The National Gallery in London has renamed Ukrainian dancers a painting by the French impressionist painter Edgar Degas known until then as Russian dancerssaid Monday the museum, challenged on this work since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The London museum explained “having updated the name of the painting to better reflect the subject of the work”, in a statement sent to AFP.
Now titled Ukrainian dancersthe painting by the French painter (1834 – 1917) depicts dancers with blue and yellow ribbons in their hair, the colors of the Ukrainian flag.
“It is almost certain that these dancers are Ukrainian rather than Russian,” the museum writes in the description of the painting published on its website.
“Since Russia launched the war in Ukraine, I have only thought about this work. The fact is that the dancers are not Russian and never have been,” Tanya Kolotusha, a Ukrainian living in London, wrote on Instagram on March 14, calling on the museum to ask it to amend the name of the painting.
“Russia/the Russians appropriated and still appropriate many elements of Ukrainian culture,” she added.
The National Gallery replied the next day, saying it had changed the title of the work.
“It is important to find our cultural heritage and to name it correctly,” Ms. Kolotusha told AFP on Monday, denouncing the current invasion as “also an attack on culture”.
In a column published at the end of March in the German newspaper Der Spiegelthe director of the Ukrainian Institute in London Olesya Khromeychuk had also underlined the place of culture in the war in Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin “has one of the greatest armies in the world, but he also has other weapons. Culture and history have a predominant role in its arsenal,” she said.
“For example, every visit to a gallery or museum in London with exhibits of USSR art or film reveals deliberately false or simply lazy interpretations of the region as an infinite Russia, such as the current Russian president would love to see her,” she added.