Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue: On the Ukrainian Abstract Art of the 1960s

Abstract

The paper focuses on the creative experiments of Ukrainian artists during the 1960s in the field of abstract art, analyzing them against the background of social and cultural events of the time, which were reflected in the features of artistic life. In this regard, Western fine art revealed to Ukrainian artists during the years of the Thaw after decades of strict separation from foreign art during the Stalinist era, was a profound influence on them. However, the perception of the Western experience was rather specific due to the lack of information and theoretical understanding of the latest trends, as most works of world art became known in Ukraine through the exhibitions in Moscow and printed reproductions. The ambiguity of the cultural policy in the USSR played a significant role here, where the official declaration of the renewal of art and the right of artists to individual self-expression were combined with a new ideological attack on creativity. State control over art gained new dimensions, due to which the authors’ experiments in the realm of abstract painting were doomed to exist in the circle of unofficial art. The article examines the “campaign against abstractionism and Western influences” launched by the authorities in the early 1960s, which had a dramatic impact on individual creative destinies. Using the example of artists from Lviv, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and Uzhgorod, the article analyzes creative directions in the realm of painterly abstraction, the features of its versions in Ukraine. It is significant that in most cases the appeal to non-figurative art remained only an episode in the work of artists, or coexisted with other ways of figurative expression. Abstract art in Ukraine generally was experimental, the presence of similar works in the art of the late Soviet era testified to a deep crisis of the socialist realist doctrine, the affirmation of individual creative thinking. Abstract works of Ukrainian artists of the 1960s are an important page in the history of Ukrainian art.