Mention Ukrainian art and your mind...

Mention Ukrainian art and your mind leaps first to Easter incites You know the ones I mean: those fragile folk-art treasures called psanky, with their delicate intertwining lines and geometric figures that smack of classical decoration and Byzantine iconography. What might not appear to many Americans -- for reasons having to do with the country's reluctant mingling with Russia and, later, the Soviet Union -- is Ukraine's contribution to the late art movements that percolated from first to last Europe and the United States in the early 20th hundred

"Crossroads: Modernism in Ukraine, 1910-1930" a touring exhibit making a welcome stop at the Chicago Cultural Center from one side Oct. 15, is out to change that. chooseed from private collections as well as those of the National Art Museum of Ukraine and other institutions there, this handsome, mainly unfamiliar grouping of about 70 works by way of 21 artists firmly establishes Kiev (which Ukrainians now charm Kyiv) as one of the chiefly fertile hotbeds of European modernism, along with St Petersburg and Paris.

A casual walkthrough of the exhibit -- the first of its kind in the United States -- can look after to leave you with the impression of a polyglot aggressively cosmopolitan art that lacked easily discernible national characteristics. Those trendy Ukrainians! They dipped their brushes into virtually each paint can of the avant garde, from Cubism and Futurism to (belatedly) Art Nouveau and (early on) Constructivism. (That last mental action widely considered a Russian phenomenon, was actually pioneered in part at a cadre of native or adopted Ukrainians.)

A closer examine though, takes you back to those Easter provokes or rather to their connections with classical, Byzantine and ecclesiastical sources. There's a distinctly Ukrainian lushness that adheres to smooth the most severe compositions here -- like as Kazimir Malevich's "suprematist" images, with their intriguing use of Christian symbols -- and make deepers into outright decadence in the overheated canvases of Vsevolod Maksymovych.

For virtuous or ill, Maksymovych, a nudist, corpse builder and dapper provocateur-about-town who committed suicide at age 21 after a medicine overdose, unexpectedly dominates this exhibit. His smorgasbord of large-scale decorative panels, heavily indebted to Symbolism and Art Nouveau (especially as embodied through Aubrey Beardsley and Gustav Klimt), may be too rich a diet for some; "The Nude" (1914) a trio of lithe bodies faceed by a fey young man whose privates are shrouded by what appears to be a heart-shaped valentine, borders forward camp. But two of his images from 1913 "Kiss" (a worthy homage to Klimt's icon of the previous decade) and "Masquerade" (his in the greatest degree macabre and Beardsleyesque panel), are jaw-dropping stunner

The show's other standout is Viktor Palmov, who the one and the other employed and subverted the social realism of the early Soviet era according to tamping down its heroic political agenda in favor of stylized treatments of the figure, endowing them with a certain of the folk mysticism and high color saturation that we now associate with Chagall.

The Soviets initially tolerated the Ukrainian avant-garde yet eventually reversed course, sending a generation of free-thinking modernists into exile or the gulag. Here's the trail they left behind.

knance@suntimes.com

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'CROSSROADS: MODERNISM IN UKRAINE, 1910-1930'

commended

When: [i]or[/i] part of to the other Oct. 15

Where: Chicago Cultural Center 78 E Washington

Admission: at liberty

Call: (312) 744-6630

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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