HHuh. I logged in today and received a message that various functions I'd been using with this host (and not, I believe, even on this particular website) were not longer functional with my current plan. I needed to remove these features before I could make updates to this site.

How many years have I been a customer here on Weebly? More than I decade, I can confidently state. 

This kind of decision makes loyalty... a non-issue.

I am moving my site, my father's site, the whole kit and kaboodle to a new platform. Haven't finalized the details, but with this bump in my service here--will accelerate the move. I will be shifting the domains katyareimann.com and williamreimann.com over soon. In the meantime, the new site is temporarily over at

https://greenivygraphics.wixsite.com/new-site

Hey! This post posted, even when Weebly said it wouldn't. Hurrah for that. This is probably my last update here--click over to my current updates via the link above.

I saw this article from CNN yesterday: Museums race against time to save Ukraine's cultural treasures.  It seems a timely introduction to this week's piece, which is about the Mikhail Kroshitsky Sevastopol Art Museum, which I started writing up as a donation to Wikipedia's current Ukrainian Articles challenge (begun, I believe, at the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2020 in an attempt to show solidarity with Ukraine)

I picked the first topic that looked interesting to me, the "The Art Museum in Sevastopol named after M. Kroshitsky," largely because I didn't understand why a museum would be named like that.

Machine translation—that was the answer to my first question.  My second question, after figuring out that this museum was probably the most important collection of European art in Crimea: who was M. Kroshitsky, and what probably corrupt politics put his name on this building?  The answer is not what I was expecting.

Final introductory note: Is Crimea part of Ukraine, or part of Russia? On the whole, I think Crimea is Crimea, and deserves some sort of autonomous rule. I'm not convinced that it is too late, that the indigenous population of Crimean Tatars is too diluted, or any of those arguments. In the modern world, can a small, strategically-located nation survive independently? We are in the process, I think, of finding out—for a  nation of 40,000,000 people.

The M. Kroshitsky Sevastopol Art Museum is an art museum located in the Crimean city of Sevastopol.
9 Nakhimova Prospect, Sevastopol

The museum is located in the center of the city, in a remarkable four story mansion with a magnificently decorated facade, built in the late 19th century by the "personal honorary citizen of Sevastopol" merchant Semyon Gavalov. After the formation of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1921, the museum was opened November, 1927, for, in good Soviet spirit, "the broadest masses of the people.”

It was renamed in 1991 in honor of Mikhail Kroshitsky, museum director from 1939 to 1958, and houses an important collection of pre and post revolutionary European art.

The Collection
Museum History
Foundation
The Sevastopol Art Museum was founded during Crimea's brief period of autonomous rule (1921-1945) following the Russian Revolution (1917) and civil war. The original collection comprised largely of artworks seized from the summer residence of Tsar Nicholas II in the Livadia Palace, as well as from the aristocratic estates that lined the southern shores of Crimea. These works were later supplemented from the collections of the State Museum Fund and museums in Moscow and Leningrad.

The War Years: WWII
The Crimea was an arena of intense conflict during World War II. Many museum collections (and other cultural treasures) were destroyed during the chaos of the hostilities, including that of the Simferopol Art Museum in Crimea's capital city, where almost the entire collection went up in flames.

Following the Siege of Sevastopol and an intense period of bombardment, Nazi Germans successfully overran the city, leaving only 11 buildings undamaged. The beautiful Gavalov mansion did not survive unscathed, but its collection, in an act of quixotic wartime heroism, was saved, owing to the efforts of its then director, Mikhael Kroshitsky.

Under Kroshitsky's directions, over one thousand artworks were evacuated, first, under German fire (and personally accompanied by Kroshitsky himself), by ship through to the Azov Sea, and then on overland through the Causasus Mountains (and Georgia!) to safekeeping in Tomsk, in Siberia—an almost 3000 mile journey. Following the war, perhaps even more impressively, Kroshitsky oversaw the return of the collection to Sevastopol, worked tirelessly to rebuild both the museuum and the Gavalov mansion, which was reopened in the spring 1958.

