(Madrid) Fleeing the Russian bombardments, some 70 works of art have been taken out of Ukraine to be exhibited at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid where they are safe from a destructive war for Ukrainian cultural heritage.
These paintings, most of which had never left the country, are brought together in the exhibition “In the eye of the cyclone. Avant-garde in Ukraine, 1900-1930”, which is held from Tuesday until April at the Thyssen and will then go to the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany, from June to September 2023.
The exhibition gives a “vision of what Russia is trying to destroy with war” and will show “how Ukraine is linked to Europe”, said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in a video released Monday during the presentation of the exhibition to the press in Madrid.
Delicate operation
These paintings – which range from figurative art to socialist realism via cubism and constructivism and were painted by artists such as Oleksandr Bohomazov, Vasyl Yermolov or Anatol Petrytsky – were evacuated from Kyiv on November 15, a delicate operation prepared for weeks.
The city was the target of Russian bombardment the day the paintings, mostly from the National Art Museum of Ukraine, were loaded onto trucks.
Luckily, “the trucks had left for two hours” and were “200 km from Kyiv” when the first bombs fell on the Ukrainian capital that day, said Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, daughter of Hans Heinrich Thyssen- Bornemisza, collector whose works are collected in the Thyssen Museum.
The convoy carefully avoided passing close to infrastructure that could be attacked all the way to the border with Poland, she said.
“We were in constant contact with the drivers, they updated us on the situation every ten minutes and everything went without incident” until the arrival at the Polish border, closed when a missile had just come off. kill two people in the Polish village of Przewodow.
In this moment of great tension, when the origin of this missile was unknown, Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza then appealed to the Ukrainian ambassador in Madrid who joined “all the politicians he knew in Poland and in Ukraine” in an attempt to get the convoy through.
“Twelve hours later, (the trucks) crossed the border” and could continue their journey to Spain, explained the collector, who is at the origin of the “Museums for Ukraine” initiative bringing together museums and foundations wanting highlight Ukrainian art in the midst of the Russian invasion.
fight for culture
“Cultural heritage is often a collateral victim of wars, but it sometimes finds itself attacked precisely because it is the essence of a country’s identity”, warned Krista Pikkat, the cultural director of UNESCO, which has identified damage to more than 200 cultural sites in Ukraine, including museums.
Beyond sheltering the works, the exhibition seeks “to show the cultural and artistic diversity of Ukraine […] for which Ukrainians are fighting so bravely at the moment,” said Katia Denysova, one of the curators of the exhibition, to the press on Monday.
The exhibition is organized chronologically from the 1910s, when Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire, to the 1920s, when the country joined the Soviet Union, until the 1930s during which several artists were victims of Stalinist purges and that Soviet realism became the only permitted style, she continued.
Visitors will be able to see paintings like Composition (1919-1920), a cubist-inspired work by Vadim Meller, The disabled (1924), a neo-Byzantine painting in ocher colors by Anatol Petrytsky, or even the Portrait of a soldier in the late 1920s by Kostiantyn Yeleva.
“It’s important to keep talking about the war, but with this project we want to show that Ukraine has a lot more to offer,” concluded Katia Denysova.