Days after invading Ukraine, Russian forces fired rockets at a museum housing colorful paintings by the late Ukrainian folk artist Maria Prymachenko, admired by Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall. The building burned down, but her joyful work survived.
Residents of the northern town of Ivankiv managed to rescue the pictures, turning the imaginative painter into a symbol of endurance and hope. Prymachenko’s light through darkness approach, despite a lifetime of hardships, opened yesterday in the Polish capital, now home to thousands of refugees from fUkraine.
The exhibition features dozens of gouache paintings of rural life and fantastical creatures in a childlike style and a palette resplendent with flamboyant tones of highlighter pink, sunflower yellow and blood orange.
Photo: AFP
“Beyond being a famous painter, Maria Prymachenko is also a great symbol of Russia’s failure to erase Ukrainian identity and culture,” said Vitalii Bilyi, counselor at the Ukrainian embassy in Warsaw.
“And thanks to this exhibition we can spread the word,” he said at a press preview of the show entitled “A Tiger Came into the Garden,” which runs until June at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
Prymachenko was born in the village of Bolotnya in 1909 and over nearly nine decades survived polio, the Ukrainian famine, both world wars — losing her husband to the second — and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
“She showed strength of spirit and painted all her life. The paintings, while colorful, show different aspects of life and the Ukrainian tragedy,” said Myroslava Keryk, head of the Ukrainian House Foundation which promotes the country’s culture in Poland.
“And they provide hope of victory, that we will persevere and the war will end,” she said.
Prymachenko produced her commentary on everyday life by pairing images of animals or nature with little poems, often with grammatical mistakes because of her lack of education, Keryk said.
An example from the exhibition is a meditation on hunger featuring a cheery yellow and pink depiction of a billy goat and the title “Dear little goat, have you eaten, have you drunk?”
Another shows bright pink ornamental tulips against a somber background with a caption that begins: “A bouquet to the Unknown Soldier. Honor and glory to you, dear warriors!”
The war widow painted a whole series dedicated to fighting men, which several decades later “has an incredible topical anti-war message,” co-curator Szymon Maliborski said.
“These are works that allow Prymachenko to, on the one hand, avoid having to directly depict war, but on the other hand show a grappling with loss, the death of a loved one,” he said.
A sunny painting of exotic blue birds is offset by the poem, “Four parrots sit in a cherry tree humming. The boys go to the army and the girls see them off — wishing them luck.”
This contrast between optimism and trauma was typical for the painter who had wished for “people to live like flowers bloom,” Maliborski said.
She often “mixed the solemn with the comical, adding a dash of humor or acceptance to her criticism,” he said. “There’s a kind of coming to terms with the world and wanting to change it simultaneously. The awareness that human nature is what it is yet fighting for it to be better,” he said.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
RSS