Museum Director Elisabeth Millqvist, 2023 Photo: Helene Toresdotter
Curator’s text about the exhibition
Myth ranges across human experience with astounding invention and variety and they thereby offer material to think with, a fundamental feature of myth and storytelling that has real importance in our fractured time is that it opens a field of discussion, it tells the truth but tells it slanted, slanted through imaginary scenarios which cannot happen in the real world, it makes possible speaking out, it lends itself to parables and exemplar, metamorphosis is partly fantastic, but in another way is just how we are. * Marina Warner
Maria Prymachenko (1909 – 1997) is a central figure in Ukrainian art history. In the exhibition, her paintings are brought together with artworks from the 1900s from the Moderna Museet collection, and two contemporary artists transport us to our time. Together, they compose a vibrantly-coloured lament.
Prymachenko was born in Bolotnya in the Polessia region and lived her entire life in Ukraine. She is one of Ukraine’s most well-known and admired artists. She lived through World War I, the Holodomor, Stalin’s hateful man-made famine in which millions were starved to death, the terror of 1933 – 1945 when both Stalin and Hitler were in power, and the Cold War that lasted until 1991, and she lived only fifty kilometers from Chernobyl, which in 1986 was the site of a fateful nuclear power plant disaster. Despite a life of tragedy and personal loss, Prymachenko elevates life in her art; she depicts agricultural cycle and paints magnificent plants, but among her motifs we also find beasts – hybrid creatures with sharp claws, staring eyes, and open mouths.
Her stylized and simultaneously playful patterns build on traditions from the area where she grew up and knowledge in the areas of embroidery and handicrafts. Her mother was well-known for her embroidery, and her father for his carpentry. As a young child, Prymachenko fell ill with polio; this resulted in limited mobility but provided more time for creative endeavors, since she was unable to help with many everyday chores. After first focusing on embroidery, she later expanded her choice of materials and worked with ceramics and painting. Painting on paper became her primary mode of expression, and in this exhibition, we encounter works from a more than 50-year period. During World War II, Prymachenko halted her artistic work, not painting again until the 1950s and 1960s, after which she painted for the rest of her life. She established an informal school for children in her home, she exhibited extensively both at home and abroad, and she gained recognition. A planetoid is named after her, and motifs from her artworks have been reproduced as postage stamps. The surrounding nature, everyday life and celebrations, stories and songs are part of her world, expressed in images and poetic titles that amplify the significance and can be seen as both dedications and incantations.
WAR AND PEACE – PROTEST AND SYMBOL
The first World’s Fair took place in London in 1851. The goal with the exhibitions was originally to promote industrial and economic development, but successively, the focus came to lie on technological innovations, architecture, art, and how modern life should be represented and expressed. National pavilions were introduced at one of the World’s Fair in Paris, and several buildings that were made for the occasions in various countries have become lasting landmarks, not least the Eiffel Tower.
In photographs from the tenth World’s Fair in Paris in 1937, the Eiffel Tower in the distance, appears flanked by the German pavilion, designed by Albert Speer and featuring a giant eagle, and, on the other side, the Soviet pavilion with the monumental sculpture Worker and Kolkhoz Woman. Instead of inventions, that year’s World’s Fair was a display of national strength and political tensions. Picasso exhibited, as did Maria Prymachenko. She was part of a local embroidery cooperative and was invited to the Museum of Ukrainian Art in Kyiv and their experimental workshop. There, she met several of her contemporaries, and it was in Kyiv that she began painting. The goal was to gather talent and Prymachenko became part of the effort to create the republic’s first exhibition of folk art, which took place in 1936. The following year she exhibited in Paris and several of her paintings that were exhibited then are now part of the exhibition at Moderna Museet.
