“Stone Hits Stone”

Book DESCRIPTION

Ukrainian art history books have long failed to give Ukrainian women artists their due. Some have even wondered whether women artists even existed. In late 2019, publication of the book Why There Are Great Women Artists in Ukrainian Art delivered a resounding affirmative answer. And the names and stories in this book suggest their numbers were legion.

The title of the book is a deliberate recall of the American feminist critic Linda Nochlin’s famous essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Nochlin chose the essay form to attack the naturalist presumption—challenged by John Stuart Mill—that whatever situation exists is “correct,” pointing out that situations are artificially created to serve purposes of exclusion. It is noteworthy that her essay appeared in 1971, a year after the Ukrainian Soviet artist Alla Horska was violently murdered for her human rights activism. Interestingly, Horska is most often spoken of in terms of her activism, not her art—even by other artists. Her letters to political prisoners and the political speeches she delivered have tended to overshadow her contributions to the genre of monumental art, mostly mosaic panels and stained-glass windows.

For artists of the Ukrainian Soviet sixties, moreover, it was typical to work in tandem with a male artist. Thus Horska worked with Victor Zaretsky in Kyiv, Margit Reich-Selska cooperated with Roman Selsky in Lviv, and Lyudmyla Yastreb co-authored with Victor Marinyuk in Odesa. And for many decades, art historians viewed these women artists predominantly as partners to the men. According to them their proper place as artists has been hampered by an unexamined belief that Ukrainian art was a masculine field, one in which women, lacking sufficient talent, simply could not survive. But the true bars to women’s participation at the same level as men were chiefly political and economic. Even during the harshest periods in Ukraine’s history, such as at the beginning of the twentieth century or in the 1990s, in the chaotic days following independence, women artists were present in Ukraine’s art life: they created artworks, mounted exhibitions, and taught art in university classrooms.

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