You're reading: Kyiv’s mysterious metro museum and the artist who is behind it

If you regularly take Kyiv’s metro to work, you may have seen Anatoliy Tartakovsky’s art portfolio along the way.

Bright and simple paintings of flowers, churches and landscapes hemmed in by light boxes along the escalators stand out from the regular advertising shots of food and celebrities.

With a sign Metro Museum underneath each image, they look almost like posters indicating there is a gallery somewhere here as well.

But there isn’t.

The 57-year-old Tartakovsky chose light boxes to exhibit his art to reach out to more people and give them a creative break from commercial marketing.
“I hate everything commercial,” he said sitting in the comfort of his small studio in the center of Kyiv.

“I see advertising everywhere and it bothers me a lot. So, I decided to somewhat dilute its presence with my art,” he added.

Affluent enough to be an avid traveler, Tartakovsky says he often paints abroad, but won’t discuss his benefactors and the cost of his paintings. He also won’t reveal how much he pays for the Kyiv metro light boxes.

Any questions about the commercial side of his metro project, which has been running for four years already and is estimated to cost more than $50 a week per light box, Tartakovsky bristles away.

“I am an artist, not a businessman. “Once a Bulgarian billionaire bought quite a few of my works, so I had a chance to travel the world and paint without worrying about money.”

Despite broad exposure, his creative light boxes don’t seem to attract more clients. Yet Tartakovsky says this will not stop him from using the metro as his art gallery.

“My father taught me not to think about art as a source of money,” Tartakovsky said referring to his late father Isaak, also a painter.

The father died in 1972, but independent Ukraine posthumously awarded him the People’s Painter title – the highest award in the field.

“The underwater world of the Red Sea” by Anatoliy Tartakovsky. (Courtesy)

“He used to say that I should follow my own path without copying anybody,” Tartakovsky said.

And so he did. Tartakovsky claims to have invented neo-impressionism. “The traditional idea of neoimpressionism by Georges Seurat is rubbish,” he says proudly.

According to Tartakovsky, the highly acclaimed 19th century French painter Seurat got carried away with the science component in neo-impressionism.

“I followed a different path. I wasn’t interested in all of those precise dots and measured brush strokes.

I gave in to emotions. If the sky seems yellow to me, I don’t question it. This is how I perceive it and it’s all that matters,” said the artist.

Art critic and chief editor of ArtUkraine magazine Alisa Lozhkina fails to recognize Tartakovsky’s exceptionality. “His art is secondary and doesn’t contain anything unique or new,” Lozhkina said. “It’s provincial.”

But the metro artist begs to differ. “I just know that my ideas are genius,” he says nonchalantly, leafing through his portfolio.

He stops at the photo, on which he is sitting next to the late Pope John Paul II.

“He liked this painting so much, I just gave it to him,” says Tartakovsky pointing at the image with a Biblical scene. “And I consider it an honor.”

Kyiv Post staff writer Alyona Zhuk can be reached at [email protected]