Multiple famous 19th-century Russian painters have been re-labeled as Ukrainian nationals by the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the gallery’s website shows.
Following public pressure from Ukrainian nationalists, the staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art has retroactively decided that Russian painters including marine master Ivan Aivazovsky, landscape artist Arkhip Kuindzhi, and highly-renowned realist Ilya Repin were all actually Ukrainians.
Despite living most of their lives in Russia, speaking Russian, marrying Russian women, graduating from Russia’s Imperial Academy of Arts, and serving in the Russian military or government, the painters were all actually Ukrainians, the gallery now insists.
In a bizarrely antagonistic opinion piece published Sunday, the Kiev regime’s ambassador to South Africa celebrated the rewriting of history by museum staff but expressed anger that it had taken museum staff so long to do so:
“A Ukrainian who actually purposely identified himself as a Ukrainian during his lifetime finally gets a note in a museum that is supposed to be facts-based that he is actually a Ukrainian painter,” she wrote sarcastically, in reference to Kuindzhi. “What a wild and unbelievable concept for a museum.”
Kuindzhi was born to Pontic Greek parents in Mariupol, which was controlled then – as it is now – by Russia. He spent most of his life in the Russian cities of Taganrog and Saint Petersburg, and thus far there is no apparent evidence that he considered himself Ukrainian.
Nor is there any evidence of a secret predilection for Ukrainian nationalism by Ivan Aivazovsky, who came from an Armenian family and served for many years as an official artist of the Russian Imperial Navy, with whom he frequently participated in Black Sea training and maneuvers.
Arguably the most distant from any conceivable Ukrainian identity is Repin, one of the 19th’s century’s best-known Russian painters, who once penned a letter from Paris informing the secretary of the Russian Imperial Academy of Arts: “I dream only of returning to Russia.”
Alongside Kuindzhi, Repin was an influential figure among the Peredvizhniki, which has been described as the “first great nationalist movement within Russian art.” The movement, whose name is often translated as “the Wanderers,” is considered the main model for the Socialist Realism style that characterized art in the Soviet Union.
It’s not the Met’s first brush with de-russification. Last week, officials renamed Edgar Degas’ “Russian Dancer” portrait to “Dancer in a Ukrainian Dress.” The decision echoed that of the curators of London’s National Gallery, who decided last April to relabel Degas’ famed “Russian Dancers as “Ukrainian Dancers.”
In a statement, the Department of Drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum claimed that Degas has “mistakenly” titled his series of works with the name, insisting without evidence that the painter “respected the Ukrainians for retaining their culture and traditions” despite what gallery staff described as “centuries of repression.”