Art as a Factor in War

Recently we talked about how Ukrainians protect their cultural heritage. Since the start of the all-out war, the village of Ivankiv has been under Russian occupation for a month, and the museum exhibiting Maria Prymnachenko's paintings was burnt down in a Russian attack on February 27, 2020.

Maria Prymnachenko is a famous Ukrainian. She was an artist who worked in a style called naive art. Her images have been exhibited in many countries and continue to amaze and inspire decades later. Some of her works by Maria Prymachenko were kept in the local history museum in the village of Ivankiv, north of Kyiv. These works and the valuables in them are the only things that remain from the history of our Ivankiv region. According to Anastasia Prymachenko, Maria's niece, 10 of the 25 works of art were saved.

Prymachenko was born in 1908 in a small village near Kyiv into a peasant family. His father was a carpenter, and his mother taught him traditional Ukrainian crafts such as embroidery. She began making art at a young age, creating from instinct and dream, while drawing inspiration from peasant life and Ukrainian folk culture. In the mid-1930s, Prymachenko was discovered by another Ukrainian artist, Tatiana Floru, who invited her to the central experimental studio of the Museum of Ukrainian Art in Kyiv.

Picasso even noticed it and praised it:

“I bow before the artistic miracle of this talented Ukrainian.” Her art has been described as "naive", which is the creation of an artist who has not been classically trained, often giving the art a straightforwardness and straightforwardness, often associated with art. Art made by children. This honesty and authenticity make Prymachenko and his art so endearing.

Here is a quote from the summary of the publication about the intentional destruction of cultural heritage by Federico Lenzerini:

“In most cases of deliberate destruction of cultural heritage, the target of the perpetrator is not the heritage itself but the communities and people for whom the inheritance is of particular importance. This shows a clear discriminatory and repressive intent against targeted cultural groups and even against the entire international community. Thus, the intentional destruction of cultural heritage, in addition to being considered a war crime, must in fact also be considered a crime against humanity."

In the context of war, targeting museums is of no small importance. Art can be the expression of a people's voice, the expression of a culture in an object. What it represents goes beyond the artist, the work of art becomes more than Prymachenko, it becomes more than what it represents, it becomes a symbol of a culture, a testament to the culture of a people in a certain place and time. This is physical evidence of the existence of popular culture. All art reflects the culture and its people, and destroying a work of art is at best an attack on the people it represents and at worst an attempt to erase them.

The fire at the Ivankiv museum, if indeed a deliberate destruction by Russian forces as has been claimed, was not just an attack against an institution, against any building, or against one of the possible exits from Ukraine. It is an attack on Ukrainian culture and the Ukrainian people, an attempt to demoralize, exhaust, and erase them.