Artistic responses to the Holodomor
One key difference was that while the famine of the early 1920s could be blamed on "bourgeois capitalist oppression", the 1932-1933 famine was not even allowed to be called a famine, and speaking about it would be considered an offense against the state. Artists like Mykhailo Boichuk and his circle tried to conform to the new political reality in the late 1920s and 1930s with "Harvest Festival in the Collective Farm" and other Diego Rivera-like murals, but they were nonetheless arrested, executed, and their works destroyed. Therefore, it should be no surprise that artists of the time either studiously avoided the gruesome reality around them in their work, or they alluded to it only in an extremely veiled and cryptic manner. One work from this period that some have interpreted as alluding to the Holodomor is "Man Running" by Kasimir Malevych. Though he has typically listed as a "Russian avant-garde artist" in art history textbooks, Malevych was born in Kyiv in a family of Polish origin, and he returned there to teach at the Kyiv Art Institute from 1928-1930 after he was removed from his position in Leningrad.
Artists outside of the Soviet Union, of course, were not subject to such restrictions. Starting with Victor Cymbal's "The Year 1933", they would create representations of the Holodomor throughout the century. But even their output was remarkably limited. It seems that artists tended to create such works only in association with anniversary years, perhaps with the explicit urging of Ukrainian diaspora communities.
Why this hesitation? For artists such as Mykhailo Dmytrenko, who witnessed dying villagers in the streets of Kharkiv, the trauma and fear of retaliation was so deep that they were obvious even in an oral history interview that he recorded in 1995 (more than six decades after the fact, and four years after the fall of the Soviet Union). This fear may seem excessive. But the Holodomor was unusual in that not only did the perpetrators of the genocide not acknowledge their guilt and were not held legally responsible, but the victims of the genocide had to continue to live under the rule of the perpetrators and their political descendants. For later artists who were not witnesses, it may have been a reluctance to tackle such a difficult subject in the absence of personal experience.
The situation changed significantly with the glasnost/perestroika era of the late 1980s, when the existence of a famine was finally acknowledged by the government, and the renewal of Ukrainian independence in 1991 opened the floodgates of depiction, remembrance, and memorialization.
This exhibition presents works by five artists, all but one of which were active in the Ukrainian diaspora and created their works before 1970. This includes one of the earliest artistic depictions of the Holodmor (Victor Cymbal's "The Year 1933"), two works by Mykhailo Dmytrenko, the famous "Zemlia" by Bohdan Pevny, and a modernist reaction to the Holodomor by the Chicago artist Andrij Kowalenko. It also includes works by the non-diaspora Ukrainian artist Mykola Bondarenko, whose restrained yet moving series of prints entitled "Ukraine 1933: A Cookbook" provides a glimpse into what Holodomor survivors did to survive.
