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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.

"The Year 1933"

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Victor Cymbal
"Rik 1933" ("The Year 1933")

This imposing image depicts an emaciated woman holding an equally emaciated child as they ascend through a star field. Her mouth is open in a silent scream, perhaps in demand of justice. The work places the precisely rendered figures in a decidedly unrealistic symbolist setting, giving the imagery of suffering and death a sense of monumentality and of transit into eternal peace.

This composition is likely the first overt representation of the Holodomor in visual art. It was initially created in the form of an oil painting (now in the collection of the Holodomor Museum in Kyiv) by the Ukrainian artist Victor Cymbal between 1933 and 1936 while he was living in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He exhibited that oil painting at his first exhibition in Buenos Aires in 1936, and then again in a more widely attended exhibition in 1956, where it attracted considerable attention from both the Ukrainian expatriate community and the general Argentine public. Although it has no explicitly political content, it prompted severely negative reactions and picketing from local Communists and others on the Argentine far left.

Cymbal created the charcoal on paper version that you see here some time later. This version is truly monumental not only in terms of imagery, but also in its physical scale: it is well over 15 feet (almost 5 meters) tall. It's so tall that we are actually not able to display it in the gallery space where we are presenting the physical version of this exhibition — we're using a reduced-size reproduction instead.

We don't know exactly when Cymbal created this gigantic version of his original oil painting, but it was probably in the 1940s or '50s, and it was almost certainly intended to be used as a stage decoration for Holodomor commemorations and similar events.

About the artist

Victor Cymbal was born on April 16, 1901 in the village of Stupychne in what is today the Cherkasy oblast of central Ukraine. His family moved to Kyiv when he was a child, and he received his secondary education there. With the outbreak of revolution in 1918, the young Cymbal became a member of the army of the Ukrainian People's Republic, with which he participated in combat operations until late 1920. After the final fall of the Ukrainian People's Republic, he was interned along with his fellow comrades-in-arms in camps in Łańcut, Wadowice, and Kalisz, Poland. After three years, he and a group of friends left the camp and settled in Prague.

Inter-war Prague was a hothouse of Ukrainian exiles, including many young and middle-aged veterans, and had a vibrant literary and cultural life. It was here that Cymbal received his artistic training, not at the Academy of Fine Arts, but at the more practical School of Applied Arts (now the Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design). He also studied at the Ukrainian Studio of Plastic Arts, which was founded in 1923 by the noted art historian Dmytro Antonovych and embraced a wide variety of artistic styles and approaches. He became known for his work in the graphic arts, winning awards and a major design competition. He received a scholarship in 1926 to travel to Italy, where he visited Venice and Naples.

In 1928 he moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he quickly re-established himself as an artist and graphic designer. He became particularly known for commercial and advertising graphics that he did for Argentine firms as well as local subsidiaries of international corporations such as General Motors, Ford, Shell, and Kodak. He also created works of fine art on paper and canvas in a style that has been described as symbolist or "neo-symbolist", which he exhibited beginning in 1936. His work continued to win awards from Argentine arts associations. In addition, he was an active member of the substantial Ukrainian community in Buenos Aires.

In 1960 he moved to the United States, first to New York City, then to Detroit, where he continued his work as a fine and commercial artist. He died in 1968.