The Fourth Grand Antiquities Salon has been launched in Mystetsky Arsenal. Armament, icons, and paintings are traditional items of the exhibit of rare works of art. However, in opinion of those who came to the vernissage and were surveyed by The Day, the greatest achievement of this year’s Antiquities
Salon is retrospective of the Sixtier artist Viktor Zaretsky. “This is a unique exhibit,” a well-known politician and public figure Mykola Zhulynsky shared his impressions with The Day, “Last time broad audience had an opportunity to see the works by Viktor Zaretsky was 20 years ago, at the National Museum. And Mystetsky Arsenal has managed today to gather a lot of works of this great artist, whom Ukrainians only come to discover.”
The artist’s friend, Ukrainian painter, and master of decorative arts, Liudmyla Semykina recalls: “In his lifetime Zaretsky had only one full-fledged exhibit.” She says that a year before his death, in 1989, the artist’s friends arranged Zaretsky’s exhibit in Kyiv’s House of Scholars. The same year 29 works were purchased for the Christie’s auction. Before that separate Zaretsky’s works had been on display at republican exhibits, one at each.
General producer of the Ukrainian fashion Week Volodymyr Nechyporuk considers that Zaretsky’s exhibit and his theme for Ukrainians is extremely topical today. “He belonged to the time of great personalities. Now it is time for Ukrainians to determine, distinguish, and unite such people, great people with such strong mind, like Sixtiers, to drive Ukraine out of the mire of plunder and greed, in which it has stuck in,” he shared his thoughts with The Day.
“I immensely like Zaretsky’s aesthetics, his positive. He contradicted the time, in which he lived, he outstripped it, he was above,” actor, TV host, showman, and singer Antin Mukharsky noted. “Being a real artist is not merely a skill of painting. This is a need to live a painter’s life.” Mukharsky considers that today Ukrainians should learn from Zaretsky the skill to believe in one’s principles and not to give up one’s ideals. Neither power, nor fellow artists recognized Zaretsky. But he remained himself, in a sincere and consistent way, so he was distinguishable even among the artists. Zaretsky did with desperate devotedness what the “system” did not order. However, as an artist he managed to accomplish the most important thing for him – to become recognizable. “You can recognize Zaretsky at first sight. And this is extremely important. Like it is important for a composer to be recognizable from the initial three notes, it is also important for an artist to be recognizable in his work,” Mukharsky told The Day.
“The life path and creative destiny of already legendary for Ukrainian art artist Viktor Zaretsky in retrospective seem not only clear and expressive, but even a hypertrophic metaphor of life in Ukrai-nian’s soul in the Soviet reality of the 1950s-1980s,” says the inspirer of Zaretsky’s retrospective in Mystetsky Arsenal, author of the book The Scales of Viktor Zaretsky’s Destiny, Merited Worker of Art, Olesia Avramenko.
To represent Zaretsky’s work at the Grand Antiquities Salon, 14 museums and several private collectors joined their efforts. The retrospective turned out to be really impressive. It shows different Zaretsky, from realistic miners and dairymaids, who brought fame to the artist in the 1950s throughout USSR to mystical modern portraits of beautiful naked women in the style of Gustav Klimt’s secession. The first manifestations of Zaretsky’s free thinking and reflections over the “darned past” (Night Arrest, 1962, and Strangers, 1962) look very powerful, as well as his later well-thought works (Vasyl Stus. A Plowman, 1989).
“This is a great exhibit, the largest of all we had previously. It overcomes even a very representative exhibit in 1992, which showed paintings only from Kyiv collections. The exhibit for the first time has gathered the paintings from various galleries and private collections. Those include his famous canvases, like Dairymaids from the Kharkiv Museum, and other works,” Viktor Zaretsky’s son Oleksii noted.
“Vitia was a happy man. He had such a profession and left such a legacy. After the tragedy he did not put down his brush for a minute and saved himself by beautiful landscapes and dames. He depicted these women as queens and czarines. This was indeed a young soul, who perceived this world in such a way. I came to bow low before the talent of this genius,” People’s Artist of Ukraine Raisa Nedashkivska told The Day.
