The first-ever exhibition of Ukrainian art from the 1970s opens in the National Art Museum on Sept. 20. The decade is said to be the most underrated period in Soviet art.
Kyiv-based art curator Yevhen Bereznitsky has brought together a collection of 120 works by 20 artists who worked in Soviet Ukraine in the 1970s. Most works come from private collections, including Bereznitsky’s personal art collection. The show features the works of Yuriy Zorko, Tetiana Yablonska, Arkadiy Chichkan and others.
“Not much was said or written about the art of this decade, unlike the previous one, in the 1960s. So I thought it would be interesting to look into it,” says Bereznitsky. “Unlike the previous generation, who actively protested against the existing ideology, artists of the 1970s were very inwardly oriented. That’s the time when the term “internal emigration” (passive protesting against the state through avoiding its political and social life) was coined.”
In the USSR, the 1970s was a decade of Leonid Brezhnev’s severe rule. It was a time when banned literature was secretly shared, the police hunted for underground concertgoers and students were thrown out of colleges for telling political jokes. Altogether it was known as “Zastoy,” or the Stagnation Era. In the world of Soviet art, it was a time when socialist realism was resisted, the dominant style of art.
Fed up with it, Soviet artists of the 1970s craved for formalism, an abstract method that the authorities criticized.
“Their (the artists’) way of protesting was sabotaging state orders by adding formalistic elements to their works,” says Bereznitskiy.
State orders were assigned through the Artists Union, a trade union. Since there was no such thing as private orders, artists could only count on the job they got from the state. State orders included jobs like wall paintings in village concert halls that paid well.
Bereznitsky says that “artists were never poor” and notes that most of them could afford a car, which on average cost around 7,000 rubles. The average monthly salary of a Soviet citizen in the 1970s was around 140 rubles.
Alexander Pavlov, a Kyiv artist, remembers how he suffered from the Artists Union’s limitations of how much each member was allowed to earn through the month.
“For me, it was 600 rubles. And even that was a high limit, I had to fight to get it. Others had even smaller limits,” he recalls.
According to Pavlov, to exceed this level the artists would agree between themselves to share orders secretly. In these agreements, those who didn’t run for the maximum payments, unofficially passed the orders they got to other colleagues.
The “Silent Protest” exhibition features works that weren’t commissioned by the Artists Union. It doesn’t concentrate on any genre, and instead shows portraits as well as still life pieces and scenic paintings.
One of the pieces, “The Swans” by Tetiana Yablonskaya, shows a naked woman brushing her hair. The subject’s massive figure brings to mind the Soviet wall mosaics that are still seen in many cities of former Soviet countries. Another look at portrait art is offered by Zoya Lerman. Her painting called “Oksana. Amateur Arts Director in Rakita Village” shows a woman sitting in national costume, painted with sharp bleak brush strokes.
The exhibited paintings are testament to what Bereznitsky calls “the silent revolution that slowly killed social realism.”
Kyiv Post lifestyle editor Olga Rudenko can be reached at [email protected].
