Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern is a Chicago-based historian and artist, born and raised in Ukraine. He is the Crown Family Professor of Jewish Studies in the History Department, Northwestern University, where he teaches a variety of courses on European and East European history and culture, including that of Ukraine. He has published half a dozen books, four of which were translated into Ukrainian. As an artist, he appeared at the Spertus Museum Gallery and the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago, The Ukrainian Museum and Ukrainian Institute of America in New York, at the Voznitsky Art Gallery in Lviv and the French Institute in Kyiv. Presently, the Zorya Fine Art Gallery in Greenwich, Conn., offers his work for sale, while the Ukrainian Institute of America will feature his new artworks in October.
A view of the exhibit at the Zorya Fine Art Gallery in Greenwich, Conn.
How does a nice Jewish Ukrainian boy from Kyiv wind up teaching, writing and painting in Chicago?
In the Kyiv of the 1970s-1980, I was neither Jewish nor Ukrainian. But I rejected the assimilationist vector of my immediate environment from early on and was deeply involved in a religious quest. At the top of my career as an assistant professor in comparative literature at Kyiv Shevchenko University (with a Ph.D. from Moscow), I was busy introducing Jorge Luis Borges, G.K. Chesterton, Leonardo Sciascia, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar and Jose Ortega y Gasset to Russian-language readers in Soviet Ukraine and beyond. My critical work on these authors – and my translations – appeared with the most prestigious Soviet publishers.
But my long religious quest took me at that time from eastern Orthodoxy through Zen through Anglo-Catholicism to Judaism. The rediscovery – or, more accurately, the invention – of my Judaism made me switch from the “rootless cosmopolitanism” of a homo Sovieticus to an observant Jew. A vigorous reassessment of my attitude to my Ukrainian connections followed immediately. A new identity required new intellectual endeavors – and I went to Boston to do my second Ph.D., at that time in Jewish history. Who knew I would be competitive on the U.S. market and would be able to get to Northwestern University, where I serve at present as the Crown Family Professor in Jewish Studies?
“Jona” by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern.
Writers, singers and poets are often painters. Scholars rarely venture into that territory. How did you become a painter?
In 2009, at a school reunion, my classmates reminded me that I was sketching and drawing during every lesson at school. Starting from the first grade. My parents seem to have known that and sent me to an art studio at the local Palace of Pioneers, where a mentor explained to students how to draw a skull. Since I wanted to draw the May Day demonstration, I did not stay there for long. My parents then asked the Kyiv-based artist David Miretsky to take me under his wing. I spent a year at his private studio. After the arrest and emigration of Miretsky, I remained on my own.
Weren’t you afraid you’d meet Miretsky’s fate?
You should take into consideration the quality and the level of talent. David Miretsky looked at the homo Sovieticus through a Breughelian prism. He is a genius of color. When he took part in his first group exhibit at the Kyiv Art Institute, Tatyana Yablonska looked at a couple of dozen works by various artists, including Miretsky, and said: “I see only one artist here.” But for the Soviet authorities, Miretsky’s talent was a challenge and an affront. It was quite different in my case. I was a person of much lesser talent who came very late to maturity. Why make me into a revolutionary by harassing me? Perhaps they would be able to harness me?
Did you have any run-ins with the KGB?
Unfortunately, my bad character came into play too often. “Rabbi” Friedrich Nietzsche used to say, “Live dangerously!” My friends and parents tried to protect me, instructing me how to keep my mouth shut and not to “tease the geese,” meaning challenges to the Soviet authorities. Most of the time, I listened to their warnings; sometimes I did not. Finding a balance was not easy, because I did not want to leave the USSR. Although my house was searched by the KGB in August 1979 and I was the target of at least two major denunciations in my student years, I was no revolutionary.
Yes, I was a pre-tenured assistant professor at the best university in the country, but I refused (twice) to collaborate with the KGB and rejected Communist Party membership with disgust. Meeting Miretsky’s fate was not difficult, avoiding it – and preserving my own integrity – was not easy.
Which is your greater love – scholarship or painting?
