Finland’s largest art museum, Atheneum, has changed its nationality signature in the name of artist Ilia Lipin [better known by the Russian spelling of his name, Ilya Repin – ed.] From Russian to Ukrainian.
This was reported by local media outlet Suomen Kvareti.
In 2021, the Finnish Museum of Art, 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 were: Anna Rodichina, Ukrainian journalist from 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 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 Finland’s largest art museum, the Atheneum, asking for an interview with chief curator Timo Fusko about one of my projects. “I was researching about his life, about which very little is known. The Ukrainian period,” Rodykhina says.
She added that she knew about a scandalous exhibition the museum held six months before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, presenting Liepin 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 paintings in the new exhibition it was written that he was a Ukrainian artist.”
After the 2021 exhibition ended, it took more than two years for the Finnish Museum of Fine Arts to make the decision to change nationality after the initial request. At the time, the Ukrainian-born Finnish musician Łukasz Stasevski stressed that the Atheneum exhibition lacked information about Lipin’s extensive ties to Russia. Ukrainian culture.
“Lipin grew up in Ukraine and Ukrainian themes were an integral part of his work, but 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 Fusko said the museum ultimately decided to call Liepin a Ukrainian when it was preparing for the exhibition “The Question of Time,” which included one of Liepin’s works. It is said that
Revival of Ukrainian art
In February 2023, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York changed the nationality of Mariupol-born artist Archip Kuinji. [often spelled as Arkhip Kuindzhi – ed.] Explanations range from Russian to Ukrainian. They also added that the Russians destroyed a museum dedicated to the artist in his hometown.
Just a few days later, the Metropolitan Museum of Art also recognized Ilya Lipin and Ivan Aivazovsky as Ukrainian rather than Russian artists. In particular, relevant marks appeared in the captions of Liepin’s portrait depicting the writer Vsevolod Harshin and Aivazovsky’s seascape.
In March 2023, the Stedelijk Museum (Netherlands), which houses one of the most complete collections of Kazimir Malevich’s works, changed the caption of information about the abstract artist to identify him as Ukrainian.
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