"The Glory of Byzantium" exhibition: commentary and interview
by Ika Koznarska Casanova
PART I
NEW YORK - "The Glory of Byzantium" has been referred to by Philippe de Montebello as the most challenging and important exhibition he has ever inaugurated in his 20 years as director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Whereas other recent exhibitions on the art and culture of Byzantium encompassed the history of the Byzantine Empire (330-1453) and drew on works of art from national and local collections, "The Glory of Byzantium" is an international loan exhibition that focuses on the Middle Byzantine period. This Second Golden Age of Byzantine civilization, which witnessed the greatest expansion of the empire's cultural influence, begins with the restoration of the use of icons in 843 and ends with the occupation of Constantinople by Latin Crusaders from 1204 to 1261.
The loan of major works of art from 24 countries, including significant works that never before traveled, collectively make this an unprecedented exhibition that contributes to a broader and greater understanding of the nature and quality of Byzantine art.
"The Glory of Byzantium" is of historical significance not only for the Met. The exhibition has special significance for Ukraine, whose medieval treasures are being exhibited for the first time as part of an international loan exhibition in one of the leading museums of the world.
For Ukraine the significance is manifold:
In terms of the recent geopolitical changes brought about by the collapse of the Soviet Union, this is the first time that the country, which gained independence in 1991, has been able to take part in and be represented at an international exhibition, as a country in its own right and not as a Soviet republic frequently referred to as a province of Russia (i.e., "the Ukraine").
Moreover, not only is Ukraine taking part in the exhibit as an independent country, but given the specific context of its inclusion in the exhibition - the period of Kyivan Rus' - it is participating as a country whose cultural patrimony has not been subsumed under Russian history.
The very designation "Kievan Rus'" goes a long way to counter the established practice among scholars and journalists in the West to refer to this period misleadingly as "Kievan Russia."
A separate gallery of the exhibition has been devoted to the religious and secular art of the Kyivan Rus' state.
There is an over-all forthrightness in presentation of material, perhaps best exemplified by the reference, both in the text of the catalogue and in the audio-guide to the exhibition galleries, to the destruction of the Cathedral of St. Michael of the Golden Domes Monastery - one of the many Kyivan churches from the Princely Era that survived until the mid-1930s when it was demolished by Soviet authorities. After the demolition of St. Michael's in 1936, the mosaics that survived were transferred to the St. Sophia Museum. Two of these mosaics form part of the current exhibition.
Finally, the exhibition has initiated a new period of collaboration between The Metropolitan and various countries, including Ukraine, which has facilitated much-needed professional contacts.
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The curators and organizers of "The Glory of Byzantium" have done an admirable job in making important and fine distinctions in terms of both scholarship and general presentation as regards the art and architecture of Kyivan Rus'. This in itself is of major historic significance.
Many of the directors and curators of Ukrainian museums present at the opening of the exhibition voiced their concern and hope that visitors to the exhibition will become aware of Ukraine and its rich cultural heritage.
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The following interview was conducted on May 19 with Helen C. Evans, associate curator for Early Christian and Byzantine Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Olenka Z. Pevny, research assistant at the Department of Medieval Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A scholar of Early Christian, Byzantine and Armenian art, Dr. Evans is the co-curator of "The Glory of Byzantium" exhibition. She has lectured and published widely on the cross-cultural currents on the development of Christian art, its style and iconography. Most recently she was co-curator of the highly acclaimed exhibition "Treasures in Heaven: Armenian Illuminated Manuscripts" at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City (1994) and the Walters Gallery of Art in Baltimore (1994), and the exhibition "Textiles of Late Antiquity" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1996). Dr. Evans has been a major contributor to the catalogues published in association with these exhibitions and has written the major essay on neighbors of Byzantium and Armenia for "The Glory of Byzantium" exhibition catalogue.
Dr. Pevny is a graduate of New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, where she completed her doctoral dissertation in 1995 on the topic "The Kyrylivska Tserkva: The Appropriation of Byzantine Art and Architecture in Kiev."
Her research, funded by an International Research and Exchange Board (IREX) grant and facilitated by the Ukraina Society (Tovarystvo Ukraina) and the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, took her to Kyiv and cities of western and eastern Ukraine as well as St. Petersburg and Moscow, and such medieval Russian cities as Novgorod, Pskov, Vladimir and Suzdal.
Dr. Pevny was engaged in all aspects of the preparatory work for the exhibition, both here and abroad. Since the exhibition's opening in March, she has lectured extensively at the museum as well as in the Ukrainian community and scholarly institutions. Dr. Pevny is the author of the essay on Kyivan Rus' in the exhibition catalogue.
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Q: How did the idea for this exhibit come about?
