LONDON.- The Royal Academy of Arts is presenting In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900–1930s, the most comprehensive UK exhibition to date about modern art in Ukraine. The exhibition brings together 65 artworks, many of which are on loan from the National Art Museum of Ukraine and the Museum of Theatre, Music and Cinema of Ukraine. On display are work by renowned artists including Alexander Archipenko, Sonia Delaunay, Alexandra Exter and Kazymyr Malevych, as well as lesser-known artists such as Mykhailo Boichuk, Oleksandr Bohomazov and Vasyl Yermilov, each of whom left an indelible mark on modernism in Ukraine and the development of the European art scene in the early twentieth century.

Geopolitically, Ukraine had for centuries been a borderland, with its territory divided between various empires and its people not perceived as a single nation until the late nineteenth century. Yet there were short periods of independence crucial for the formation of a Ukrainian identity. This complex historical background resulted in a vibrant amalgamation of encounters, a fusion of Ukrainian, Polish, Russian and Jewish elements that created a distinctly local cultural profile.

The modernist movement in Ukraine unfolded against a complicated socio-political backdrop of World War I, collapsing empires, the revolutions of 1917 with the ensuing short-lived independence of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (1917–20), and the eventual establishment of Soviet Ukraine in 1922. Despite such political turmoil, this became a period of bold artistic and literary experimentation, and a true flourishing in Ukrainian art, literature, theatre and cinema.

Highlighting the range of artistic styles and cultural identities that existed in Ukraine in the early twentieth century, the exhibition has been divided into six thematic sections. The first section showcases the Cubo-Futurist movement, when young artists from Ukraine combined elements of different radical trends that they had encountered in Western European capitals to create their own visual language. The next section explores the role of theatre design as one of the most vigorous expressions of modernism in Ukraine, highlighting work by Alexandra Exter, Vadym Meller and Anatol Petrytskyi. The next gallery spotlights the Kultur Lige, which brought together young Jewish artists such as El Lissitzky, Issakhar Ber Ryback and Sarah Shor to foster a synthesis of the Jewish artistic tradition and the European avant-garde. This is followed by sections looking at Early Soviet Ukraine and the artistic hubs of Kharkiv (which became the capital following the establishment of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic), and Kyiv Art Institute. There is also a section dedicated to the Last Generation, whose artistic activities were cut short in 1932 with the Soviet Union’s abolition of all independent art groups and the imposition of socialist realism as the single official artistic style.

In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900–1930s shares the story of modernist artists in Ukraine and their attempts to produce a recognisable national style in a bid for Ukrainian statehood and cultural autonomy, spotlighting this essential – though little known in the West – chapter of European Modernism.