Ukrainian Baroque

Art, Myth, and National Identity

p. 83-94

Résumés

Résumé en FR

Résumé en EN

Plan

Texte

Since Heinrich Wölfflin published his study of the Baroque in 1888, it has been the subject of numerous studies exploring it as a style, period, and system that transgressed the boundaries of historicity.1 The tension between the empirical research on Baroque as a historical style and the theoretical concerns of Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Hubert Damisch, and Christine Buci-Glucksmann was investigated in a volume edited by Helen Hills in 2011 and in a discussion she moderated for the journal Perspective.2 This discussion also addressed the concept of the Neobaroque coined by Haroldo de Campos in 1955,3 and extended by Severo Sarduy in his seminal essay of 1972.4 For Sarduy, Baroque as a historical style, although decentered, was still harmonious, while the Neobaroque “reflects structurally the disharmony, the rupture of homogeneity, of the logos as an absolute, the lack that constitutes our epistemic foundation.”5 Sarduy thus equated the Neobaroque with postmodernist aesthetics. De Campos, in his turn, introduced the notion of a “cannibal reason,” succinctly described by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup: “Renegade colonial subjects (renegados) appropriate imposed cultural forms, consume and digest them, and then incorporate them into the colonial body.”6 These essays were fundamental for the research in Latin American Neobaroque, but are these approaches applicable to Ukraine? Is every concept of Neobaroque regionally specific?

This paper is an attempt to delve into a region that was rarely explored in Baroque historiography. It follows a suggestion made by Jens Baumgarten and Gabriela Siracusano during the discussion in 2015: “In order to deal with the complexity of a global baroque and avoid the perpetuation of national art-historical traditions and mythologies, it is necessary to compare Latin American Baroque, for example, to Asian contexts, and to address the appropriation of the Baroque in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art-historical and political discourses.”7 Ukrainian Baroque as a part of both art historical narrative and political mythology constitutes an ideal case for such a pursuit. Or, as Piotr Piotrowski suggested, one might want to shift the focus from the center–periphery system of relations that inevitably marginalizes the periphery (East–Central Europe in our case) and consider the entanglements between the previously marginalized states.8 He called this approach a “horizontal history of art.” In our case, it will mean first disentangling the relations between Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian Baroque.

Ukrainian art history itself presents a challenge. Deprived of unity and independence, it has been subject to reinvention within the overlapping colonial narratives of its former metropoles (Russia, Poland, Austria-Hungary).9 The development of art in Ukraine as seen through the lenses of colonial hierarchies exposes a lag in the adoption of major European styles that is a characteristic feature of the territories considered to be artistic peripheries. However, in the 17th and 18th centuries, one style, Baroque, evolved not only into an unprecedented artistic boom but also into an authentic “national style” during an epoch central to Ukraine’s spiritual life. The Baroque style’s importance in building national identity allows it to thrive even in the art of the 21st century.

In the first part, we shall explore how Ukrainian art historians interpreted the Baroque style on Ukrainian territory and why they referred to it as a national style. In the second part of the paper, we shall deal with the notion of “Neobaroque” and the quest for Baroque elements in Ukrainian contemporary art. Since the late 1980s, Ukrainian Baroque has become an embodiment of national sentiment. It -shaped the style of artists of the so-called “New Wave,” who strived to fight against the Soviet regime. The artists’ connections to the expressionist and atectonic European Baroque were so conspicuous that their art was labeled as “Ukrainian Neobaroque.”

Inventing “Ukrainian,” “Mazepa,” and “Cossack” Baroque

Despite the revival of general interest in Baroque and Neobaroque art, the major works of those periods avoided the topic of the Baroque in Central and Eastern Europe, where the style was not always directly associated with Catholicism. Given the impressive quantity of buildings constructed in a style that resembled Western European Baroque, Eastern European art historians faced the issue of reinventing the notion of Baroque in a way that could explain the drastic changes in Ukrainian and Russian art and architecture.

The Baroque style that dominated the Ukrainian architecture of the 17th and 18th centuries received its name at the beginning of the 20th century, when art and architecture of that period gained the attention of scholars. Early 20th-century Ukrainian historiography not only rediscovered the style but also played a key role in promoting the myth of Ukrainian Baroque. We will therefore try to disentangle the origin and dissemination of the principal features and characteristics.