A: Dr. Evans: In 1992 there was a marvelous exhibit in Paris at the Louvre called "Byzance," which was put together from collections of France, covering the history of Byzantium. I was asked by Philippe de Montebello, director of The Metropolitan Museum, who attended the Louvre exhibition, for a concept of an exhibition for The Metropolitan Museum. What we did was to focus on a sequel to the earlier "Age of Spirituality" exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum in 1977 and cover the Middle Byzantine Empire and its sphere of influence.
I drafted a memo describing the exhibition I wanted. I was encouraged and supported by William D. Wixcom, chairman of Medieval Art and The Cloisters and co-curator of the exhibition.
The preparation of the exhibition entailed extensive travel to arrange for loans to the exhibition.
Q: Did you travel to Ukraine prior to the preparation of the exhibition?
A: Dr. Evans: I was briefly in Ukraine in 1989. Dr. Pevny was in Kyiv at the time working on her dissertation. In 1991 I attended an international congress of Byzantine studies held in Moscow which Dr. Pevny also attended. (This was right before the Moscow coup).
Subsequently, then Minister of Culture Ivan Dzyuba was in the U.S. and met with Dr. Mahrukh Tarapor, associate director for exhibitions, Dr. Pevny and me. We had already begun discussing Ukraine's participation in the exhibition. Mr. Dzyuba was very supportive of the idea and helpful in facilitating the process.
We returned to Ukraine several times, along with museum restorers, and met with museum officials to secure the loans. Dr. Pevny was involved in all of these trips.
Q: What were the greatest challenges in putting the Kyivan Rus' segment together?
A: Dr. Evans: The greatest challenge was Ukraine. I don't think it was ever a question whether or not Ukraine would participate, but whether we would be able to obtain works that were critical to this segment of Ukraine's history.
Dr. Pevny: Ukraine was always willing to lend small-scale objects but in order for Ukraine to occupy a prominent position in the exhibition, it had to lend large-scale works. Since no one knew how the works - the mosaics that we were asking - were mounted and because they had never been lent, convincing directors to let these works travel abroad to America was a novel idea and took a lot of convincing.
Q: To your knowledge, is this the first time art from this period was on exhibit, either in Europe or in the U.S.?
A: Dr. Evans: Not the small objects, no. They've gone as far as Japan.
Dr. Pevny: The small jewelry objects that are housed in the Historical Treasures of Ukraine Museum in Kyiv travel fairly extensively. We borrowed only one object from that museum (and maybe the bracelet from the Historical Museum), but I can say that most of the other works that we borrowed from Ukraine - icons, reliefs, mosaics - have never traveled before. Also the works of Kyivan Rus' from Russia have never traveled before. So most of the works in the (Kyivan Rus') room have not been exhibited before.
Q: Were any scholars from Ukraine, Belarus or Russia involved in the preparation of the exhibit?
A: Dr. Evans: No, not in the initial phase. That was done within this museum. We concentrated on scholars working in America. What we have done, however, and not just with Ukraine or Russia, is talk to the curators and directors of the lending institutions. We were receptive not only to their advice on what we could include, but also respected their opinion on works which we had wanted to borrow but which were deemed too delicate to travel. Not often, but at times, this modified our selection.
Q: Fifty-nine scholars and art historians, most of them working in America, were involved in the preparation of this exhibit. With regard to Kyivan Rus', are there elements incorporated in the scope of this exhibit which, heretofore, perhaps received cursory mention or scant treatment in the West?
A: Dr. Evans: As Prof. Ihor Sevcenko noted when he was here, the unique contribution of this exhibition was the recognition of the interconnections between Byzantine civilization and its neighbors rather than seeing the latter simply as provincial Byzantines or seeing them only in terms of their own history. It is the linkage that we have done which was not done before.
I think that not just for Kyivan Rus' but for all the works in the exhibition, there is very little in this exhibition that isn't the most important work of its type. We have managed, through the generosity of states like Ukraine, to bring these works together. It's as if you walked across the Byzantine world during this period and you can see, for instance, how Ukraine took from Byzantium but you can also see a very strong sense of it creating its own identity, or of Novgorod creating its own identity.
Q: Again, this is novel in terms of this exhibition and the scholarly work being done. This is a new emphasis, a new approach.
A: Dr. Evans: Yes, I think that's the reason we're getting so many scholars from Europe and from all over the U.S. Usually scholars tend to focus on their area of expertise. Rarely do Western scholars study Byzantium or Byzantine scholars the West. For that matter, Bulgarian scholars tend to concentrate on Bulgaria, and so on. This exhibition forces one to think how these cultures thought of each other in this time frame.
We have tried to recognize that Kyivan Rus' adopted the religion and culture of Byzantium while remaining politically independent; that Bulgaria accepted Orthodox Christianity and was conquered; that Armenia was conquered but never accepted Orthodoxy. Each has a different response.
Q: How does Kyivan Rus' fit in the over-all scheme of Byzantine art studies today? Are there different schools of interpretation with regard to Kyivan Rus'? For instance, is there a notable difference in the kind of scholarship on Kyivan Rus' being done in the West, in Ukraine and in Russia?
