An album-cum-catalogue entitled From Red through Yellow-Blue to Orange (Kyiv, Oranta publishers, 2004-2005) has just been published. This gorgeous folio-sized book (668 pages and more than 600 illustrations) is fascinating from the artistic and esthetic angle. But even more important is the content. This unique publication illustrates the main trends in the development of 20th-century Ukrainian art. Much was written on this subject in the Soviet Union, which passed under the sign of socialist realism. Yet, art critics were reluctant, even afraid, to state that this officially sanctioned art style was not as homogeneous as it appeared. Moreover, well hidden from the public eye was art that was not socialist realist and more than just an artistic method. This was a kind of mythologization, which for many decades dominated one-sixth of the planet, i.e., the USSR. So was socialist realism art or an ideological instrument? Were artists creators or servants of ideological institutions? Can socialist realism lay claim to a place in the history of art or is it just the symbol of a political system that has irreversibly sunk into oblivion? You will find answers to all these questions in this extraordinary album and catalogue.
The book will appeal to both ordinary art lovers and connoisseurs, including collectors, artists, and art historians. In addition to what may be called self-explanatory illustrations, the catalogue features articles by leading Ukrainian art historians and art critics.
The book’s author and chief editor Liudmyla BEREZNYTSKA is known to the general public as the owner of L-Art, one of Kyiv’s most interesting galleries, situated in Andriivsky Uzviz. She is also a respected collector, and an associate professor at the Department of the Theory and History of Arts at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture. What motivated her to take on this titanic job?
“Everything began with the collection. I started working on it more than 10 years ago, when I founded the L-Art Gallery, which from the very outset identified the art of socialist realism as its specialty. When the collection grew to more than 200 works on Soviet life, several fundamental studies on this subject were published in Russia and Britain. This helped shape the concept of the collection, stirring up reflections on the specific features of Soviet Ukrainian art.”
“Many Ukrainian and especially foreign art enthusiasts may be surprised to hear this. For Soviet art is seen as something monolithic.”
“This is a misconception. Yes, Ukrainian and Russian realism were assigned the same ideological task — to create the ideal image of Soviet society, but they differed in the ways of achieving expressiveness. Ukrainian artists emphasized the joy of being and thus preferred bright colors, sometimes to the detriment of the subject, while their Russian colleagues insisted on the priority of representation. Socialist realism did not emerge from a void or blank space. The Ukrainian artistic school was founded by masters who had received their basic education in Europe and, naturally, introduced European figurative culture into Ukraine’s artistic environment.
“The project From Red through Yellow-Blue to Orange is not just a collection of 20th-century graphic art. Rather, it is an attempt to describe contradictory and ambiguous processes within the artistic life of a totalitarian culture and the particularities of its manifestations during the ‘Thaw’ and ‘stagnation’ periods. This collection also illustrates the idea of the specific features of an art that performs different, if not directly opposite, functions: ideological (mythological), medial (when art is used as a social technology for directing society, which shapes myth), and esthetic.”
“In my opinion, the catalogue has a broader task. You’re also telling readers about fringe art in relation to the dominant socialist one.”
“In amassing the collection, I understood that talking exclusively about Soviet artifacts would not allow me to draw a realistic picture of the various art movements in Ukraine. Therefore, we complemented the officially-approved art pieces with items that can be called Soviet only in time-related terms. The collection was expanded to include pictures that not only demonstrated the dissent of their creators but were also comparable to examples of foreign art. These works can be found in the catalogue’s section “The NEO and POST Situation as Part of the Soviet Ideologeme.”
The collection also contains such important instruments of Soviet ideological manipulation of human, or to be more exact, mass psychology, as agitprop posters and tapestries, and Soviet mass-produced plastic art items. Nor could we exclude naive art as the best reflection of the depth of Ukrainian esthetic preferences. This art is presented in the collection with the works of the world-famous artist Maria Priymachenko.
“The final touch to the collection is the revolutionary (from the viewpoint of the late 1980s) art of the ‘perestroika’ period. The ‘new wave’ (Ukrainian version of trans-avantgarde) exposed the rift that existed between social-oriented Soviet art and the art of socially apathetic young people.”
“I daresay that it was our life or, to be more exact, the Orange Revolution, that introduced the ‘final touches’ to the collection and the catalogue.”
“Yes, quite unexpectedly we included in the collection a few works of the art group REP (Ukrainian acronym for Revolutionary Experimental Space) from the revolutionary Maidan. This is the end of the book.”
