Ukraine’s Modernist art has defied censorship and missiles
A new exhibition in Madrid is a tribute to Ukrainian creativity and resilience
In the final room of “In the Eye of the Storm”, an exhibition of Ukrainian Modernist art that opened this week at the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum in Madrid, hangs “Sharpening the Saws” by Oleksandr Bohomazov (a detail of which is pictured). A triumph of form and colour, it shows workmen preparing their elongated, jagged tools for the following day. Painted in 1927, its theme nodded to what would soon become the official Soviet artistic cult of Socialist Realism. But its mood is contemplative, almost abstract, rather than heroic and propagandistic.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Art against war”
Culture December 3rd 2022
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