Because of its strategic location, Sevastopol was designated a closed city following WWII, requiring non-residents to apply for permits in order to visit. This had a strong impact on the culture of the city even within Crimea, suppressing opportunity for growth and development—while simultaneously amplifying the importance of the Art Museum's survival.

Collapse of the USSR
Following Ukraine's emergence as an independent state, Kroshitsky's efforts were recognized with the Museum's re-dedication in his name.

The Collection Today
The Sevastopol collection comprises more than ten thousand works of art, including paintings, drawings, sculptures, graphic and printed media works.

The permanent collection displays original masterpieces from the Renaissance and the Dutch Golden Age as well as paintings by French and German masters and Russian artists from the 16th to the 21st centuries. The art is organized into three collections: Western European Art; Art of the Russian Empire of the 18th—early 20th centuries; and Soviet, or more specifically Crimean, Art of the 20th century. The museum offers new and rotating exhibitions on a monthly basis. As of 2022, the Gavalov Mansion is under renovation and interior modernization, and the collection is housed on a temporary basis in space at 70 General Ostryakov Avenue.

Western European Art
These pieces represents the earliest part of the museum collection, including art from the estates of Prince LS Golitsyn, Prince Baryatinsky, Prince A.N. Witmer, and P.A. Demidov (the last owner of Vishnevetsky Castle). It includes Dutch and Flemish masters of the seventeenth century, works of the Italian Renaissance, French artists of the XVII-XIX centuries, Meissen porcelain and Western European bronzes.

The provenance of at least one of the pictures below was Nicholas II's collection at the Lividia Summer Palace, and formerly hung at the the Hermitage in Russia. Any guesses?

Pre Revolutionary Russian Art
Also substantially a part of the museum's early collection, these works convey a sense of Russian Imperial culture at the time when the Tsar and his court routinely retired to Crimea for the winter months. Several types of work are included:

• Landscapes: including works by Ivan Aivazovsky, Arkip Kuindzhi, Isaac Levitan, (a personal favorite!) I.I. Shishkina, F.A. Vasilyeva, Vasily Polenov, S.I. Vasilkovsky, I.P. Pokhitonova, K.A. Korovina, I.E. Grabar, K.F. Bogaevsky.
  
• Portraits: V.A. Tropinina, I.N. Kramskoy, Ilya Repin.
  
• Genre paintings by V.E. Makovsky, N.A. Kasatkina, Vasily Vereshchagin.
  

Soviet Art
Works of painting, graphics, sculpture and arts and crafts of the 20th and 21st centuries make up two-thirds of the collections of the Sevastopol Art Museum.

These works include pieces by: A. V. Kuprin, P. P. Konchalovsky, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, I. E. Grabar, K. F. Yuon, I. I. Brodsky, A. A. Deineka, G. G. Nissky, E. S. Zernova, along with the works of Ukrainian painters: T. N. Yablonska, A. M. Kashshay, N P. Hlushchenko and others. Not a list of artists with whom I am familiar.

While working on the initial draft of this piece for Wikipedia, I admittedly ignored the museum's collection of Soviet Art. For this, I had several reasons, the first being is that it is highly unrewarding to work on any subject in Wikipedia where your principal subect did not die before 1951 ("fair use" be damned, seventy years dead is pretty much the international copyright limit for any author or artist, insofar as the Wiki Institutions is concerned).

The other reason was that I assumed that the collection itself would not be interesting.  Well, I am suitably chastened! True, this was the least interesting section insofar as the official descriptions on the Museum's website were giving me clues. In the listings for artists such as Soviet Belorussian-born Georgy Nissky ("founder of the so-called severe style, the master of the industrial landscape"), I found little that was unfamiliar.

But then, suddenly, lyrically, there were the paintings of the Crimean artists, suffused with an exotic (to me) bleaching, golden light.

If you click and open any of the galleries above, to look at the painings at larger scale—I hope you will choose this one, and see for yourself what you think.

The closing statement of the M. Kroshitsky Sevastopol Art Museum's history webpage currently reads—translated here from the original Russian--

 A small body of work in painting tunes to something in my own body and sparks an emotional/physical response. I had that just yesterday, and, unusually (for me), it was for once easy, easy, easy to understand why that connection had sparked.