I cannot make do with one love (double entendre not intended). I delve into art to distance myself from my scholarship, to clear my mind for more complicated work and, most importantly, to ponder in visual language what I cannot or do not want to convey in words. That is to say, I begin as an artist exactly when I stop as a scholar.
Where do you draw inspiration for your images?
I use what I have read and studied, from biblical and rabbinic stories to literary and political myths, to shape my imagery. If some of my works could be considered a visual midrash (medieval rabbinic narratives based around the verses from the Pentateuch), then that means that I have to know the real midrash to invent a new visual narrative. People falling from the Tower of Babylon and perishing is an image from a famous rabbinic narrative. But, if you look closely, my Tower of Babylon is not necessarily a construction site in Mesopotamia…
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern’s “Okozvir.”
Stylistically, your paintings strike me as having been inspired by Marc Chagall and Maria Primachenko.
I discovered Marc Chagall very late. There were no albums in the USSR with his artwork available and no works of his in Soviet museums. In addition, Chagall moved from Jewish themes to universal ones, from Vitebsk to Paris. He sought to universalize his Jewish experience. I am moving in the opposite direction, seeking to Judaize whatever universalistic theme I touch.
I consider myself a disciple of Maria Primachenko, whom I never knew. On leaving the USSR, my art mentor told me that I might become a graphic artist, but my sense of color is deficient. So, I turned to the work of famous female Ukrainian folk artists such as Halyna Sobachko, Kateryna Bilokur and, above all, Maria Primachenko to study color. There was a set of small palm-size postcards with Primachenko’s works in my parents’ library. I took her images and transferred them onto huge sheets of paper (55 x 45 inches), copying and learning color while copying. Then I used the folk-art vocabulary of Primachenko, predominantly pagan in her imagery, to tell religious stories, mostly from the New Testament. Many of my works of that time ended up in private collections in Kyiv and Moscow. (A 1983 Primachenko-style image from a private Moscow collection appears on the left.)
Who are your favorite painters?
Robert Schumann used to say that the question about one’s favorite composer is not really a good question since there were many great composers whom one should know. I think that I am well acquainted with various trends in art. I spent days and weeks in the museums, particularly the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, the Gemäldegallerie in Berlin. There are hundreds of artists from whom I learn. I like the hands on the canvases of Meister Grunewald, the silhouettes of Toulouse-Lautrec, the social themes of Boll and Ostade, the minimalism of Utamaro and Hiroshige, the thick coloring of Guttuso, the combination of avant-garde and folk technique of Goncharova and Siniakova, and, of course, the floristic ornaments of Bilokur and the animalistic world of Primachenko.
I can name many more, but let me get to your main question. Among my favorite ones, I will name 15. No. 1 is Peter Breughel the Elder. He is also Nos. 2, 3, 4, and 5. Then comes Lucas Cranach the Elder, who is No. 6. Then Rembrandt: he is Nos. 7, 8 and 9. Otto Dix is No. 10, Egon Schiele is No. 11, Primachenko is No. 12, Van Gogh is No. 13, Kustodiev is No. 14, and Malevich is No. 15.
Your top nine are all from the 16th and 17th centuries. Doesn’t that make you terribly old-fashioned?
You asked about my favorite painters, but we have not yet discussed my favorite genres and styles. Most of my work comes in the form of poster-size black, red and white compositions. I use the visual elements of German Expressionism, the Russian avant-garde, the Ukrainian school of the Boichukists, the English Pre-Raphaelites and, of course, Polish political posters. I adore the avant-garde (particularly Mayakovsky’s “ROSTA Windows”), although I hate its message as it endorses social violence. So, how could one speak of favorite artists whose vocabulary one adores but whose message one rejects? That’s what I do: I do not rank most of the avant-gardists (from Sedliar to Lissitzky) with my favorite artists, but I constantly use their language in order to reverse, or at least challenge, their message.
A final question. Unlike so many academics and artists, you have a wonderfully refined sense of humor and self-irony. Where do they come from?
From the great minds of past and present. For example, from Robert Frost who said: “Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, And I’ll forgive Thy great big one on me.”