Hryhorii Pavlutskyi (1861–1924), a professor at the department of theory and history of the Saint Vladimir Imperial University of Kyiv, introduced “Ukrainian Baroque” as a descriptive term for Ukrainian architecture of the second half of the 17th century and the 18th century in his chapters for the multivolume history of architecture published in 1909.10 Pavlutskyi argued that there were two main types of Ukrainian Baroque churches: the first bore a resemblance to wooden churches built in “national style” and only used Baroque elements for the decor whereas the second type was basilical, “with pediments and shields.”11 He explored only Orthodox churches, excluding Catholic buildings on the grounds that they didn’t belong to the Ukrainian tradition, because in Ukraine’s case, national identity was bound to the religious creed. Pavlutskyi stated that unlike Western European examples, “Ukrainian Baroque is a product of an aesthetic feeling that does not succumb to anything but to one’s fun or a whim.”12 Thus, it is a whimsical, heavily ornamented but not religiously ecstatic style. When tracing the origin of the style, Pavlutskyi mentions wooden architecture and Polish Baroque, while emphasizing that Ukraine was ahead of Russia in adapting the style. For Pavlutskyi, Ukrainian Baroque is synonymic with the national revival, initiated by Ivan Mazepa (1639–1709).13

The term “Ukrainian Baroque” reemerged in 1911, in an essay by Georgy Lukomskiy (1884–1952), a Russian art historian. He was the first to describe basilical churches with five domes as “Mazepa Baroque”14 instead of the term “Kyivan Baroque” that was used by Pavlutskyi.15 They both referred to the churches founded and sponsored by Ivan Mazepa, a Ukrainian statesman and diplomat, who in 1687 had been elected the Hetman of Left Bank Ukraine in Kolomak.16 From that time on, he, a rich landowner with a European education, invested generously in the rebuilding of cities and towns under his jurisdiction. His outstanding contribution to Ukrainian architecture of the 17th century can be easily grasped from Mazepa Amongst His Good Deeds (fig. 1).

1. Ivan Mihura, Mazepa Amongst His Good Deeds, 1705, engraving, 46.5 × 31.5 cm, The National Preserve “Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra,” Kyiv.

1. Ivan Mihura, Mazepa Amongst His Good Deeds, 1705, engraving, 46.5 × 31.5 cm, The National Preserve “Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra,” Kyiv.

Six Kyivan Baroque churches are testament to his triumph, only three of them haven’t been destroyed. Although one of those three survivors, the Gate Church of the Trinity of Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, is medieval in structure and was only redecorated according to Baroque taste. The other churches represent two subdivisions in Mazepa Baroque architecture, which can be labeled as “Western” and “Eastern,” the latter being closer to Ukrainian churches from the times of medieval Rus’ and later wooden Orthodox churches. When introducing the notion of the “Kyivan” or “Mazepa” Baroque, Pavlutskyi and Lukomskiy each discuss at length Saint Nicholas Military Cathedral (fig. 2) and the Epiphany Cathedral, both commissioned and funded by Mazepa. Built in Kyiv by Osip Startsev, a Russian architect who worked in the style of both Muscovite and Ukrainian Baroque: the cathedrals are pentacupolar as a tribute to the Orthodox architecture but have an identical basilica plan that was altered to make all three naves of the same height with rich and undulant Baroque decor. Combining both Western and Eastern features, they testify to the inventiveness and uniqueness of Ukrainian Baroque.

2. Saint Nicholas Military Cathedral, Kyiv, March 30, 1918, photographic print from the album of photographs taken by an unknown German during World War I. Private collection.

2. Saint Nicholas Military Cathedral, Kyiv, March 30, 1918, photographic print from the album of photographs taken by an unknown German during World War I. Private collection.

But not all approaches treat Baroque as an essential part of Ukrainian art history. Vadym Modzalevskyi (1882–1920), a Ukrainian historian, in his 1918 essay on Ukrainian art’s main features, rejected examining Baroque and classical buildings, for “they will tell us nothing about the features of Ukrainian architectural style.”17 In his opinion, the tastes of important patrons like Ivan Mazepa (1639–1709) or Lazar Baranovych (1620–1693) were visible only in the decoration.18 His severe judgment was driven by the pressure to assure that only “popular” wooden architecture could be considered a “Ukrainian architectural style.” The quest for the popular roots of national architecture would continue well into the Soviet era.

Much of Soviet Ukrainian historiography followed in the footsteps of Modzalevskyi’s essay. Scholars tended to overlook the “high culture” dimension of Ukrainian Baroque. Platon Biletskyi (1922–1998), one of the most prominent Ukrainian historians after World War II, in his monograph on Ukrainian art of the second half of the 17th–18th centuries, argues that Ukrainian Baroque grew from the popular aesthetic and this is what made it so unique.19 Although he later acknowledged European and Russian influences too, his emphasis on the popular element was telling. Biletskyi also considered Baroque as proof of the Ukrainian people’s desire to “reunite” with Russia. He stated that “at that time, the Russian state was a sole independent and mighty Orthodox country. The dream of reuniting with it, the hope for its support gave wings to the subdued Ukrainian people, who considered and called themselves ‘the Russian people.’”20 Thus, during the Soviet period, scholars refused to recognize the European influence in Ukrainian Baroque and emphasized the artistic unity between Ukraine and Russia, in line with the Russian ideology of the triune nation forged in the 18th century.

