An undeclared war on mosaics: how Ukrainians are losing their heritage deep in the rear
[ad_1]
The mosaics of Ravenna, Rome or Constantinople are more than 1500 years old – and they will exist as long as human culture exists. The mosaics of Ukrainian modernism are not older than half a century and they are dying en masse all over the country. Some are destroyed by the Russians, like the mosaics Alla Gorska in Mariupol. Some Ukrainians destroy themselves, like a mosaic Bohdana Soyka in Lviv at the publishing house “Free Ukraine” at the beginning of October this year, a mosaic panel at the capital’s VDNG in the summer. A recent example is the destruction of mosaics Ivan Klyapetura to the premises of the Kamianets-Podilskyi fire department.
The destruction of a vibrant, unique, and ultimately expensive art form is often justified by decommunization. Although there are neither red flags nor hammers and sickles at the mosaic stops along Ukrainian roads or on the facades of schools and cultural institutions. The story about the destroyed mosaic panels in Kamianets-Podilskyi and its author was prepared for UP. Life of Iryna Pustinnikova.
Loss after loss
In recent years, mosaic disasters have been pouring in like raging sacks. During the “Great Construction”, dozens of mosaic stops disappeared from Ukrainian roads forever. In the summer of this year, a mosaic panel was destroyed in fire station No. 26 in Kyiv. After publicity, the Main Directorate of the State Emergency Service decided to restore the panel.
On October 2, another high-profile incident occurred in Lviv. There, businessman Serhii Vasechko arbitrarily destroyed the “Information Space” mosaic in the premises of the “Free Ukraine” publishing house, authored by Bohdan Soyka. The city appealed to the law enforcement officers, the president and the prime minister, and a statement was written to the police.
Specialists also calculated the cost of the materials needed to restore the panels: up to 1,600 hryvnias for 1 kg of enamel. 25 kilograms are needed for 1 square meter of panel. The panel had an area of 18 square meters. Therefore, you will have to spend several million hryvnias on materials alone.
| Mosaic “Information Space” by the artist Bohdan Soyka after destruction. Photo: Jurko Voloshchak/Facebook |
In Lviv, activists have long insisted on creating a register of city mosaics. The City Council contributed 236 works there. But she did not think through the mechanism of their protection. So the registry did not help in the case with Vasechka.
Works of modernism in megacities are a little easier: there is someone to protect them. Things are much worse in the provinces. Let Kamianets-Podilskyi be an example.
“Figures” on the pavilions
A significant part of the not too large modernist heritage of Kamianets-Podilskyi is connected with the name Ivan Klyapetura, a comprehensively gifted artist from Podil. In the 1970s and 1980s, he worked in the Khotyn branch of the Chernivtsi art and industrial workshops. Later, he worked in Kamianka and Ryny Kadyivtsi, 7 km from the city – until his death in January 2023.
Ivan Klyapetura is the author of many graphic and painting works, stained glass windows, sculptures and mosaics. If the paintings are seen only by the visitors of the exhibitions, then the mosaics are available to everyone. Kolibaivka, Zhvanets, Chhotyri Korchmy, Khotyn, Kaskada, Havrylivtsi, the already destroyed stops in Maryanivka and Gukov – all of them. And all of them are very recognizable, because he chose his favorite topics: soft, warm and very human folk humor, Cossacks and architectural monuments of Podillia. No ideology, no Lenins and slogans.
 |
| Ivan Klyapetura on the background of mosaics |
In 2020, we were lucky enough to ask the artist about his work on monumental works. Mr. Ivan suffered a stroke shortly before that. It was difficult for him to speak, he was choosing words for a long time, but when he mentioned the work on the stops, he smiled. He said that each crew of an artist and several assistants worked for at least 2-3 weeks. The plots were laid out with smalta – tiny pieces of opaque colored glass. It was a rare and scarce material. Ceramic tiles were used in the decoration on top and on the sides.
Klyapetur received the order for the stops in the late 1970s. At that time, the authorities began to upgrade the tracks before the Olympics-80. The task of the driver was to build the stop itself from bricks and concrete. Monumental artists plastered it, and then decorated it. The mosaics were never repeated.
The artist sent the sketch to Kyiv for approval. Mr. Ivan most liked stories with “figures” – images of people. And it’s more interesting to do, and you could get a bigger fee for it. Klyapetura’s stylistics was based on folk art and naïve. Later, already in the panel at the Kamianets-Podilskyi fire station, overtones of Wassily Kandinsky’s work were added to the naïve.
 |
| Klyapetur received the order for the stops in the late 1970s |
A high-quality mosaic, the artist assured, can withstand weather cataclysms and delight the eye for many tens, if not hundreds of years. This is technologically expensive art, but also durable. Ivan Klyapetura considered the upholstering of modernist mosaics barbaric. After all, works of monumental art can be carefully maintained, and not simply plastered over the facade “to make it neater.” I was happy when I heard that his lazy Cossack Mamai at the bus pavilion in Havrylivtsi was included in the top ten mosaic stops in the country.
