, while elsewhere, in Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and Donetsk “bastions of cosmopolitanism” are found.
Unfortunately, the artists’ union leadership do not seem to realize that the editors’ patriotic slogans, reflections on the “national form” and “national style” actually inherit all the colonial values left by the Russian and Soviet empires. It was then Ukraine was depicted as a sort of ethnographic reserve, isolated from the broad expanses of modern culture. There are constant references to the “decadent” West: “Western European art and culture, in their overall distorted manifestation, have ceased to exist.” (2001, No. 3). A craftswoman from a village in Vasylkiv district peremptorily declares that “Europe (let alone the United States) has lost too much ground in its cultural advance” (1998, No. 2), and that Ukrainian art, relying on the “astral destinies” of its native land and on “the eternal fire of Trypillia,” is actually merely transforming the Soviet model of art in a pseudo- national sense, which model likewise disowns world experience, cultivating its own superiority and singularity.
If one were to learn from such publications, other, even more threatening parallels become apparent: “The times of artists cultivating an aristocratic, even snobbish lifestyle have come to an end; the arts assume true cultural worth only when they are created by the people” (1998, No. 2). One is immediately reminded of Hermann Goering who said that art can be true only if understood by a man in the street. We all know what happens when a cook is allowed to govern and when culture is governed by the like of a buck private or a seminarian. In this context the appearance of the article “Ukrainian Art Academy in Lviv: The Period of the German Occupation.” (2001, No. 1) was only to be expected. It tells about “the remarkably intensive creative life” under the Nazi occupation, as evidenced by the foundation of Ukraine’s first variety show “Merry Lviv” in the fall of 1942. Ukrainian history is tragic, indeed, rich in dramatically complex paradoxes and controversies. Studying it is one of the top priority tasks of modern domestic art criticism. Yet discussing the “progress in Ukrainian cultural life” in a Nazi-occupied city, on whose streets people were constantly being killed and around which the world’s most devastating war was raging, requires special length and depth. Otherwise how can one face people that did not dance at the Merry Lviv in 1942 but shed their blood in trenches or were dying in concentration camps, spent weeks without leaving factories, drove plows instead or oxen, whose close and dear ones died at the front, who starved but never gave up struggle?
A lot can be said about the Obrazotvorche mystetstvo (but why? —Ed), pointing to its low professional level, lack of knowledge about the current status of the visual arts and criticism, lexical errors, and narrow coverage. Most alarmingly, however, it seems to pose the question: Do we have to analyze the specifics of the national creative tradition on a basis of blood relationship, or is the presence of “Ukrainian genes” the decisive criterion in allowing an artist to operate in the national creative space? This might be a rhetorical question, but the National Artists’ Union of Ukraine must provide a very specific answer.
The reason we at the art studies and criticism department send this message to The Day is the need to draw public attention to an edition which we believe not only fails to serve its professional purpose — elucidating the creative process in Ukraine — but also emerges as a source of ethnic, creative, and cultural discord in this society.
