December 31. 2011 - The Ukranian Museum is located on East 6th Street in Manhattan; I discovered it by chance one day while killing time before a dance rehearsal at NYU. Kokyat and I promised ourselves we'd go there by the end of December 2011 and today was our last chance to keep good our word.
The museum is quite small, basically one large gallery on each of two floors, with a small gift nook. It is an immaculately kept and inviting space. The first floor is currently given over to an exhibit of traditional Ukranian wedding costumes (above)...
...and colorful head-dresses worn by wedding guests (above). A film shows us some of the customs in celebrating a wedding: the groom is bathed by old women, then goves off to the bride's house. Bride and groom are led blind-folded into the bridal chamber and placed in a yoke-like wooden collar. Everyone leaves them alone; they grope their way out of the yoke, remove their blindfolds and then their clothing. Then marriage is underway.
One large wall is covered with old photographs of weddings and other traditional festivities in small Ukranian villages. Fanciful sculptures made of baked bread are dislayed.
Upstairs in an attractive open white space, works by Borys Kosarev are on display. This prolific artist produced works in a variety of styles...
...from this 1922 charcoal Female Nude and Fish...
...to geometric set designs for theatrical productions (above, from 1923). At the top of this article is the cover design of an almanac, dating from 1918.
From the exhibit's catalog:
"Kosarev is barely known in his own country. This first ever exhibition brings to light Kosarev’s prodigious talent and exposes the fundamental relationship between the artist and the site of his creative stimulus, his beloved city, Kharkiv," said Maria Shust, director of The Ukrainian Museum. “The exhibition will return to Ukraine to be shown at the Kharkiv Museum in 2012. Kosarev’s extensive contribution to Ukrainian Modernism will finally be given its due.”
Borys Kosarev’s name will forever be associated with the city of Kharkiv—the place of his birth, death, and a long life devoted to the visual arts. A native son of the fiercely independent Kharkiv territory, which produced some of Ukraine’s most creative cultural personalities, Kosarev epitomizes the spirit of the area and its regional diversity. The contents of the exhibition coincide with the period of Kharkiv’s status as Ukraine’s capital city (1919-1934) and the rise of Constructivism as an ideological aesthetic. It was also the period of Ukrainianization—a government policy that encouraged the revitalization of national culture, only to be quashed through a series of orchestrated purges of its proponents, the Ukrainian intelligentsia, beginning in the 1930s. While it flourished, Ukrainianization brought with it a renaissance of art and culture, serving as an unprecedented gateway into global Modernism through the aesthetic of Constructivism.
Sheltered from excessive official scrutiny by working in theater design and as a teacher until his death in 1994, Kosarev survived the Stalin purges and later repressions by intentionally staying “under the radar screen.” Sadly, his own reticence, coupled with the pressures exerted by the political landscape of the times, left Kosarev virtually unknown as a contributor to the Modernist movement. Not unlike Anatol Petrytsky (1895-1964), whose works were called a “serendipitous discovery” by the New York Times, Kosarev and his art are yet to be revealed and considered among the important Modernists of the early 20th century."
After leaving the museum we walked to the nearby St. George Ukranian Catholic Church (detail above).
A shattered mirror left on the curb gave me this image.
Then we continued our walk under an ever-changing sky on this last day of 2011.