Cossack village
The first work of Mr. Ivan’s son, Honored Artist of Ukraine Serhiy Klyapetura, was at one of these stops at the former Kozak farm (now the village of Dovzhok near Kamianets). The father allowed the boy to put enamel on the Cossack’s boot. The stop was demolished in the summer of 2021 as part of the “Big Construction”. This happened already after the big “mosaic” scandal with Ukravtodor. In the spring of the same year, two bus pavilions on the northern outskirts of Kamianets-Podilskyi by Vinnytsia artists were destroyed. No fewer than six bus stops were destroyed on the section of road H03 between Kamianets-Podilskyi and Khmelnytskyi. At that time, the head of Ukravtodor O. Kubrakov promised that they would not touch any more mosaic stops. But several months passed – and bulldozers demolished the “Khutir Kozak” pavilion. In its place, a faceless concrete structure was immediately installed. Perhaps the villagers will then paint it to their liking – this is what happens in many villages. And this is often not creativity, but pure Spanish shame. Mosaic, the equipment is expensive, it is unlikely to return to Dovzhok.
Like most mosaic stops, “Khutir Kozak” was in a state of disrepair. Smalta was plastered with advertising and political announcements. Ivan Klyapetura was sure that it was purposeful to litter the mosaics with posters and announcements during the presidency of Leonid Kuchma. Although the version that printers began to appear en masse at that time also has the right to life. The stop was sometimes used as a public toilet. The concrete from which the pavilions were made was of poor quality, the roof was leaking, and fragments of the mosaic were falling off. Nevertheless, this and all other destroyed stops could be put in order without losing artistic value at a small cost.
 |
| Posters began to litter the mosaics during Kuchma’s presidency |
Of all his works, the “Khutir Kozak” pavilion was seen by the master himself most often, because he lived in the nearby village of Kadyivtsi. He was born there on August 27, 1948. He loved drawing from early childhood. Collective farm worker parents did not forbid creativity. During his school years, he went to Kamianets every Saturday and Sunday to work in an art studio in the city park. Sometimes on foot, sometimes on a bicycle, in winter – on skis. Rushed to study with his friend Konstantin Prokhorov (1947-2002). He later headed the Kherson regional organization of the Union of Artists of Ukraine for many years. In Kamianets, the teachers of Kadyiv talents were the well-known artists Serhii Gaikh and Semyon Rosenstein (his mosaic designs for the facades of many institutions have been partially preserved to this day). The desire to become a professional artist forced him to enter the art and graphic faculty of the Odessa Pedagogical Institute named after K. Ushinsky four times. The catch was with dictations. Made it, entered. And then he also created for himself. And to people’s joy.
One of the first to notice the destruction of the “Khutir Kozak” stop was the master’s son Serhii Klyapetur. He was afraid to tell his father: he was not in the best health for such news. Klyapetura Sr. once painfully experienced the destruction of a bus stop in the center of Khotyn. The beautiful pavilion with the image of the Khotyn Fortress was demolished in 2008 by a local entrepreneur, who erected the MAF in its place. Pieces of smalt and ceramic tiles from that stop were simply thrown over the fence of a nearby college. They lie there until now
 |
| A well in Khotyn |
At the time, the Highway Service in the Khmelnytskyi region announced that in August 2021, Acting Oleksandr Bondar, Director of Housing of the Kamianets-Podilskyi City Council, did not comment on the dismantling of the bus stop. There was no answer to the question why art critics did not participate in the survey, but only people far from understanding cultural heritage. Bondar’s letter read: “It was not known about the residents’ correspondence with the Highway Service and the discussion about the possible preservation of the stops, it was not reported during the survey. Such appeals were not received directly to the housing and communal services department.” If you want the modernist heritage to live on, save it yourself, write letters, keep vigil near the mosaics. And the government simply washes its hands.
Art critic, candidate of architecture Inna Berezina reacted to the death of the stop at the time: “Mosaic stops, all without exception, smalt or polivyan tiles, are unique monuments of Ukrainian monumental art. The history of their creation, the originality of performance, ethnic affiliation – behind this is the author’s work – turns these stops into a special asset of Ukrainian cultural heritage. Their destruction is ignorance of the 21st century, unjustified and, unfortunately, irreversible. It is important not only to stop this process, but also to redirect it to conservation and protection“.
A new victim of tidiness
But who would have heard that. Recently, the mosaic on the premises of the fire station on Hrushevsky Avenue in Kamianets-Podilskyi was painted over with gray paint. The work did not have a protective status. The press officer of the State Emergency Service of Kamianechchyna, Maria Zabolotna, said that “the panel was no longer subject to restoration. However, if necessary, we can easily remove the building materials and restore the previous appearance of the mosaic.” We would also like to know what that need looks like, which would save the mosaic from neat improvement.
 |
| Such was the mosaic in Kamianets-Podilskyi |
Most Ukrainians do not see any value in mosaics. Foreigners who get acquainted with modernist mosaics for the first time in their lives have diametrically opposite impressions. In 2015, British photographer Christopher Herwig published the book “Soviet Bus Stops”, which he worked on for 13 years. The publication became so popular that in two years the second volume of “Stops” appeared. And Gerwig’s dream is to have the hundred best stops in the post-Soviet space nominated for the UNESCO World Heritage List. Would Klyapetura mosaics be on the list? For this, we need to realize that before us is not only a functional thing, but also a work of art that deserves to be preserved. It is necessary that the tasteless total epidemic of “neatness” bypasses the mosaics. It is the desire to do “neatly” that kills our wooden churches, which are covered with clapboard or sheet metal. Trying to make it “neat” deprives old houses of decor and zest. And the stops get: the mosaics are upholstered (because “sloppy”) or whitewashed. And for nothing: the gallery under the open sky should be preserved.
 |
| And so it was painted over |
Read also: “All beauty was smashed with hammers”: Soviet mosaic with firefighters destroyed at VDNG
[ad_2]
Original Source Link