When Ukraine became independent in 1991, the country’s scholarship went in a quite different direction. Art historians began to write about Ukrainian Baroque as an essential part of European Baroque, uncovering their previously neglected entanglements. The essay Hryhorii Lohvyn (1910–2001) published in the edited volume on Ukrainian Baroque and the European context (1991) marks a turn in scholarship, when Ukrainian Baroque together with Ukraine itself broke free from the Russian context. For Lohvyn, Ukrainian Baroque was not a national style, but “one of the national schools of the grand style.”21 With his coauthors, he tried to explain the popularity of Baroque in Ukraine by following in Wölfflin’s footsteps:22 “European Baroque, with its recognizable pathos of struggle and victory, plastic expression, and a wealth of variations painterly compositions, was congenial to the rise of the national feeling of the Ukrainian people, to the triumph gained from the liberation war of 1648–1654 and the creation of their own state, the Hetmanate.”23 Ukrainian scholars essentially addressed Wölfflin’s writings as the best and more accessible examples of Western historiography, attempting to catch up with the tradition they fell away from during the Soviet times.

Volodymyr Vecherskyi (b. 1958), in his contribution to the third volume of the multivolume history of Ukrainian art (2011), identified the first period of Ukrainian Baroque (that Lukomskyi labeled Mazepa Baroque) as “a Renaissance-Baroque synthesis under conditions of the retardation in comparison with other countries of East-Central Europe.”24 However, this term failed to gain any popularity.

In summarizing this, 20th-century Ukrainian art history began associating the forms typical of Ukrainian architecture of the second half of the 17th and the 18th century, pentacupolar basilicas or cross-in-square buildings with Baroque decor, with the national style in particular and, more generally, national identity. Writing in 1923, five years after he had to flee Ukraine, art historian Dmytro Antonovych (1887–1945) described “Cossack Baroque” as a “truly Ukrainian style.”25 He juxtaposed “whimsical princely Baroque with the cupola introduced by German masters” and “Cossack Baroque” which evolved from that “princely” style but absorbed Ukrainian architectural concepts.26 This notion complemented those of “Ukrainian” and “Mazepa” Baroque introduced by Pavltuskyi and Lukomskiy, respectively, forming a triad that remains in use. It is still considered an independent style in respect to European or Muscovite counterparts, although scholars acknowledge the dominance of the Russian aesthetic at the ultimate stage.

Ukrainian “Neobaroque” art and the issue of “national style” (20th and 21st centuries)

Neobaroque emerged at roughly the same time the Baroque was rediscovered and branded as “Ukrainian” or “Mazepa.” When the New Economic Policy was introduced, a discussion started between champions and opponents of the (Neo)Baroque. Shortly before that, in 1918, it was suggested that the Baroque iconostasis of Saint Sophia Cathedral (fig. 3) be moved to another church and it be replaced with a new, “stylish” one.27 The confrontation took radical forms in 1927. At that time, the Ukrainian architect and public figure Dmytro Diachenko (1887–1942) stated that “to fight against Baroque would mean to fight against the Ukrainian understanding of art.”28 Moreover, he argued that “Ukrainian Baroque is an architectural expression of the peasantry and constructivism is an expression of the working class, that is, classes between which the struggle is impossible, so these styles must be merged, synthesized, and not be put into confrontation with each other.”29 Neobaroque refers to a decorative folk style because after the (nonexistent) ban on the “construction of Ukrainian-style churches,” “relics of the Ukrainian Baroque continued to live only in the folk church construction in Galicia (Halychyna) and peasant houses or suburban settlements.” During this “Great Discussion,” Diachenko labeled Baroque a “Ukrainian element,” and “national face,” and “associated with Ukrainian personality” (fig. 4).30

3. Saint Sophia Cathedral, Kyiv, 18th century, iconostasis.

3. Saint Sophia Cathedral, Kyiv, 18th century, iconostasis.

4. National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv, building 1 (Institute of Forestry), architect: Dmytro Dyachenko, 1927, main facade (2022).

4. National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv, building 1 (Institute of Forestry), architect: Dmytro Dyachenko, 1927, main facade (2022).

Svitozar Drahomanov (1884–1958), Yevhen Kholostenko (1901–1945), Mykola Kholostenko (1902–1978), Mykhailo Symikin (1893–1975), and Petro Yurchenko (1900–1972), and were among those opposing the (Neo)Baroque style. They insisted that the Ukrainian cultural revival was unnecessary and that the old (Baroque) architectural forms were obsolete. The opponents argued that Baroque buildings should be replaced by the constructivist structures, to reflect the culture of the working/peasant class of the Soviet Union.31 Symikin referred to the Baroque style as “Cossack,” Kholostenko branded it as “feudal-clerical,” while Yurchenko and Zabolotnyi attributed it to the “Ukrainian bourgeoisie.”32

The outcome of the discussion was predictable. The “Neobaroque” project was rejected and certain of the participants were repressed, including Diachenko. In 1942, he was arrested by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs; he died in a gulag the next year. The rejection of Neobaroque meant that following the Second World War, Soviet cities were rebuilt in a more austere style, without the excesses of the so-called “Stalinist Empire.” The use of decorative elements from historic styles such as Gothic, Renaissance, or Baroque was frowned upon as a manifestation of “vkusovshchina,” that is of an individual taste and commercial attitudes toward art, which was considered a flaw of bourgeois culture.33 As Anatolii Kantor argued, capitalism did not create a style of its own but used and degraded the achievements of previous epochs.34 Socialist realism, with its decorative and constructive austerity, was considered the only style that corresponded to post-Revolution reality.

