February 5, 2016

2015: Culture and the arts in all its expressions

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First prize in the portrait category in the Picture of the Year International 2015 contest was won by Alexey Furman for this photo (foreground).

The year 2015 witnessed the celebration of three important and distinguished diaspora luminaries: graphic artist Jacques Hnizdovsky, linguist and scholar Yuri Shevelov and painter Zenowij Onyshkewych. Ukrainian artists, musicians and performing groups grew in number and travelled across oceans to garner new audiences and advance Ukrainian art and culture. At the same time, organized protests against Russian musicians who publicly promoted Vladimir Putin’s aggression spread throughout many cities in the North America. Throughout 2015, the Russian invasion and annexation of Ukrainian territory continued to have a profound effect on the cultural and artistic life of Ukrainians.

Centuries-old art held hostage

On April 8, Amsterdam’s district court ruled that Ukraine was eligible to claim rights to the Scythian gold artifacts from an exhibition sent out before the Russian invasion of Crimea, Among the items on loan were 565 rare treasures from Crimean museums, which remain in boxes in a storage facility awaiting a court decision about where they should be shipped.

The “Crimea: Gold and Secrets of the Black Sea” exhibit was originally gathered from five Ukrainian museums, four of which are located in Crimea. Back in March 2014, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the Ukrainian government had claimed the entire collection as state property and demanded that the entire collection be returned to Kyiv. Crimean museums filed their own lawsuit in November 2014 in Amsterdam demanding that the Allard Pierson Museum return the Crimean part of the collection. Amid fears that Russia would loot the treasures if returned to occupied Crimea and then permanently move them to St. Petersburg or Moscow, the Amsterdam museum said it could not return the treasures until the legal ownership was clear.

Meanwhile, a collection of stolen 17th century Dutch masterpieces was alleged to have resurfaced in rebel-held eastern Ukraine 10 years after the paintings had been missing. On December 7, the Westfries Museum in the Dutch city of Horn announced that two men approached the Dutch Embassy in Kyiv in July offering to sell the 24 paintings back. The men claimed they found the collection in a villa in eastern Ukraine and asked $5.4 million for it – half its value when stolen in 2005.

Arthur Brand, an expert on stolen art traveled to Kyiv, while the Westfries Museum Director Ad Geerdink warned these works were in danger of being sold on the black market after the museum’s own efforts to retrieve them failed. The Ukrainian government is working part with Holland in the ongoing investigation.

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