This painting by Rusu Ciobanu reminded me so strongly of my mother's work. There is the Eastern European element, for sure, and although the brushwork here is harder, or harsher, than my mom's, immediately on seeing this portrait, I knew this artist had worked this painting just as my mother would have done, in a studio with her subject in front of her, looking at and intuitively adjusting proportion and color, and winnowing away the extraneous details.

I love the marginally small, intense head, the big sensuous hands. The dead (possibly) Soviet architecture outside the window. I would love to talk to my mother about this painting, and see what she thinks. Unfortunately that conversation has no longer been an option, not since May of 2018.

Last year, Rusu Ciobanu's family still had her with them for those conversations (even though cataracts have long past cut short her painting life). There's a substantive article in the Calvert Journal (elements of which seem scrounged from this Romanian-language piece at Scena9) which touches through the major arcs of her life and art career.  I'm not surprised to feel the additional detail I've learned slotting into my mental landscape, locking down my interest in both her life and paining. This is an artist who has lived through "interesting times": A 19th century manqué Romanian rural childhood; the transition to portraiture of the Soviet collectives of the 1960s. And then, mature intellectual rebellion as she cemented her home in Chișinău, Moldova's capital city, hosted the Moldovan equivalent of a salon--a hidden, artful garden, within the concrete city--and began producing portraits of the artists and intellectuals of that grouping.

So--2020 was Valentina Rusu Ciobanu's centennial. Retired now, and living still in her secluded Chișinău home, she roused herself for the interviews and retrospective public attention of a world of art that came knocking at her door, belatedly, with a fresh world of change. What does a 100 year old person think about her art? Her "playful potraiture," as one modern reviewer described it?

A fair amount, it would seem, about a past, and a life, that was so sharply cut away from her by the geopolitics of the 1940s. "She paints like a fox," an admirer observes. Through her paintings, her harmless old lady comments twist under the weight of now long past decades of Soviet oppression. "People are all the same,” she says, on her centenary. But what really do those words mean?

Her son, Lică Sainciuc, comments that she has always been a story teller, describing the time that he, and she, spied a horse-drawn sleigh as they walked together in town. "Let's take it," she told him. "Who knows when we'll see another one."

The portrait above left, of her neighbor, was not the spontaneous moment of observation we think we see. To create this portrait, Rusu Ciobanu borrowed traditional Romanian-style clothes from a local museum. She did not stop there. Rusu Ciobabu wore the outfit herself to a Soviet-run artists' conference in Kyiv. To Rusu Ciobabu, the clothes were not museum pieces. They were part of something, in Soviet Moldova, that was at risk of vanishing. For wearing these 'historical' clothes, she was formally rebuked. 

One translation of her centenary exhibition has the title "Valentina Rusu Ciobanu - A Century of Loneliness.” Another "Valentina Rusu Ciobanu - one hundred years since birth." Can both translations be simultaneously correct? I feel the tense dance in her work between conformity to the arbitrary system that surrounded her, and her internal flight above those earthly cares. For Rusu Ciobanu, that dance was, is, a highly defined series of needles to be swiftly threaded, imposed by an authoritarian and threatening government. A folklore maiden facing the impossible tasks imposed by an wicked sorcerer could hardly have managed the task more deftly.

Rusu Coibana painted many, many interesting surrealist images, which I highly recommend taking some time looking over, if that is the work that speaks to you (I think valentinarusuciobanu.com, is the official site). For myself, at this day and time, I like, best the portrait of Dumitru Fusu.

I wonder what styles and forms will speak to me a decade from now, if I'm still here and moving forward in time on this journey of my own.

I started this project two years or so before my mother passed away. It's a quixotic enterprise for sure; all the important people I could share this language with in the way I am hearing it in my mind have passed away. Some friends have commented that it was an excellent undertaking for Covid-19 days. It was. With all the disruptions of the past two years, it's been a good project because it can be picked at with something that resembles diligence and consistency.

