EDITORIAL: Accuracy, please (05/11/03)

EDITORIAL

Accuracy, please

On May 13, New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum will open a major exhibition of paintings and drawings by Kazimir Malevich, the Ukrainian founder of Suprematism and the avant-garde movement's most famous exponent. In a story published on March 31, The New York Times properly called Malevich, a "master" and a "seminal figure in modern art." It noted that "the Guggenheim show will feature important works never seen in the West," and that "there will be an elegant dinner and flurry of events, all celebrating the bold spirit of an artist who was also a prominent victim of Stalinist repression."

Unequivocally, these are accurate statements. However, the story, which is an interesting piece of reporting focused on Nikolai Khardziev, the man who became the self-appointed guardian of the Malevich legacy, flounders on a single misguided stroke of inaccurate information: it implies that Malevich was Russian and calls his art "Russian" avant-garde.

These are absolutely untrue and unfounded assertions with which we take exception. There is no need to cry disinformation or deception, for we do not believe it exists in this case. However, it is undoubtedly the result of past injustice and disinformation, most pointedly, a past Moscow-initiated state policy used by both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union over more than 300 years to turn into Russian everything notable and exceptional that is in fact Ukrainian. It is a problem to which the West has turned a passive and blind eye, in particular the Western press, through careless or less than accurate reporting, perhaps done at times merely for the sake of expedience. Nonetheless, it is injurious to the Ukrainian cultural legacy.

The fact is that Malevich is not Russian, but Ukrainian, and the avant-garde movement he founded developed in the depths of the fertile artistic loam of the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv. Most of the chief proponents of the avant-garde revolution of the 1920s - Vladimir Tatlin, Oleksander Bohomazov, Alexandra Exter, David Burliuk and Anatol Petrytskyi - came from the artistic communities of these two Ukrainian cities. We believe that for this reason it would be more accurate to represent the movement as the Ukrainian avant-garde.

Malevich, the leading figure of the movement, can only be considered Ukrainian. It is incontrovertible that he was born in Kyiv in 1878 before leaving to study and work in St. Petersburg. He returned to his hometown in the latter years of the 1920s and taught at the Kyiv Art Institute alongside Bohomazov until he was dismissed by Bolshevik authorities and then arrested.

Malevich's theoretical articles published in the Kharkiv magazine New Generation and in the Kyiv "Avant-Garde Almanac" were written in Ukrainian. This is indisputable as well because in the last decade they have been translated into French from the language of the originals. Prof. Dmytro Horbachov, a Kyiv-based Ukrainian specialist on the avant-garde movement and one of the world's authorities on Malevich, states that he has evidence the artist even wrote letters to friends and relatives in Kyiv in the Ukrainian language. And, finally, the artist himself, in his autobiography published posthumously in Stockholm in 1976, reminiscing about his colleague Valentyn Loboda, wrote: "He and I were Ukrainians."

Need we say more?

The Guggenheim Museum, which is publicizing Malevich as the leading figure of the "Russian" avant-garde, must pay heed to historical accuracy in the way it presents one of Ukraine's greatest artists.

Ukrainian Americans, and especially those in the New York metropolitan area, need to press upon the directors of the Guggenheim that it is in the best interest of the arts to represent Malevich truthfully: as a Ukrainian.

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