Muristek
Ukraine’s best loved artist: ‘Once again a symbol of survival in the midst of a dictator’s war’
Maria Prymachenko created seemingly happy scenes of animals and rural life. But look closer and you see the horrors unleashed on her country by Stalin. She has once again become a national symbol, her work duplicated at rallies worldwide
At the 1937 International Exposition in Paris, two colossal pavilions faced each other down. One was Hitler’s Germany, crowned with a Nazi eagle. The other was Stalin’s Soviet Union, crowned with a statue of a worker and a peasant holding hands. It was a symbolic clash at a moment when right and left were fighting to the death in Spain. But somewhere inside the Soviet pavilion, among all the socialist realism, were drawings of fabulous beasts and flowers filled with a raw folkloric magic. They subverted the age of the dictators with nothing less than a triumph of the human imagination over terror and mass death.
These sublime creations were the work of a Ukrainian artist, Maria Prymachenko, who has once again become a symbol of survival in the midst of a dictator’s war. Prymachenko, who died in 1997, is the best-loved artist of the besieged country, a national symbol whose work has appeared on its postage stamps, and her likeness on its money. Ukrainian astronomer Klim Churyumov even named a planet after her.
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