Evans is a place on Earth: Slava Ukraini:In the Eye of the Storm.

With last week's election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, the future for Ukraine (as well as the future for the left, for progressives, for women, for minorities, for Gazans, for the climate, and for America and the planet) looks pretty bleak but Donald Trump was not on the forefront of my mind when me and my friend Vicki visited the Royal Academy just over a month ago to see the excellent In the Eye of the Storm:Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s.

Anatol Petryskyi - At the Table (1926)

There will be time enough to worry about Trump and to worry about the future but on the day I'm writing about here my focus was on catching up with Vicki, going for a long walk, enjoying tasty moussaka in Shepherd Market's Sofra (washed down with a few beers) and checking out the rather brilliant Ukrainian art.

Ukraine isn't (like, for example, France or Italy) a country that springs to mind when you think about art and much of the art that was on display at the RA is normally on show at Kyiv's National Art Museum of Ukraine. With Ukrainian culture, and Ukrainian lives, under threat from Putin's Russia, it seemed an apt time to celebrate that culture and the exhibition did feel more like a celebration than a wake. Let's hope that, somehow, it stays like that.

The art, the modern art at least, of Ukraine is a fusion of Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, and Jewish communities and it's an art that grew up against the chaotic backdrop of the First World War, the collapse of the Russian empire, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the 1917 revolutions, Ukrainian independence, and Ukraine being absorbed into the USSR. There's no shortage of inspiration for Ukrainian artists to get their paintbrushes into.

Plus there was everything that was happening in the wider art world at the time. Alexandra Exter had studied at the Kyiv Art School before moving to Paris and making friends with some of the pioneers of Cubism and Futurism which she fused with native influences to create her own unique style before paying it back by training the next generation of Kyiv artists.

Alexandra Exter - Three Female Figures (1909-10)

Oleksandr Bohomazov - Landscape, Caucasus (1915)

Alexandra Exter - Bridge (Seures) (c.1912)

Oleksandr Bohomazov - Landscape, Locomotive (1914-15)

I particularly like her cubist-adjacent Bridge which has an uneasy sense of paranoia about it. Oleksandr Bohomazov (another who claims Kyiv Art School as his alma mater) veers more towards abstract sensibilities. Fascinated by human progress, Bohomazov seems to me to be a fellow traveller of Russian artists like Kandinsky and Malevich (who was actually born in Kyiv and hence earns his place in this show with a sketch - and a brilliant painting - you'll see if you continue to read on) and even the American abstract expressionists whom he predated by several decades.

One abstract artist I didn't realise was Ukrainian was Sonia Delaunay, probably because she took her French husband Robert Delaunay's surname. Sonia was born Sara Stern in Odesa (or, possibly, Hradzyk) in 1884 but grew up in St Petersburg before relocating to Germany to study at Karlsruhe and, then, to Paris. Quite the international.

Her 'bright and dynamic' palette explores rhythm and movement within a two dimensional artwork and is as joyous as many of the works on show at this exhibition. Ukrainian artists, it seems to me, are masters of colour and the curators of this show have lit and displayed the works to get the very best out of that colour.

Davyd Burliuk - Carousel (1921)

Alexandra Exter - Composition (Genova) (1912)

Sonia Delaunay - Simultaneous Contrasts (1913)

Vadym Meller - Composition (1919-20)

Volodymyr Burliuk - Ukrainian Peasant Woman (1910-11)

The more figuratively inclined Volodymyr Burliuk was also a bit of a gadabout, spending time in Paris, Munich, and Moscow as well as Kyiv. His work was more inspired by the Pointillism of Seurat and Signac and the Post-Impressionism of Henri Rousseau and Camille Pissarro but, like others, he incorporated more traditional elements of Ukrainian culture (in the above work, a traditional dress and an Orthodox cross) to create something that blends the modern and the archaic and makes something new. Burliuk died in his early thirties, a victim of World War I and very few of his paintings survive today.

Theatre, and costume, design was big in Ukraine back in the 1910s and the exhibition devotes a small space to that discipline. During that time, Ukraine was fighting against invading Russians (plus ca change) and Alexandra Exter (her again) and Les Kurbas were the leading lights when it came to bringing modernist art principles into scenography and theatrical design. Anatol Petrytskyi, Vadym Meller, and Oleksandr Khvostenko-Khvostov were among Exter's students.