Ukrainian is a tough language, not least because of the past two centuries of the land's history, torn between Austro-Hungarians and Poles and Russians and Soviets, mean that its current form (and how best to teach it!) is still a matter of some debate. Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861), whose literary heritage is regarded as the foundation of Ukrainian literature--and, to a large extent, the legitimization of Ukrainian as an independent language--was jailed and exiled as a revolutionary for daring to honor his own language as a worthy medium of expression. Most late-life learners of Ukrainian quickly become aware of this political resonance in their learning choice.

All that said, it's a beautiful language, Slavic but sometimes described as "the sixth Romance language," with beautiful rolled Rs and many, many vowel sounds. The nightingale is a prized national symbol. What kind of a lunatic nation takes a tiny brown-feathered songbird as their national emblem?

In today's world, there are multiple resources online for learning Ukrainian. These are ones I've personally found useful:

--Duolingo has a short learning tree (which includes ~⅓ the number of lessons as its French or Spanish counterpart). A fine place to get started.
--Glossika has a full 5,000 spoken Ukrainian sentences--voiced by one of the harshest speakers of Ukrainian I have ever heard. It's only free for 7 days, but is a great resource for improving one's ear. Caveat: it does not exactly further one's sense of the famously poetic character of the language.
--The UK Ukrainian Language organization is an excellent source for beginning pronunciation and for reading. The first three lessons are particularly helpful--before it launches into daunting immersive mode!
--Anna Ohoiko has a beautifully put together collection of language lessons and podcasts at Ukrainian Lessons. This is a free resource, with extras that can be added for a charge. This site has been active for a few years now, so there it a lot of content.
--for flashcards, Anki has some useful language decks (though Ukrainian does not rate as one of their top languages). Access to content requires a log-in. I find the ☀️Ukrainian Language Vocabulary: Illustrated deck particularly good--because it is my own creation and reflects my personal idiosyncrasies.

These sources—they subtly contradict each other, and it is, I find, that peculiar disorderly subtlety that offers my biggest challenge to learning Ukrainian. What is this language I am learning? A Russian influenced variant? A modern artificially nationalist one? Certainly it's not the "pure" ancient tongue of my forebears.

And yet, I find myself enraptured.  Between the 20th century diaspora and the last 30 years of Ukrainian independence--the culture and language are unsettled and in transition. It is a fascinating moment to participate in Ukrainian study.

I've spent the past week working on the Henry L. Zietlow Memorial Trophy project.  My father and I began work on this project almost exactly two years ago, and, finally, it's reached its end stages. In memory, I sense that this work will merge into the unmoored passage of the months through the Covid-19 pandemic; I'll look back on these two years in a very particular time and way that will be marked by a heightened sensation of death and mortality and our places in that arc.

As I write this the pandemic is not over, but its character, post the release of four effective vaccinations this past spring, has very clearly changed. We have a means of protecting ourselves, whether or not we are able, as human beings, to deploy it effectively or humanely. So--the virus has evolved, but so has our capacity to evolve with it.

I read the Nicholas Carey article this morning and found it fascinating. Largely, it's about identity, and questions of self that address the ancient nurture/nature conundrum.

These thoughts are colliding in my head, and then, one of the commentators in Carey's piece chipped in with the quotation that closes this entry.

It pulled some ideas together in my mind about all the things I've written above. Not in a way I could express here--that would take hours of writing and revision for a piece that is meant to be short.

But also it made me want to read Of Human Bondage, to find the context for these words.

We live in an amazing age when it comes to family documentation.  Philip Sampson was my grandmother's older brother.  He was one of the soldiers who participated in that famous "Christmas in the trenches."

Thanks go to my cousin Julie, for finding, and sharing, this article with me.

It's a small tragedy, but a real one. I imagine a few decades hence, and some future publisher thinking, "Hey, how about a classic edition of that old book The Sword in the Stone? You know the one that old Disney cartoon is based on? It's just come out of copyright, so we can put it out real cheap!" So--away they go, and pulp and print a bunch of paper--into a poor version of a text that has become increasingly unintelligible, all illustrations stripped out. "Why did Great-Auntie Katya say she loved this book so much?" some future kid will wonder.

Reader-of-the-Future--it wasn't the same book.

I accept that the world is changing, but this change, this closing of my used bookshop--it's a bad one.