A: Dr. Evans: One can observe a profound difference in scholarship before and after the fall of the Soviet Union. Prior to its collapse there were certain givens, constructs of history demanded by Marxist and capitalist conceptions that required different interpretations.
In this respect I think that a big difference is that now that there is no Soviet Union, scholars from countries like Ukraine will not be filtered through the administrative culture of Moscow but will stand on their own.
In this exhibition, as Dr. Pevny points out in the lectures she gives, there has been a change from borrowing artifacts of cultural history which have been shorn of their religious association, to borrowing artifacts of cultural history which at their core are seriously religious.
Q: Dr. Pevny, could you elaborate?
A: Dr. Pevny: There are very few Western scholarly works that deal with Kyivan Rus' art at all and it usually gets covered as an aside in the general texts on Byzantine art, with just a few pages or a few images.
There is a great difference between works written in the West because usually works produced here see Kyivan Rus' from Byzantine eyes while usually the works written in Ukraine and Russia focus on Kyivan Rus' and don't really place it in the context of the broader Byzantine culture of the Middle Byzantine period.
As Dr. Evans mentioned because most of the art is religious, Western studies focus more on the iconography and the ecclesiastical context of the works, whereas most of the works produced in the former Soviet Union are descriptive or focus more on the historical-political context.
Q: Have there been new, significant developments on Kyivan Rus'-Byzantine studies in the last two decades?
A: Dr. Pevny: I think a lot of works published in journals of such institutions as the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton have tried to focus on some of the art and history of Kyivan Rus', and have tried to breach the gaps both in Western and in former Soviet scholarship. But there hasn't been a new study or a new interpretation of Kyivan Rus' produced in the last two decades.
Q: Who are the leading scholars on Kyivan Rus' today? Which institutions are leaders in the field?
A: Dr. Pevny: I would say that universities which have institutes of Ukrainian studies - such as Harvard, the University of Alberta, the University of Toronto as well as figures like Profs. Ihor Sevcenko and Omeljan Pritsak at Harvard.
Q: And in Ukraine?
A: Dr. Pevny: In Ukraine there are young scholars emerging and also big figures such as Profs. Hryhorii Lohvyn and Yuri Asieiev - these are mostly art historians who have dealt with architecture and monumental paintings. Prof. Ludmila Miliaieva, who will speak at the museum's symposium, specializes in icons; Prof. Yaroslav Isaievych is a general historian.
Q: Are the works of leading scholars known in the West? Have their works been translated?
A: Dr. Pevny: I think Prof. Lohvyn's book on the St. Sophia Cathedral is available as well as books by Oleksa Povstenko on the architecture of St. Sophia and by the late Viktor Lazarev, the leading Russian scholar of Kyivan Rus', on the mosaics of St. Sophia. And since these are general surveys of monuments, they're really the only available literature in the West.
Q: Would you comment on the representative quality of the works on exhibit? In terms of stylistic comparisons within Byzantine art, what is the significance of the art and architecture of Kyivan Rus'?
A: Dr. Evans: We have borrowed what I think represents a reasonably comprehensive demonstration of the exceptional quality of the art of Kyivan Rus' - from the monumental to the small and intricate.
It reflects the wealth, the power and the ambition of Kyivan Rus', as well as the quality of the art which expresses its own sense of its destiny and perhaps, brings really to life the quotation Dr. Pevny uses - of travelers coming and thinking that they've reached Constantinople when they've reached Kyiv.
Dr. Pevny: I think that we borrowed the best works from the period of Kyivan Rus' that have been preserved and are transportable.
Q: Kyivan Rus' is presented in the exhibition as trying to equal if not rival Constantinople.
A: Dr. Evans: I think there's no question that Kyivan Rus' ambition was to replace Constantinople.
Q: In the early surveys of Byzantine art and architecture in the West the art of Kyivan Rus' was often referred to as provincial.
A: Dr. Evans: The traditional approach to Byzantine art history was that the good works were in Constantinople and everything else was provincial. And what we hope the exhibition will do is to portray the greatness of Constantinople but also show that it wasn't the only place where there was good work.
Western studies of art history always respected the differences between England, France, Germany and Italy in the Middle Ages, but the same books tended to speak of the Byzantine Empire as a monolith and to see Kyivan Rus' or any other of the people that we have identified as the neighbors of the Byzantine Empire as simply provincial Byzantines.
Not only is that a misunderstanding of history but it provides a very simplistic view, and one that I'm very opposed to, because it implies that people did not have ideas of their own. I believe that when a Rus' imported a Byzantine artist or hired their own artist - that very soon they were demanding that the work respond to their interest which was often to be like Byzantium but it was also often another agenda.
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, June 1, 1997, No. 22, Vol. LXV
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