Kazimir Malewitsch und die Ukraine

The lecture is given by Dr. Svitlana Shiells

Der Vortrag ist auf Englisch.
The lecture will be held in English.

Kazimir Malevich and Ukraine: From What Is the Ukrainian Peasant in Malevich’s Painting Peasant Between Cross and Sword Running?

Scholarship on Kazimir Malevich (Kazymyr Malevych) rarely discuss his Ukrainian roots, connections or influences. At the end of 1920s, Malevich (1879-1935), who was born in Ukraine, studied there, and kept uninterrupted close contacts with his Ukrainian colleagues, moved back to Kyiv and started to teach at the Academy of Arts. For Russians and Ukrainians, the Revolution of 1917 embodied different desires: for the former—the triumph of the proletariat that personified social justice; for Ukrainians—long-awaited independence. For a short period, Ukraine indeed became independent. A month after the Revolution, in December 1917, the Ukrainian Academy of Arts was founded. Lamentably, the Stalin regime delivered the final nullifying blow to Ukrainian modernism. Malevich’s paintings, created around the 1930s, give a codified, stylized depiction of the realities of the Soviet Ukraine during that period, when most artists were killed, and peasants were dying by the millions due to the 1932-33 Holodomor (man-made famine) organized by Stalin in order to put down any aspirations for freedom in the Soviet Ukraine. In this regard, his work Peasant Between Cross and Sword (1932-34) is a testament to the atrocities done by the Soviet regime in Ukraine. Providing the wider historical and cross-cultural context for Malevich’s famous painting, this paper reveals clearly for the first time why the Ukrainian peasant is running. These days, when many Ukrainians refugees are running from their native land again due to the war that Russia started on February 24, 2022, Malevich’s art resonates even more deeply. Ultimately, the lecture emphasizes that without understanding the key role of Ukrainian history and culture in Malevich’s oeuvre, it is impossible to understand his supremely complex art.

Svitlana Shiells, a former professor of art history, has taught at a number of universities in Ukraine, America, and Austria. She has worked as a Research Associate at the Freer and Sackler Galleries (a museum of Asian art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.). For more than ten years she was also the Director of the Washington Cultural Fund, Washington, D.C. The focus of her research is Eastern and Central European modern art. Dr. Shiells publishes widely and has presented her research at numerous conferences, lectures, and seminars, for instance, at Harvard University, Tokyo University of the Arts, the College Art Association, the Library of Congress, the Salzburg Seminar, different art museums, etc., as well as at conferences in London, Tokyo, Paris, Barcelona, Chicago, Montreal, Baltimore, Salzburg, Washington, D.C., Kharkiv, Budapest, etc. She is a recipient of fellowships in the field of art in the U.S., Ukraine, and Japan. Currently, she is an independent scholar, living in Vienna and working on a monograph.