Finnish news site Suomen Kuvalehti reported this significant change. In 2021, Repin was listed as a Russian artist, with the addition that he was born in the territory of modern-day Ukraine. Since then, Ukrainians have regularly applied to museums seeking restoration of historical justice.
A journalist from Ukraine is among those who have applied to the museum to change Repin’s nationality. ukrainska pravdaAnna Rodizina wrote a thorough article identifying the true nationality of the artist and his family.
While preparing the material, she asked for more information about his life in Finland. The curator of the museum sent her an article saying that Repin’s parents were Russian and born in the Moscow region.
In response, Rodygina sent proof that this was not the case. According to church documents, the artist’s father and grandfather were born on the territory of Ukraine.
She identified that Repin was introduced as a Russian artist in a major exhibition of Repin’s work that the museum jointly organized with the Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian Museum six months before the full-scale invasion.
According to journalists, she discussed the artist’s ethnicity with the exhibition’s chief curator, Timo Gusko.
“In one of the letters, he sent a link to documents showing that Repin’s parents were Russians born in the Moscow region. “I appealed to him to send me a copy of the metric book of the painter’s family as proof that his roots were not Russian, but Ukrainian,” the journalist recalled.
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According to Rodygina, the information from the museum in Chuhuib was very important for the Athenaeum.
“A little later I learned that under Repin’s paintings in the new exhibition it was written that he was a Ukrainian artist.”
The Finnish Museum has been working for more than two years to finally determine Repin’s nationality.
Among those who raised the issue of Repin’s nationality change in the media was Ukrainian-born Finnish musician Lukasz Stasevsky.
Finally, the museum decided to classify Repin as a Ukrainian when preparing the exhibition “A Matter of Time”, which included one of Repin’s works.
An article in the Kyiv Post last year revealed how Repin glorified his native Ukraine and its Cossack heritage in his paintings and their provenance.
The trend of returning the names of Ukrainian artists in world museums
In March 2023, the Stadelik Museum in Amsterdam, which houses the most complete collection of abstract artist Kazimir Malevich’s works, reclassified him as Ukrainian.
In February 2023, the New York Subway classified Ilya Repin and Ivan Aivazovsky as Ukrainian artists rather than Russian artists, in connection with Repin’s portrait of the writer Vsevolod Garshin and Aivazovsky’s seascape. Certified.