HISTORY REPEATED- ARTIST/ACTIVIST IN UKRAINE

ALLA HORSKAborn in 1929 in Yalta (on the Crimea)  was a Ukrainian artist of the 1960s, monumentalist painter, one of the first representatives of the underground art movement, dissident, and human rights activist of the Sixtiers movement in Ukraine. She was the wife of  painter Viktor Zaretsky (See previous Blog). Not only did she paint, she also designed many mosaics, found today throughout the Ukraine.

Highly intelligent, motivated, and talented, she graduated from art school with honors and later joined the Kyiv Art Institute. It was through relationships developed there, including the meeting of her future husband, that she became involved with the Creative Youth Club “Suchasnist,” the center of Ukrainian culture in Kyiv. In the early 1960s Alla joined the national revival movement in Ukraine which counted numerous intellectuals and artists of her generation.

They exhibited paintings, performed plays, read poems, and mentioned everyone and everything that was stamped out by the Soviet authorities. Ukrainian culture and history were created there.

 She was a fiery student of Ukrainian history and its cultural legacy, in particular folk art, academic and monumental painting, and the avant-garde of the beginning of the century. But her passion did not end with art.

After the artist and other dissidents discovered a mass grave in Bykivnia in the Kyiv region in 1962 (referring to the victims of NKVD), Alla’s human rights activity quickened in pace. She participated in protests. Political prisoners asked her for help, and dissidents often found shelter in her apartment. All of this resulted in an appeal to the Soviet authorities to stop the persecution.

 Of course, neither her artistic nor the human rights activities could stay unnoticed by the authorities. The artist’s apartment was watched; her phone was tapped, and her every step was monitored. She was repeatedly questioned by the KGB and unsuccessfully “recruited” to their ranks.

Her funeral on December 7, 1970, turned into a civil resistance campaign. Her associates – the literary critic Yevgen Sverstiuk, poet Vasyl Stus, human rights advocate Ivan Gel, and civil activist Oles Sergienko made speeches. The event was not allowed by the investigative commission and all of those who spoke were arrested a short time later. Two years after the death of the artist, mass arrests began among the Ukrainian intelligentsia. As a result, for some, it was the beginning of the end. For example, the literary critic Ivan Svitlychny and the poet Vasyl Stus were both arrested, and both of their lives ended as a direct result of Soviet imprisonment.

Her works are housed in the collections of the NationalArt Museum in Kyiv, the NationalMuseum in Lviv, the Central State Archive Museum of Literature and Art, the Museum of the Sixtiers, the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Soviet Nonconformist Art at RutgersUniversity, and the CheckpointCharlieBerlinWallMuseum, among others.

Art:  Top photo of Alla in 1940s.

   Painting top right- Swan Lake

    Painting left- Dancing peasants

    Painting right- Self Portrait with son, (6 year old Oleksii)

    Bottom-   Mosaic -"The WInd" in Mariupol

            July 2022