Following Ukrainian independence in 1991, writers began describing Ukrainian Baroque as an “oppressed style,” stemming from the misinterpretation of sources. For example, the Russian Synod decrees of December 25, 1800, which banned the rebuilding of “wooden churches wherever there is one destroyed by fire,”35 were interpreted by some Ukrainian scholars as a ban on “Cossack Baroque,”36 “Ukrainian style,”37 “Ukrainian-type churches,”38 and even “Small Russian style”39 (probably implying “Ukrainian Baroque”40). Shaping the image of Ukrainian Baroque as a style oppressed by Russians aimed at putting it at the heart of the cultural revival of now-independent Ukraine.

Moreover, in the early 1990s, when Ukraine found itself culturally in-between the collective “West” (Western Europe and the United States) and “East” (Russia), scholars were anxious to prove that it belonged to the “West,” in order to gain not only formal but also intellectual and cultural independence from Russia. As the editors of the two-volume collection on Ukrainian Baroque wrote in their introduction in 2004: “The Baroque is rightfully considered a watershed in the cultural relations between Europe and Ukraine. At this point, our culture starts to get closer to the culture of ‘Latin Europe,’ becoming a part of the pan--European cultural context.”41 In June 2022, almost twenty years later, an exhibition conspicuously titled European Ukraine: The Age of Mazepa opened its doors to visitors. The curators stated in the press release that the exhibition aimed “to prove that Ukraine has been a part of European cultural space.”42 The glorious age of Ukrainian Baroque was connected through curatorial practices with the Ukrainian Neobaroque, which highlighted the continuity of Ukrainian art.

In 1996, the National Art Museum of Ukraine organized a conference and an exhibition, the title of which could be translated as “From Baroque to Baroque.” It treated Baroque as a type of consciousness beyond any historical time. Thus, Ukrainian artist Yurii Lutskevych (1934–2001) put his own artworks, the creations of Mykola Storozhenko (1928–2015) and Dmytro Yablonskii (1921–2001) right alongside Ukrainian Baroque artworks.43 In the introduction to the anthology of conference abstracts, Anatolii Makarov argued that Ukrainian art of the 17th–18th centuries developed a unique model of Ukrainian cultural perception,44 and, thus, it is impossible to build a contemporary culture without the foundation the Baroque has laid. Therefore, “Ukraineness” equals “Baroqueness.”45 Viktor Chepelyk, in his paper at the conference, distinguished three stages in Ukrainian Neobaroque art: 1910–17; 1918–30s; and 1945–54.46 For Oleksandr Soloviov, an influential Ukrainian curator, Neobaroque still plays role in Ukrainian contemporary art.47

The exhibition The Myth of “Ukrainian Baroque, held at the National Art Museum of Ukraine from April 27 to August 26, 2012, curated by Oksana Barshynova and Halyna Skliarenko, was built on the concept developed by Yurii Lutskevych.48 The placement of 18th- and 21st-century works next to each other in the exhibition space was intended to show that “in different historical eras, Baroque acts as a certain visual and substantive core in Ukrainian art, from which multi-directional currents flow.”49

In one of the rooms, the curators placed two official portraits from the 1760s beside the homage to Caravaggio’s Narcissus (fig. 5). Pavlo Kerestey (b. 1962) found a reproduction of Narcissus in a Soviet journal; he asked nine of his colleagues to replicate Caravaggio’s work and created an image himself. As a part of this experiment, Kerestey tried to recreate the working conditions of a factory. The artists worked together, with identical materials, getting “paid” with coffee, tea, and cookies. In this way, Kerestey addressed the issues related to the status of the artwork and of the artist in a post-socialist state. Next to a panel of Ganna Sobachko-Shostak (1883–1965) were 18th-century portraits (fig. 6). The artworks were connected only through the exuberant Baroque flowers, that were both visible on the sitters’ clothing and central to the art of Sobachko-Shostak. Thus, the exhibition created an entangled semiotic space beyond historicity, beyond the traditional narrative of art history created by modernity, which brings it close to the approach of Jean-Hubert Martin (b. 1944). Deconstructing the myth of Baroque on the one hand and exploring it more deeply on the other, the curators transformed “Baroque” into a conceptual mold of tradition, into which almost any work of art can be fitted. In particular, for the artists of the 20th century, “Baroque appeared to be first and foremost a source of renewal of imagery and style, confirmation and continuation of the national tradition.” For example, the works by Hanna Sobachko, Paraska Vlasenko, and Fedir Krychevsky were interpreted as having associations with Baroque via luxuriant ornamentation. The authors claimed that in the sculptures by Oleksandr Arkhypenko50 one can spot the Baroque theatrics and complex spatiality or that “the Baroque visions nourished Yurii Lutskevich’s creativity,”51 and it continued to live in Serhii Yakutovych’s graphics.