Picasso was invited to the World’s Fair in January 1937. After the bombing of Basque city of Guernica at the end of April, he completed a new painting for the Spanish Pavilion in six weeks: “Guernica”. During the Spanish civil war, Hitler cooperated with General Franco, and Guernica became a target of air raids carried out by German and Italian bombers. Without directly depicting the violence, Picasso displays his ire through desperate expressions, twisted bodies. Artist Dora Maars’ photographs of Picasso when he was working on the giant 349.4×776.6 cm painting in Paris have become iconic. The artwork is often named in parallel with Francisco Goya’s equally world-known depiction of war, “Desastros de la Guerra” (1810 – 1820). Writer Christophe Ono-Dit-Biot called Picasso’s Guernica “The War’s Mona Lisa”, a symbol of the meaningless violence of all wars. The art work has reached mythical proportions, been reproduced countless times and numerous artists have made reference to the painting. When the only approved reproduction was hanging in the United Nations building in New York, it was covered before the then- foreign secretary Colin Powell informed the media about his country’s imminent invasion of Iraq in 2003. The motif could not be the backdrop for this announcement of war.
Picasso felt that his painting belonged to the Spanish people and did not allow it to be returned to Spain until the republic had been restored. It was on long-term loan for more than 40 years to MoMA in New York, toured, and reached Sweden two times. It was shown at Liljevalchs konsthall in Stockholm in 1937 and again in 1956,
two years before Moderna Museet opened in Stockholm, when the museum had a sneak start in Exercishallen in a provisionally arranged locale. Otte Sköld wrote about the work in exhibition catalog number 1 from Moderna Museet’s catalog series, saying it was the “most significant piece of propaganda of our time against the futility and barbarous cruelty of war”. In archived records, it appears that the cabinet secretary twice received visits from the Spanish ambassador, who complained about what he perceived as negative propaganda against the Spanish regime. The painting was returned to Spain first in 1981 under a cloak of secrecy, several years after Picasso’s death in 1973, and it hangs today at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.
It is reasonable to think that many of the more than 30 million attendees of the World’s Fair in 1937 visited both the Spanish and the Soviet pavilions, and therefore saw both Picasso’s and Prymachenko’s works. Maria Prymachenko would also come to be associated with both war and peace, In her titles such as “War is a terrible Beast” Prymachenko warns of and curses war and her method of finding her own path has made her a meaningful part of the building of a Ukrainian identity and an urgent symbol of peace. During Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, around twenty of Prymachenko’s paintings in the Ivankiv museum were destroyed after a Russian attack during which the museum was set on fire. The destruction of cultural heritage tells the story of the transformation of a society, but cultural heritage is also a target in war — without being the actual goal. Attacks on cultural heritage are one facet of a war strategy that aims to shatter a people by destroying what carries meaning and binds us together.
FOLKLORE AND CHANGE
Maria Prymachenko’s art is a part of folk art historiography. She dedicated herself to murals, embroidery, sewing, and pysanky, a traditional Easter egg decorating technique that is characteristic of her home region of Polesia. Her background is different
from that of the other artists in this exhibition. In a Western art tradition, folk artists are absent from the collections of modern art museums. Those who were active in folk art in the 1900s in Sweden are primarily found in the collections of Kulturen in Lund, at Nordiska museet in Stockholm, or in many of the county museums. During Prymachenko’s lifetime, several Ukranian intellectuals, artists and published authors were victims of a ruthless regime. The number of imprisoned and murdered cultural figures who were active in particularily the 1920s in Ukraine is so great that it has given rise to the term “the executed Renaissance”.
In every photograph of Maria Prymachenko, except those in which she is very young, she is wearing a headscarf and hand-embroidered clothing. We see a traditional farm wife; this was a deliberate choice, an appearance that perhaps protected her and emphasized the perception that she was old-fashioned, non-threatening. She was active in the country for people in the country, busy making things beautiful and decorative. In parts of Ukraine, which was a part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics at the time, folk art was formed and promoted during different periods and with different goals. For Communist leaders, folk art would highlight the characteristics of individual national groups and show the kinship between Russian and – in this case, Ukrainian – regional culture. Folk art would develop and blossom thanks to socialism; it was part of nation-building and an important element of colonizing the constituent republics that comprised the Soviet Union. Prymachenko was awarded the gold medal at the first folk art exhibition in Kyiv. She was invited to Moscow, but she never traveled there, instead returning home.
