As the war in Ukraine rages around it, one museum in the city of Kharkiv is working to save its priceless artworks. Kharkiv Art Museum has one of the biggest and most valuable collections in the country.
While the museum itself is still standing, bombardment from Russian forces has caused the windows to be blown in, leading to a layer of plaster and dust covering the inside of the building, and making it hard to control the temperature and humidity.
Many of the works of art that museum staff are trying to remove to a safer location are by Russian artists.
“There are over 25,000 items in our collection,” said Maryna Filatova, head of the foreign art department at the Kharkiv Art Museum, speaking to Reuters. “It is simply irony of fate that we should be saving Russian artists, paintings by Russian artists from their own nation. This is simply barbarism.”
Saving culture amid the chaos
An example of the kinds of paintings that Filatova and her colleagues are attempting to save is a version of Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks by Russian painter Ilya Repin (pictured, top).
“Basically, it should not be moved,” she said, although it has now been taken down from the wall and is waiting to be taken to a safe, secret location. “Any movement should be avoided. We treat it with great care.”
The museum also holds paintings by the Dutch masters and works by Albrecht Duerer.
“Workers, women that are still in town, we will work and do our best to save it all. We are taking the paintings down and will hide them,” added Filatova. “We are doing our best to preserve them.”
Elsewhere, The Hermitage Amsterdam, a museum of Russian art in the Netherlands, has announced that it has cut ties with Russia’s State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg in response to the war in Ukraine. In the UK, the director of the Science Museum has returned a Russian medal awarded by Putin, while the National Railway Museum has cancelled its upcoming Russian exhibition, ‘Trans-Siberian: The World’s Longest Railway’.
Last year, blooloop spoke to Zeina Arida, director of the Sursock Museum in Beirut, Lebanon, about the challenges of rebuilding after the deadly Beirut blast in August 2020.