5 and 6. A room of the exhibition The Myth of “Ukrainian Baroque,” National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kyiv, 2012, with Petro Kerestey’s Narcissus.

5 and 6. A room of the exhibition The Myth of “Ukrainian Baroque, National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kyiv, 2012, with Petro Kerestey’s Narcissus.

5 and 6. A room of the exhibition The Myth of “Ukrainian Baroque,” National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kyiv, 2012, with Petro Kerestey’s Narcissus.

The curators stated that Ukrainian postmodernism continued the Baroque tradition, becoming the Neobaroque of the new art, and that the representatives of the “New Wave”52 were the first to regard Baroque as an item in the agenda of Ukrainian culture.”53 They showed the problematization of Ukrainian art history by artists as a continuation of the tradition: “The Baroque marked the beginning of the ‘unrepentant’ wanderings of someone in space and time, of the people on their historical path, that is like a labyrinth.”54 After all, the Baroque in Ukraine is often used for political purposes. Thus, the exhibition exposed “Ukrainian Baroque” as “a special model of culture”55 that characterizes Ukrainian culture at all stages of its history—from the 17th century to the 21st.

The second case is associated with the artistic practices of representatives of the New Wave. “Ukrainian Neobaroque” became a part of the artistic practice of the New Ukrainian Wave and Parkomun residents in particular.56 The Russian critic Leonid Bazhanov (b. 1945) used the term “trans-avant-garde Neobaroque type”57 in his 1988 All-Union Art Exhibition Youth of the Country Moscow Manezh exhibition reviews. Later, Ukrainian critic Volodymyr Solovyov labeled the first stage of the work of one of the most famous representatives of the New Wave, Oleksandr Hnylytskyi, a “curly style.” The stylistic features of this period in Hnylytskyi and other Parkomun residents are “imitation of the Baroque pictorial manner” and the “creation of outlines with curly contours.”58 Alisa Lozhkina extends the “curly style” to include many “New Wave” artists like Dmytro Kavsan (Gifts of the Magi, 1989; Battle of the Yellow Waters, 1989) and Yuriy Solomko (Bioshyliannia, 1989; Symmetry of the Path, 1989) who used “elements of the Baroque visual language in their arsenal.”59

The ideological distortions of “Ukrainian Baroque” as an oppressed style involve undergoing the decolonization processes, hybrid national forms of life proclaim self-sufficiency, and a newly invented tradition fills the existing break from the empire. The “restoration” of tradition often means returning to oppressed moments of history and continuing them. Therefore, art historian Myroslava Mudrak considers the work by Oleh Tistol and Mykola Matsenko within the framework of the New Wave as a “revival of the bright forms of the Ukrainian Baroque—its scope, expression, variegation, hyperbole.”60 They argued that as representatives of the New Wave, Tistol and Matsenko dwelled on the tradition conceived by George Narbut, borrowing elements from banknotes designed by him.61

Ukrainian Baroque is an entanglement of art, myth, and national sentiments and, thus, cannot be regarded only as a local version of Italian Baroque. The construction of Ukrainian national identity in the early 20th century impacted the ways Baroque in Ukraine was treated and appreciated. First, art and architecture themselves were shadowed by the figure of Ivan Mazepa given his attempts to build an independent state, which could distance itself from Russia. Thus, his patronage determined the way the buildings he invested in would be analyzed. Second, Baroque edifices and especially churches were inevitably judged against their predecessors on Ukrainian soil which is popular wooden architecture. Unlike imported Baroque, the latter was seen as something truly belonging to Ukrainian artistic tradition.

Scholars found a way to reconcile Baroque “foreignness” with Ukrainian traditional architecture. They stated that whimsical, ornamented, painterly style transformed traditional wooden Ukrainian Orthodox architecture incorporating some of its traits and imposing new structural and decorative formulae. Thus, at first, Ukrainian Baroque embodied the identity of the late 17th- and early 18th-century state that strived to protect and nourish its independence. Therefore, unsurprisingly, after Mazepa’s defeat alongside his Swedish allies, the style, too, lost its creative power and succumbed to the Muscovite influence.

However, as we demonstrated, further ideological changes added new layers of meaning to the construct of Ukrainian Baroque, which stopped being seen as a historical style limited to the 17th–18th centuries but as a unique national style that transcended chronological boundaries and expressed Ukrainian identity.

Eventually, in the late 1980s, the term Neobaroque was introduced in order to structure the continuous presence of Baroque in Ukraine. The term Neobaroque coming from Latin American studies got a new application in Ukraine. Although, its introduction does signify a post-and decolonial sentiment too. Through the efforts of curators and artists, Ukrainian Baroque was merged with Ukrainian contemporary art.

