Ukrainian Modern

Ukrainian Modern is the national version of the Art Nouveau style, which unfolded roughly from the early 1900s into the 1930s and spanned the era of the liberation struggle and state-building of 1917–1921. Its key idea was the forging of a modern artistic language on the basis of a native tradition: folk art, the Baroque heritage, Cossack regalia, icon painting and the printed book. Unlike international Art Nouveau, Ukrainian Modern deliberately built a national style capable of representing the culture of a nation striving for statehood. In architecture it was founded by Vasyl Krychevsky, who fused folk building with modern forms and developed the concept of a Ukrainian style in construction and stage design. The most brilliant figure of graphic Modern was Heorhiy Narbut, creator of Ukrainian book graphics, coats of arms, postage stamps, banknotes and the state symbols of the Ukrainian People's Republic; his manner, leaning on Baroque and heraldry, remains a model of national design. Narbut headed the Ukrainian Academy of Arts, founded in 1917, which became the hearth of the new school. Krychevsky's Poltava building became a template after which schools, zemstvo institutions and people's houses in the Ukrainian style were erected in various cities, while the master himself also developed theatrical stage design. The aesthetics of Ukrainian Modern nourished the decorative arts, ceramics, embroidery and book design. This era was a bridge between national Romanticism and the avant-garde: it proved that folk form could be the material of modern, not merely ethnographic, art. The Stalinist repressions of the 1930s cut this development short, but the tradition it laid down fed the Ukrainian visual identity throughout the twentieth century.