Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/GENEVA: When Russia sent soldiers into Ukraine a year ago, the director of the Kyiv National Art Gallery was only concerned about the paintings’ safety.
Yuri Vakulenko filled a bag and headed to the gallery, where he would spend the next 66 days in the basement, armed with a bulletproof vest and gas mask, and caring for the exhibits. Vakulenko, who didn’t want the paintings to collect dust in storage abroad, asked European art museum if they would be interested in staging modified versions of two previous exhibitions in Ukraine.
Keeping paintings safe was a difficult task
The Musee d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva and the Kunstmuseum Basel both agreed. From Kyiv, Vakulenko told Reuters that this was an idea that would keep our paintings safe while allowing our gallery to continue fighting on the cultural front. During the Spanish civil war in the 1930s, the Geneva Museum received paintings from Madrid’s Prado Museum and sent packing materials to ensure safe transport.
The Musee Rath, which houses the Musee d’Art et d’Histoire’s temporary exhibitions, is currently displaying “From Dusk to Dawn,” which features works by Ukrainian painters from the Kyiv gallery. The crates in which the paintings were transported from Ukraine are also on display, weeks after the windows of the Kyiv gallery were shattered by the shock of a nearby shell. Because it was impossible to insure the paintings as they crossed Ukraine, Vakulenko said the shipment was associated by security on its two-day journey to the Polish border.
The most important thing, according to Vakulenko, was keeping the cargo’s movement on Ukrainian territory secret. The specifics of cargo movement were only known to a small group of people directly involved in the transportation and security processes. The Basel exhibition features 49 works by Ukrainian-born artists from the 18th to 20th centuries, including Ilya Repin and Volodymyr Borovykovsky. Many of the painters received their training in Russia and later became associated with the country’s empire or the Soviet Union.
However, the exhibitions call into question the idea that the works fit into a broader understanding of Russian art. The initiative of the Kyiv gallery, according to Olga Osadtschy, assistant curator at the Kunstmuseum Basel, was an important project to comprehend the narrative of their collection, as well as to view (their) history more critically and consciously.
