ALLA HORSKA
born in 1929 in Yalta (on the Crimea) was a Ukrainian artist of the 1960s, monumentalist painter,
one of the first representatives of the underground art movement, dissident, and
human rights activist of the Sixtiers movement
in Ukraine.
She was the wife of painter Viktor
Zaretsky (See previous Blog). Not only did she paint, she also designed many mosaics, found today throughout the Ukraine.
Highly
intelligent, motivated, and talented, she graduated from art school with honors
and later joined the Kyiv Art Institute. It was through relationships developed
there, including the meeting of her future husband, that she became involved
with the Creative Youth Club “Suchasnist,” the center of Ukrainian culture in
Kyiv. In the early 1960s Alla joined the national revival movement in Ukraine which
counted numerous intellectuals and artists of her generation.
They
exhibited paintings, performed plays, read poems, and mentioned everyone and
everything that was stamped out by the Soviet authorities. Ukrainian culture
and history were created there.
She was a
fiery student of Ukrainian history and its cultural legacy, in particular folk
art, academic and monumental painting, and the avant-garde of the beginning of
the century. But her passion did not end with art.
After the
artist and other dissidents discovered a mass grave in Bykivnia in the Kyiv
region in 1962 (referring to the victims of NKVD), Alla’s human rights activity
quickened in pace. She participated in protests. Political prisoners asked her
for help, and dissidents often found shelter in her apartment. All of this
resulted in an appeal to the Soviet authorities to stop the persecution.
Of course,
neither her artistic nor the human rights activities could stay unnoticed by
the authorities. The artist’s apartment was watched; her phone was tapped, and
her every step was monitored. She was repeatedly questioned by the KGB and
unsuccessfully “recruited” to their ranks.
Her funeral
on December 7, 1970, turned into a civil resistance campaign. Her associates –
the literary critic Yevgen Sverstiuk, poet Vasyl Stus, human rights advocate
Ivan Gel, and civil activist Oles Sergienko made speeches. The event was not
allowed by the investigative commission and all of those who spoke were
arrested a short time later. Two years after the death of the artist, mass
arrests began among the Ukrainian intelligentsia. As a result, for some, it was
the beginning of the end. For example, the literary critic Ivan Svitlychny and
the poet Vasyl Stus were both arrested, and both of their lives ended as a
direct result of Soviet imprisonment.
Her works
are housed in the collections of the National
Art Museum in Kyiv, the National Museum
in Lviv, the Central State Archive Museum of Literature and Art, the Museum of
the Sixtiers, the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Soviet Nonconformist Art
at Rutgers University,
and the Checkpoint
Charlie Berlin
Wall Museum,
among others.
Art: Top photo of Alla in 1940s.
Painting top right- Swan Lake
Painting left- Dancing peasants
Painting right- Self Portrait with son, (6 year old Oleksii)
Bottom- Mosaic -"The WInd" in Mariupol
July 2022
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