The constant pressure to assert national identity led to the creation of the myth of Ukrainian Baroque only partly based on the close looking at the actual artworks and the artistic entanglements that produced them. Ukrainian Baroque had to cement the disruptive narrative of Ukrainian art history and highlight the continuity of forms that could have been seen as immanently Ukrainian. The notion of the Neobaroque, which emphasized the link between the Cossack state under the rule of Mazepa and independent Ukraine served a similar purpose.

However, the unique status of Baroque in Ukrainian art history reflects not only the desire to build a harmonious cultural and political tradition that could date back at least to the Hetman period. More generally, it is a witness to the longing of states in Central and Eastern Europe to have their European identity restored after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Thus, the fixation on Baroque art turns out to be one of the ways of decolonizing and reintegrating Ukrainian culture into European cultural space.

Notes

1 Nike Bätzner, ed., Die Aktualität des Barocks (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2014); Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004); Werner Telesko, “Barock als Staatsideologie? Kontinuitäten und Brüche einer kulturpolitischen Leitkategorie von der Habsburgermonarchie über die Erste Republik bis zum Ständestaat,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Kunst und Denkmalpflege 73, no. 1/2 (2019): pp. 16–23; John V. Waldron, The Fantasy of Globalism: The Latin American Neo-Baroque (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013). Retour au texte

2 Helen Hills, ed., Rethinking the Baroque (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2011); Claire Farago, Helen Hills, Monika Kaup, Gabriela Siracusano, Jens Baumgarten, and Stefano Jacoviello, “Conceptions and Reworkings of Baroque and Neobaroque in Recent Years,” trans. Susan Wise, Perspective 1 (2015): doi.org/10.4000/perspective.5792. Retour au texte

3 Haroldo de Campos, “A obra de arte aberta,” Diário de São Paulo, July 3, 1955. Retour au texte

4 Severo Sarduy, “El barroco y el neobarroco” (1972), in Obra completa, vol. 2, eds. Gustavo Guerrero and François Wahl (Madrid: Galaxia Gutenberg; Nanterre, ALLCA XX, 1999), pp. 1385–404. Retour au texte

5 Severo Sarduy, “Baroque and Neobaroque,” in Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monica Kaup (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 289. Retour au texte

6 Zamora and Kaup, eds., “Baroque, New World Baroque, Neobaroque: Categories and Concepts,” in Baroque New Worlds, p. 11. Retour au texte

7 Farago, Hills, et al., “Conceptions and Reworkings of Baroque and Neobaroque in Recent Years,” p. 50. Retour au texte

8 Piotr Piotrowski, “Towards a Horizontal History of Modern Art,” in Writing Central European Art History: Patterns Travelling Lecture Set 2008/2009 (Vienna: Erste Foundation, 2008). Retour au texte

9 Shona Kallestrup, Magdalena Kunińska, Mihnea Alexandru Mihail, Anna Adashinskaya, and Cosmin Minea, eds., Periodization in the Art Historiographies of Central and Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 2022). Retour au texte

10 Hryhorii Pavlutskyi, “Каменное церковное зодчество на Украине” [Stone church architecture in Ukraine], in История русского искусства [History of Russian art], ed. Igor Grabar, vol. 2 (Moscow: Publishing house I. Knebel, 1909), p. 407. Retour au texte

11 Ibid., p. 384. Retour au texte

12 Ibid., p. 407. Retour au texte

13 Ibid., p. 383. Retour au texte

14 Georgy Lukomskiy, “Українське Бароко” [Ukrainian Baroque], Apollon 2 (1911). Retour au texte

15 Pavlutskyi, “Каменное церковное зодчество на Украине” [Stone church architecture in Ukraine], p. 399. Retour au texte

16 Olha Kovalevska, Іван Мазепа: у запитаннях та відповідях [Ivan Mazepa in questions and answers] (Kyiv: Tempora, 2008), p. 182. Retour au texte

17 Vadym Modzalevskyi, Основні риси українського мистецтва [The main features of Ukrainian art] (Chernihiv: H. M. Veseloi, 1918), p. 16. Retour au texte

18 Ibid., pp. 13–14. Retour au texte

19 Platon Biletskyi, Українське мистецтво другої половини XVII–XVIII століть [Ukrainian art of the second half of the 17th and the 18th century] (Kyiv: Publishing house “Mysteztvo”, 1981), p. 6. Retour au texte

20 Ibid., pp. 6–7. Retour au texte

21 Hryhorii Lohvyn, “Українське бароко в європейському контексті” [Ukrainian Baroque in the European context], in Ukrainian Baroque and the European Context (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1991), p. 23. Retour au texte

22 Wölfflin is mentioned or addressed in several other contributions throughout the volume, particularly in the essays of Dmytro Stepovyk and Helena Popova. Retour au texte

23 Lohvyn, “Українське бароко в європейському контексті” [Ukrainian Baroque in the European context], p. 10. Retour au texte

