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Depicting Genocide: 20th Century Responses to the Holodomor This exhibition was made possible by a grant from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.

© 2023 by the Ukrainian History and Education Center, all rights reserved.

Taking grain from the villagers at the “Bread Union” granary in Kaharlyk village, Kyiv oblast. Kaharlyk, 1932.

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Mykhailo Dmytrenko
"1933"

Painted during the 30th anniversary of the Holodomor, "1933" depicts a dying man and Bolshevik requisitioners carting away sacks of grain: symbolic images representing the victim and the perpetrator of genocide.

While the work is not in a traditional realist style, the elements are historically appropriate: photographs of grain requisitions in the 1930s show very similar sacks of grain in very similar wagons, also drawn by horses or other animals. Even the requisitioners' uniforms are historically correct. The contorted figure of the famine victim echoes similar figures in the works of Pevny and Kowalenko.

One major liberty taken by the artist is the man playing an accordion while sitting on the grain sacks. It's very unlikely something like that would have happened in reality, but it suggests the perpetrators' cavalier attitude towards suffering and the taking of human life.
"Mozhna zbozhevolity" ("One Can Go Mad")

The charcoal drawing "One Can Go Mad" is an image of a woman, possibly symbolizing Ukraine, standing over a tangled mass of human bodies of various ages. The drawing was made by Dmytrenko while he was in Lviv, where he had been sent by the Bolshevik Ukrainian authorities after the annexation of western Ukraine by the Soviet Union in 1939. It is unclear whether it is meant to represent a particular event, and it is possible that it was not meant to depict the literal famine of 1932-1933 at all. However, it is likely a symbolic representation of the repressions and terror of the 1930s, which were a part of the extended process of genocide that included attacks on Ukrainian language and culture in addition to the famine.
About the artist
Mykhailo Dmytrenko was born in 1908 in the town of Lokhvytsia located in the Poltava region midway between Kyiv and Kharikv. He often spent time at the Ukrainian Baroque Church of the Nativity of the Mother of God in Lokhvytsia and made sketches of its 18th century iconostasis. He began professional studies at the Kyiv Art and Industrial School, then was one of 60 students selected out of 500 applicants to the Kyiv Art Institute (today known as the National Academy of Visual Arts and Architecture). He studied with the renowned Ukrainian artist Fedir Krychevskyi and graduated in 1930. After briefly working in the Donbas and at a Kyiv theater, he rejoined the Institute (at that point renamed the Kyiv Institute of Proletarian Art Culture), first as Fedir Krychevskyi's assistant, then as a "dotsent" of painting within the school or architecture.

In 1939, he along with a group of fellow artists was sent to L'viv, which had come under Soviet occupation after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, with the assignment of Socialist Realism to the artists of L'viv. and the Nazi invasion of Poland. While in L'viv he took part in organizing Ukrainian artist associations during both the Soviet and German occupations. Despite the nature of his assignment, western Ukrainian artists respected his skill and were able to feel his Ukrainian patriotism, even if he was unable to express it directly. While in L'viv he had his first encounters with western European art movements of the early 20th century.

He succeeded in escaping to Munich in 1944, where he continued his organizational work among Ukrainian refugee artists. He helped to organize the Ukrainian Association of Artists ("Ukrains'ka Spilka Obrazotvorchykh Mysttsiv") in 1947, and participated in exhibitions, including the 1947 International Displaced Persons' Art Exhibition in Munich.

He was able to resettle to Canada in 1951, making his home in Toronto. In addition to his art and graphic design work, he again set out to organize Ukrainian artists: he was a founder and the first president of the Ukrainian Association of Creative Artists in Canada (1955). He worked commercially as a designer, eventually becoming the chief designer at an architectural firm in Detroit, Michigan (where he moved in 1960). He died in Detroit in 1997.

In addition to his graphic art and illustration work (which displays the heavy influence of Heorhii Narbut), Dmytrenko is best known for his portraits, paintings with Ukrainian folk themes, and for his work as a church artist (which included painting, carving, and mosaic work). He designed the interiors of a host of Ukrainian Orthodox, Ukrainian Catholic, and Roman Catholic churches in the United States and Canada. He participated in numerous exhibitions throughout his career (including a joint exhibition with fellow-Detroiter Bohdan Pevny). A catalog and monograph on his work was published in 1990 (with a cover design by Dmytrenko himself).