By Olha Chepil | 2025-06-30

For decades, some of Ukraine's most daring art was locked away, seen only by party officials and hidden from the public that the creators wanted to inspire. Now, it is finally on display.

The National Art Museum of Ukraine has opened "Special Fund: New Research," an exhibition revealing works once considered so dangerous that Soviet officials sealed them in a secret archive during the 1930s. They branded many of the featured artists enemies of the state, their names and creations erased from public life.

"Like their European colleagues, our Ukrainian artists created, but this was hidden from view for 100 years," Dmytro Doroshenko, a visitor and official at the Ukrainian National Office of Intellectual Property and Innovation, told Kontur.

Only the director of the National Art Museum's Soviet predecessor and Communist Party authorities could access the hidden collection. Today, those long-silenced canvases are speaking again, telling stories of beauty, resistance and repression.

A cultural black hole

Between 1932 and 1939, the future National Art Museum created the secret collection. Its purpose was to store artworks that the Soviet regime called "harmful," "formalist" or "nationalistic."

Museums across the Ukrainian SSR received secret directives, instructing directors to form special committees that included secret police officials.

"They selected 'harmful' works and sent them to our museum for destruction," Yulia Litvinets, curator of the exhibition and general director of the National Art Museum, told Kontur.

Paintings poured in from across Ukraine -- Odesa, Kharkiv, Dnipro and Kyiv. In just three years, censors built up more than 1,747 storage units, with each unit holding up to 25 pieces.

Soviet officials deemed any artistic expression that strayed from party-sanctioned realism, such as emotional or abstract forms, subversive, said Litvinets.

Among the blacklisted were artists now recognized worldwide: Oleksandra Ekster, Kazimir Malevich, Mykhailo Boychuk, Oleksandr Bohomazov and Vasyl Yermylov.

"If an artist became the subject of repression, then all his works automatically became 'enemy works,'" said Litvinets.

Nobody inventoried or exhibited the confiscated paintings. Hidden in museum basements, they vanished from public and academic view.

Soviet authorities "condemned the works ... to be destroyed, labeled them the product of 'formalists and nationalists' and transferred them to a special storage facility," said Litvinets.

They "made the works inaccessible and included them on liquidation lists," said Litvinets.

Many artists faded into obscurity for decades. Nobody listed them in catalogues or researched them. Litvinets credits museum staff for quietly preserving the collection.

"Almost half of the museum's personnel were shot in the 1930s. But someone still tried to save the art, and that is why it has survived to this day," she said.

Relentless destruction

The Kremlin reserved access to the Special Fund for only a few.

Officials deemed the paintings dangerous and barred their study.

In the 1950s, Soviet authorities tightened restrictions. The Culture Ministry of the Ukrainian SSR classified works by perceived threat level, with the most "toxic" marked for destruction.

Even members of censorship committees sometimes did not realize that officials had targeted their works, say museum staff.

"There were cases where an artist was part of a committee, and [censors] immediately took away his work as 'enemy works'. These were tragic stories," said Litvinets.

Unveiling once-banned masterpieces

Many pieces vanished without a trace. But in the past decade, researchers have uncovered archives and documents tracing the art's fate.

Ukraine even has repatriated some works found abroad, including in the United States, where relatives had quietly preserved them.

"We even discovered that Ilya Shulga's wife took art to America and then donated it to the Lviv Museum. There are many such stories, and they reveal the whole picture of the legacy of the 1920s and '30s," said Litvinets.

Shulga is one of many Ukrainian artists nearly erased from memory by Soviet repression.

The Soviets denounced his works, like others from the 1930s, as "harmful" and placed them in the Special Fund.

For the current exhibition, curators organized paintings by artistic movements of the 1920s and 1930s. Restoring them took years -- the Soviets had intentionally damaged many of them.

"There is a painting where the face is simply wiped off. This was deliberate destruction. They just desecrated the work," Natalia Chamlay, director of the department for the protection of historical and cultural monuments at the museum, told Kontur.

Stored for almost a century, often rolled up and unframed, many pieces warped or disintegrated.

"All the works had disintegrated because much time had passed and they were not properly cared for. They bear the imprint of time," said Chamlay.

Returning from oblivion

Today, the Special Fund is accessible once again. The museum continues to research and exhibit newly uncovered works.

"We studied every one, every work. Now the results of all these years are on display," said Litvinets.

For museum staff, the exhibitions mark the return of a stolen artistic legacy. Paintings by Boychuk, Ekster, Vasyl Sedliar and others, hidden for decades, are finally visible. Their stories are both cultural milestones and records of repression.

"At the time Ukraine was alive with the same styles as Europe. Futurism, expressionism -- we had it all. But it was hidden, as if it didn't exist," said Doroshenko.

Despite pressure from a totalitarian regime, Ukrainian artists kept pace with Europe, he added.

Now, works once condemned to oblivion are reentering history.

"We're not just talking about tragedy. We're returning these works to Ukrainian and world art history," said Lytvynets.