The view of what should be categorized as folk art has changed and developed over time. When Moderna Museet as a collecting institution embarked on an important acquisition effort, The Second Museum of Our Wishes (2006 – 2009), to purchase key works with an eye on equity, the focus was placed on women artists from the 1900s and expressions from outside the Western metropoles. But artists such as Ceija Stojka, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, or Maria Prymachenko were not considered, nor were artists who primarily worked with textiles or artists who are indigenous the main focus. They were seen as separate rather than in a dialogue with contemporary art, but arthistory is constantly rewritten.
AMONG THE FLOWERS THERE ARE STORIES
In her art, Maria Prymachenko depicts life—the everyday as well as the celebratory; we see traditional garments, sowing, flax- dressing. In Autumn is Riding a Speckled Horse and Sowing Grain, autumn is a woman on an extravagant red horse with mane and tail that resemble brushes or thorns, surrounded by what might be cucumbers, giant strawberries, pumpkins, and blooming cornflowers.
Art historian Oksana Semenik rightly points out that Prymachenko’s interest in shaping new forms and worlds were no less than the modernist’s and asks — why make something that already exists in nature? At the same time, it is no coincidence which plants appear and what tasks are being done — the motifs also represent existence. Among the flowers, there are stories. Fantasy and reality walk hand in hand. Grand sunflowers and ears of corn looming large like bouquets depict which crops the farmers will cultivate —like sugar beets in Scania — and that even today are among the most common crops in Ukraine. Many flower motifs are dedications; Prymachenko had a large garden but preferred to give away painted flowers. The most narrative motifs are reminiscent of Dalecarlian floral painting or the painted tapestries of southwestern Sweden.
Even though many motifs depict traditions, Prymachenko was also interested in what was happening around her and in the world, in news reports and innovations. In 1984, she painted “Space Pepper”. She named other works with titles referring to space, and she was likely inspired by the space race and space research. In 1986, technical development and human error led to catastrophe. Prymachenko lived only fifty kilometers from Chernobyl. After the nuclear power plant disaster, she created a suite of paintings connected to Chernobyl that commented on contaminated water and expressed grief. For one of the paintings, dedicated to Valery Khodemchuk, an engineer and the first victim of the nuclear power plant accident, she wrote:
“A Jackdaw is flying looking for its owner, but he isn’t anywhere, his body has flown over all of Ukraine. Flowers will grow, children will pick them, they will braid wreaths, carry them to the graves, and my grave has flown to the sky.”
BEYOND WHAT WE KNOW
There are similarities between Prymachenko’s works and works by her contemporaries such as Hanna Sobatschko-Schostak, but she is also characterized by the fact that she departs from the expected path. The patterns covers everything and the idiom is her own. In the paintings a mouse with a cane wanders around, a bird plays a tambourine; as in fables, they seem to replace people. But there are also beasts. They are hybrid creatures with animal bodies and human faces with sharp claws or shoes. Magical thinking was still alive in the area where Prymachenko lived, she took it further in her own writing of history. By creating another reality, she impacts how we can imagine the future.
In this exhibition, her work is brought together with other artworks mainly from the 1900s. Several of the artists portrays monsters. They are created during wars, after wars, as a reaction to political circumstances and in response to inner demons.
Sometimes the artworks are seductive, playful and other times grief and darkness takes over and tears fall. Mythological figures such as Leda and the Minotaur appear. Among the gods, what horrifies us is also part of existence—assault, violence, and murder are a part of these stories. Prymachenko encouraged a fear of the beasts. Metamorphosis —transformation and boundary-crossing expands our imaginary worlds, familiarizes us with or gives expression to what is dangerous, what lies beyond what we already know and brings with it a variety of possibilities.
