National Ukrainian Museum hosts exhibition, Oleksandr Arkhypenko and His Inheritors

At first, the Arkhypenko exhibit seems disappointing. After all, considerable expectations were associated with it from the very beginning — for the first time they were to bring part of the collection of the Saar Museum that has probably the world’s largest Arkhypenko collection. In reality, the shining mirage shrank to the size of a small exhibition hall with several titles and a couple dozen prints, with half from the National Museum’s stock. Two other halls were for the “inheritors”: sculptor and graphics artist Oleksandr Sukholit and sculptor Anatoly Tverdy.

The director of the Saar Museum explained the scant exposition simply: most works by Arkhypenko stored in Saarbrucken are made from plaster of Paris and moving them could be lethal. And so, not counting several abstract lithographs — indeed very expressive and memorable — only three bronze works were brought.

And, taking a closer look at them, rather at two figurines, you understand once again that the history of art is written not even as separate phrases, but in rare signs scattered hither and yon. Precisely such two hieroglyphs were presented in Kyiv: A Dance and Walking Woman (both from 1912).

The Dance represents two schematic figures in broken lines, pushing each other away and at the same time mutually attracted. Arkhypenko deleted everything he considered irrelevant and immaterial, with a hand and a foot of one of the figures only vaguely outlined, and the whole composition mark out an almost ideal sphere. Here is everything that can emerge between a man and a woman: love, power, animosity, and joy.

The Walking Woman became a symbol of the whole exposition, duplicated on the posters. Even now, ninety years later, it is a very impressive treatment of space and material. The female silhouette is vaguely outlined and the human forms seem torn apart, dissected, reaching the innermost cavities by their very motion; it is just that, a walking woman, her every step perfectly inscrutable any of us.

Ukraine probably could do with a larger exposition of Arkhypenko. Maybe we will live to see one. However, even that little which they brought was more than enough for the clever onlooker. After all, there is a gaping almost unintelligible alarming void within each of us. He who can perceive it and reproduce it to make it even ever so slightly more understandable is a true genius.