Art critic Waldemar Januszczak reports on the country's astonishing mission to stop the destruction of its artistic treasures.
How my mother was born in Ukraine in what were then Polish lands. How in 1939 the Russians invaded and put her on a cattle truck to Siberia. She was 16. How, when the Russians turned against the Nazis two years later, they opened up the labour camps and she walked from Siberia to the Middle East with hundreds of thousands of other newly freed Poles. How she fetched up in England. And had me. How art was my way of seeing light at the end of the tunnel.
You can go and see for yourself, he added. I suppose I can, I whispered back, wishing I was as evidently Polish and brave as he was. That must be when the gods of art got involved. Because the next thing I know, Tomasz and Marta de Zuniga, the unstoppable life force from the Polish Cultural Institute who organized the event, are jointly planning my journey.
Throughout its entire history Ukraine has been a motorway for anyone heading west or east in Europe. Whether you’re Napoleon marching on Moscow or the Golden Horde riding to Berlin, you pass through Ukraine. And all these cultures—Scythians, Tatars, Germans, Russians, Poles, French—have left their mark on the local art. The result is a wild mix of styles and influences that make Ukrainian art spectacularly varied. Now it is all under threat.
Propped up on his cupboard is a 19th-century painting of an earlier Ukrainian war showing a mounted Chechen waving the decapitated head of a Russian at us. “It pleases me,” he answers when I ask him why he’s put it there. Not in a million years can I imagine the director of Tate Britain or the National Portrait Gallery being as up for a scrap as Voznyak. Same job. Completely different species.
He is annoyed that people in the West seem to have forgotten that the war with the Russians started in 2014 with the invasion of Crimea. The present fight is just the latest episode. So Ukraine has had plenty of time to prepare plans and regulations for moving its national art to safety. Yes, many of the art treasures from Kyiv, Kharkiv and Dnipro have come to Lviv. But many are hidden elsewhere. Where the Russians won’t find them.
Workers move a baroque sacred art piece in the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum as part of safety preparations in the event of an attack on Lviv. So, of course, is Ukrainian art. It’s what art does in times of war. It rallies the national spirit and focuses it.
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