Bohdan Pevny
"Zemlia" ("The Earth")
This painting by Bohdan Pevny of an old woman lying face-down in a surrealistic landscape of tilled but empty fields is perhaps the most famous and widely-reproduced artwork in the UHEC's permanent collection. The large canvas is masterfully executed, with the the soil in the foreground portrayed in three-dimensional texture using extremely heavy, granular impasto that can only be fully appreciated by viewing the work in person.
Unlike some of the other works in this exhibition, this painting is resolutely non-narrative and in some ways ambiguous. Is the woman dead, or merely unconscious? Is she a famine victim? She doesn't seem severely emaciated for an elderly person. But her contorted posture is reminiscent of the man in the foreground of Mykhailo Dmytrenko's "1933".
The empty but plowed landscape suggests both a lack of harvest and the potential of future fertility.
Equally ambiguous is the tiny blue-flowered plant at the bottom left of the canvas. It could be a symbol of hope amid the barrenness, but it has precariously exposed roots and looks like it could easily wither or be blown away by the wind.
Further complicating the interpretation is the artist's inscription on the back of the canvas:
"'The Earth' — oil by Bohdan Pevny (1962)/Dedicated to the memory of O. Dovzhenko/A gift from the artist to the permanent collection of the Ukrainian Orthodox Center in [South] Bound Brook on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the famine in Ukraine (1972)"
This connects the painting both to the Holodomor and to the renowned Ukrainian filmmaker Oleksandr Dovzhenko.
Dovzhenko's most famous film, considered to be a masterpiece of world cinema, has the same title as the Pevny painting. However, Dovzhenko's "Zemlia" was made to glorify collectivization and the economic changes made by Stalin in the late 1920s, so it seems that it would be an unlikely inspiration for Pevny.
Like the painting, however, the film is full of ambiguities. It has all of the plot conventions of Socialist Realism, but it executes them in a way that ultimately undermines the "party line" that it is supposedly following. This was sufficiently clear to the Soviet authorities that they banned the film nine days into its limited run in Kyiv in 1930. Soviet authorities did, however, allow it to be released in Europe and North America. Ironically, as left-leaning cinemaphiles and intellectuals extolled the film's images of abundance, Ukraine was in the grips of genocidal famine.
It turns out that the direct source for Pevny's painting was not "Zemlia" but "Arsenal", the film that preceded "Zemlia" in Dovzhenko's "Ukraine Trilogy". In fact, the painting is a direct visual quotation from an extended sequence early in the film:
"Arsenal" not only predates the Holodmor by nearly five years, but its story line has nothing to do with agriculture or collectivization. Instead, it is a film about the absurdities of World War I and the 1918 Kyiv Arsenal January Uprising, in which workers aided the besieging Bolshevik army against the army of the independent Ukrainian People's Republic. However, it was the image of the elderly mother who collapses as she sows the plowed fields that inspired Pevny and created a connection in his mind to the Holodomor.
About the artist
Bohdan Pevny was born on June 4, 1931 in the city of Lutsk (today the administrative center of Volyn oblast, Ukraine). Although his father had come to Lutsk from the Poltava region of Ukraine during the revolutionary period of the early 20th century, as residents of the Second Polish Republic, he and his family would have had no personal connection to the Holodomor.
Life for the young Bohdan turned upside down during World War II, when his father was forced to flee to avoid arrest by the Bolsheviks after the Soviet annexation of western Ukraine. His mother soon died, and Stefan Skrypnyk (the future Patriarch Mstyslav) helped Bohdan get across the border to his father in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Bohdan would never return to the land of his birth.
He obtained his secondary education at the Displaced Person camps in Ulm and Dillingen, Germany, and began studying journalism at the Hochschule für Politischen Wissenschaft at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (now the Bavarian School of Public Policy at the Technical University of Munich) in 1949.
In 1951, he and his family emigrated to the United States, settling in New York City. It was here that he began studying art at the School of Visual Arts, the National Academy of Design, and the Art Students League, as well as at Columbia and New York Universities. He would go on to do work as a graphic artist and illustrator, and would publish over 100 essays and articles. He served as the vice-president of the Association of Ukrainian Artists in America, and in 1991 would become a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine. He described his artistic style as being influenced by surrealism.
