In 2021, the Finnish Museum of Fine Arts, in cooperation with the Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian Museum, organized a major exhibition of Lipin’s works. It indicated that the artist was born on the territory of modern Ukraine, but presented him as a Russian. Since then, Ukrainians have approached the museum with the intention of restoring historical justice.
Among those who asked the museum to change Lipin’s nationality was Ukrainian journalist Anna Rodykhina of Ukraine Pravda.Kultura (Culture). While she was preparing an article about the artist, she asked to know more about his life in Finland. The curator sent her an article saying that Lipin’s parents were Russian and that he was born in the Moscow region. In response, Rodykhina sent proof that this was not true. Church documents indicated that the artist’s father and grandfather were born in Ukraine.
“Exactly one year ago, I wrote for the first time to the Atheneum, the largest art museum in Finland, asking for an interview with the chief curator Timo Fusko about one of my projects. “I was researching about his life, about which very little is known. His time in Ukraine,” says Rodykhina.
She added that she knew about a scandalous exhibition the museum held six months before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, presenting Lipin as a Russian artist.
“My request turned into a conversation and correspondence, during which I discussed with Timo the ethnicity of the artist. In one of his emails he sent a link to an article, in which Lipin’s parents I asked Auriha Shevchenko, deputy director of research at the Lipin Art Museum in Chukhiv, whether his roots were Ukrainian, not Russian. “I was asked to send a copy of the artist’s family’s weighing book as proof of this,” she says.
Rodykhina believes that the information from the Chuhuif Museum was extremely important for the Atheneum. “A little later I learned that under Lipin’s painting in the new exhibition it was written that he was a Ukrainian artist.”
The decision to change Lipin’s nationality took more than two years for the Finnish Museum after the initial request after the end of the 2021 exhibition. At the time, the Ukrainian-born Finnish musician Łukasz Stasevski stressed that the Atheneum exhibition lacked information about the wider relationship with Lipin. Ukrainian culture.
“Although Lipin grew up in Ukraine and Ukrainian themes were an integral part of his work, the organizers ignored this and presented Lipin exclusively as a Russian artist,” he said. He started writing letters to museums and raising the issue in the media, but to no avail.
Atheneum curator Timo Fusco said the museum ultimately decided to call Lipin a Ukrainian when it was preparing for the exhibition “The Question of Time,” which included one of Lipin’s works. It is said that
Main image:National Museum of Finland / Aleks Talve