24 Volodymyr Vecherskyi, “Архітектура. Загальна характеристика доби” [Architecture: General characteristics of the era], in History of Ukrainian Art, vol. 3, ed. Dmytro Stepovyk (Kyiv: Rylsky Institute of Ethnology and Art History, 2011), p. 287. Retour au texte

25 Dmytro Antonovych, Скорочений курс українського мистецтва [A short introduction to the history of Ukrainian art] (Prague: Vydannia Ukrainskoho universytetu, 1923), p. 105. Retour au texte

26 Ibid. Retour au texte

27 Георгій Нарбут. Посмертна виставка творів [Heorhii Narbut: The posthumous exhibit of his works] (exh. cat. Kyiv: State Publishing House of Ukraine, 1926), pp. 67–68. Retour au texte

28 Viktor Chepelyk, “Зародження архітектури українського необароко” [The origins of Ukrainian Neobaroque architecture], Українське бароко IІ [Ukrainian Baroque II] (Kharkiv: Akta, 2004), pp. 269–369: p. 316. Retour au texte

29 Ibid. Retour au texte

30 Ibid., p. 315. Retour au texte

31 Ibid., p. 319. Retour au texte

32 Ibid. Retour au texte

33 Anatolìj Kantor, О стиле [About style] (Moskow: Sovetskiy hudozhnik, 1962), p. 46. Retour au texte

34 Ibid., p. 47. Retour au texte

35 Полное собрание законов Российской империи, с 1649 года [The complete collection of the laws of the Russian Empire from 1649] 26 (Saint Petersburg: Printing House of the 2nd Department of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery, 1830), p. 483. Retour au texte

36 Yurii Ivanchenko, “Київська архітектура XII–XVIII століть” [Kyivan architecture, 17th–18th centuries], Актуальні проблеми мистецької практики і мистецтвознавчої науки 4, 2012, p. 80. Retour au texte

37 Petro Savchuk, “Церква і фундуші на Волині” [Church and manors in Volyn], Наукові записки Національного університету Острозька академія, Серія Історичне релігієзнавство 1 (2009): p. 197 Retour au texte

38 Chepelyk, “Зародження архітектури українського необароко” [The origins of Ukrainian Neobaroque architecture], p. 271. Retour au texte

39 Viktor Vecherskyi, “Бароко козацьке” [The Cossack Baroque], Велика українська енциклопедія [Great Ukrainian encyclopedia](January 22, 2023): vue.gov.ua/Baroko_kozatske. Retour au texte

40 The term “Little Russia” was first used by the Patriarchs of Constantinople to refer to the smaller or less populated part of Rus’. Until the Truce of Andrusovo in 1667, the term meant the Orthodox Ruthenian lands that were part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. But after Ukrainian lands were again divided between Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the left-bank territories, under the name “Little Russia,” were annexed by Russia. See Nataliia Yakovenko, “Вибір імені versus вибір шляху: назви української території між кінецем XVI–кінцем XVII століття” [The choice of name as a choice of a path: The names of the Ukrainian territory at the end of the 16th century and in the 17th], Міжкультурний діалог [Intercultural dialogue] 1 (2012): pp. 57–95. From that time on, a neutral term becomes pejorative and used to highlight the primacy of the “Great Russia” that referred to the Russian Empire. Retour au texte

41 Dmytro Horbachov, Yaroslav Isaievych et al. (eds), Українське бароко [Ukrainian Baroque] I (Kharkiv: Akta, 2004), p. 13. Retour au texte

42 “28 червня в Скарбниці Національного музею історії України відбудеться відкриття виставкиЄвропейська Україна. Доба Мазепи’” [On June 28, 2022, the opening of the exhibition European Ukraine: Age of Mazepa], Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine, January 22, 2023: mkip.gov.ua/news/7327.html. Retour au texte

43 Halyna Skliarenko, “Необарокові тенденції в українському мистецтві кінця 1980-x–2000-x років: актуальність національного досвіду” [Neobaroque tendencies in Ukrainian art of the 1980s–2000s], Сучасне мистецтво [Contemporary art] 16 (2020): p. 41. Від Бароко до Бароко: Художньо-літературна акція, присвячена бароковій культурі 17-18 ст. і необароковим течіям 20 століття [From Baroque to Baroque: The artistic and literary event dedicated to the Baroque culture of the 17th–18th centuries and the Neobaroque currents of the 20th century] (Kyiv: Irena, 1996). Retour au texte

44 Від Бароко до Бароко [From Baroque to Baroque], p. v. Retour au texte

45 Ibid. Retour au texte

46 Ibid., p. 19. Retour au texte

47 Ibid., p. 11. Retour au texte

48 Halyna Skliarenko and Oksana Barshynova, Міф “Українське Бароко” [The myth of “Ukrainian Baroque”] (Kyiv: Maister knyh, 2012). Retour au texte

49 Ibid., p. 17. Retour au texte

50 This transliteration of the name follows the Ukrainian style; the name can also be found in the form “Alexander Archipenko,” which follows the Russian style. Retour au texte

51 Ibid., p. 17. Retour au texte

52 “New wave” is a generalized name for stylistically diverse schools. Some groups in the 1980s and 2000s did not have a school or did not belong to a specific style defined by one generation. Hlib Vysheslavskyi, Contemporary art Українивід андеграунду до мейнстріму [Contemporary art of Ukraine — from the underground to the mainstream] (Kyiv: IPSM NAM Ukrainy, 2020); Alisa Lozhkina, Permanent Revolution: Art in Ukraine, the 20th to the Early 21st Century (Kyiv: ArtHuss, 2020). Retour au texte

53 Skliarenko and Barshynova, Міф Українське Бароко[The myth of “Ukrainian Baroque”], p. 17. Retour au texte

54 Ibid., p. 18. Retour au texte

55 Ibid., p. 19. Retour au texte

56 Paris Commune or Parcomuna is a Ukrainian artistic phenomenon and underground art group that worked in Kyiv from 1990 to 1994 in an abandoned building (squat) on the street named for the Paris Commune. See Vysheslavskyi, Contemporary art України [Contemporary art of Ukraine]. Retour au texte

57 Yaryna Tsymbal, ed., Паркомуна. Місце. Спільнота. Явище [Parkcomuna: The place, the society, the phenomenon] (Kyiv: Publish Pro, 2018). Retour au texte

58 Oleksandr Soloviov and Oleksandr Hnylytskyi, 25 років присутності. Сучасні українські художники [25 years of presence: Contemporary Ukrainian artists] vol. 1 (Kyiv: IPSM NAM Ukrainy, 2016), p. 68. Retour au texte

59 Lozhkina, Permanent Revolution, p. 275. Retour au texte

60 Myroslava Mudrak, Образний світ Георгія Нарбута і творення українського бренду [The creative universe of Georgii Narbut and the making of the Ukrainian brand] (Kyiv: Rodovid, 2021), p. 151. Retour au texte

61 Ibid., p. 139. Retour au texte

Illustrations

  • 1. Ivan Mihura, Mazepa Amongst His Good Deeds, 1705, engraving, 46.5 × 31.5 cm, The National Preserve “Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra,” Kyiv.

    1. Ivan Mihura, Mazepa Amongst His Good Deeds, 1705, engraving, 46.5 × 31.5 cm, The National Preserve “Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra,” Kyiv.

  • 2. Saint Nicholas Military Cathedral, Kyiv, March 30, 1918, photographic print from the album of photographs taken by an unknown German during World War I. Private collection.

    2. Saint Nicholas Military Cathedral, Kyiv, March 30, 1918, photographic print from the album of photographs taken by an unknown German during World War I. Private collection.

  • 3. Saint Sophia Cathedral, Kyiv, 18th century, iconostasis.

    3. Saint Sophia Cathedral, Kyiv, 18th century, iconostasis.

  • 4. National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv, building 1 (Institute of Forestry), architect: Dmytro Dyachenko, 1927, main facade (2022).

    4. National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv, building 1 (Institute of Forestry), architect: Dmytro Dyachenko, 1927, main facade (2022).

  • 5 and 6. A room of the exhibition The Myth of “Ukrainian Baroque,” National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kyiv, 2012, with Petro Kerestey’s Narcissus.

    5 and 6. A room of the exhibition The Myth of “Ukrainian Baroque, National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kyiv, 2012, with Petro Kerestey’s Narcissus.

  • 5 and 6. A room of the exhibition The Myth of “Ukrainian Baroque,” National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kyiv, 2012, with Petro Kerestey’s Narcissus.

    5 and 6. A room of the exhibition The Myth of “Ukrainian Baroque, National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kyiv, 2012, with Petro Kerestey’s Narcissus.

Citer cet article

Référence papier

Stefaniia Demchuk et Illia Levchenko, « Ukrainian Baroque », Histoire de l’art, 91 | 2023, 83-94.

Référence électronique

Stefaniia Demchuk et Illia Levchenko, « Ukrainian Baroque », Histoire de l’art [En ligne], 91 | 2023, mis en ligne le 01 juin 2024, consulté le 05 novembre 2024. URL : https://devisu.inha.fr/histoiredelart/114

Auteurs

Stefaniia Demchuk

Stefaniia Demchuk, PhD, is an assistant professor of art history at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and a Research Fellow at Masaryk University in Brno. She is currently working on her postdoctoral project devoted to the culture of memory and art of 16th-century Netherlands and on a larger study of historiography, which looks at intellectual exchanges between “Western” and “Eastern” European art histories.

Illia Levchenko

Illia Levchenko, MA, is a PhD student at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and visiting scholar at the Bibliotheca Hertziana–Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome. He is researching the representative practices of James I (VI) Stuart based on visual sources (1603–40) and analyzing the relationship between art, power, identities, and politics in a broader sense.