Oleksandr Khvostenko-Khvostov - Costume design for the Soldier in the opera 'Love for Three Oranges' (1926)

Vadym Meller - Costume design for the Friar in the play 'Mazepa' at the First Taras Shevchenko State Theatre, Kyiv (1920)

Vadym Meller - Sketch of the 'Masks' choreography for Branislava Nijinska's School of Movement, Kyiv (1919)

Alexandra Exter - Costume designs for the Greeks in the play 'Famira Kifared' at the Chamber Theatre, Moscow (1916)

Anatol Petrytskyi - Costume designs for the ballet 'Eccentric Dancers' at the Moscow Chamber Ballet (1922)

Oleksandr Khvostenko-Khvostov - Stage drop design for the ballet 'Red Poppy' at the Theatre of Opera and Ballet, Kyiv (1928)

Anatol Petrytskyi - Costume design for Khiuria in the play 'The Fair at Sorochyntsi' at the State Opera Theatre, Kharkiv (1925)

Anatol Petyrtskyi - Costume design for Minister Pinh in the opera 'Turandot' at the State Opera Theatre, Kharkiv (1928)

Geometric shapes and Constructivist principles abound although I was reminded of New Order's True Faith video on more than one occasion. I'm particularly taken with Petrytskyi's 'Cry of the Captives, designed for a theatre in a small town in northern Ukraine. As ever, it's the colour but, here, it's also the harmony of the composition.

Something that also comes across in the works of Kultur Lige artists like El Lissitzky (another one I'd heard of before) and Issakhar Ber Ryback. Kultur Lige was founded in Kyiv in 1918 to promote the development of then contemporary Jewish-Yiddish culture, at that time the short lived Ukrainian People's Republic was led by the Central Rada who recognised and celebrated the multicultural and multilingual nature of the country. Even while, at the same time, multiple violent pogroms were being carried out against Ukraine's Jewish population. By the mid-1920s the Kultur Lige was over. The Soviets weren't fans.

Anatol Petrytskyi - 'Cry of the Captives'. Sketch for the interior decor for the Kozelets Theatre (1920)

Issakhar Ber Ryback - City (Shtetl) (1917)

El Lissitzky - Composition (c.1918-1920s)

Sarah Shor - Sunrise (late 1910s)

Bad move by the Soviets. Some of these paintings are great. El Lissitzky and Issakhbar Bey Ryback joined ethnographic expeditions around Ukrainian Jewish towns and the architecture, the street life, and the people spilled out into their art. In Ber Ryback's case, more literally than in El Lissitzky's. Sarah Shor experienced what it was like to be a Jew in Ukraine at the time of the pogroms in a far more frightening way. She actually survived a pogrom and having been through such trauma was determined to make positive art.

It seems, to Sarah Shor, there had to be a better ways of doing things. There will always be negativity out there if you look for it but there will always be positivity too. I know someone who had to walk up a small hill and acted like they'd been in the Third Battle of Ypres. While at the same time the cyclist Chris Hoy has terminal cancer and has been overwhelmingly positive in his outlook. I know which instance I find the most inspiring.

Marko Epshtein - The Tailor's Family (c.1920)

Marko Epshtein - Cellist (c.1920)

When the Soviets finally defeated the Ukrainian forces in 1921, Kharkiv became the capital of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic (hardly anybody seems to use the word 'socialist' in its correct context) and a policy of 'ukrainizatsii', or Ukrainisation was introduced which sounds good in theory. In actuality, it was an ideological concession, a sop, to appease the defeated locals.

It did, at least, allow for a level of cultural autonomy and, under this, Mykhailo Boichuk's studio of monumental art emerged to become the USSR's leading artistic group and were commissioned to create murals for public spaces and buildings. Again, it sounds good. But soon the group were dismissed as 'Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists' and Boichuk and some of his associates were executed during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s (and most of the art publicly destroyed). Wandering around this exhibition it's instructive to note just how many artists died during that grim decade. A decade the world seems to be sleepwalking into reliving.

Anatoly Petrytskyi - Portrait of Mykhail Semenko (1929)

Vasyl Yermilov - Journal cover design for 'Avanhard' ('Avant-garde') (1929)

Vasyl Yermilov - Journal cover design for 'Nove Mystetstvo' ('New Art') (c.1927)

Kyrylo Hvozdyk - Shepherds (1927)

Anatol Petrytskyi - Construvist Composition (1923)

Mykhailo Boichuk - Dairy Maid (1922-23)

To look at Boichuk's dairy maid you wouldn't necessarily come to the conclusion that he was particularly bourgeois, less so you would consider him to be worthy of execution. Like so many of the artists on show here, Boichuk had travelled a bit. He'd studied in Vienna, Munich, Paris, and Krakow and he believed that art should be 'a national treasure' rather than a commodity which, again, doesn't exactly reek of the bourgeoisie.

If anything his fusion of European modernism, Ukrainian folk traditions, and even Pre-Renaissance frescoes sounds unifying and inclusive. Not, it seems, to Stalin and his murderous goons. Dictators never tend to be particularly good at understanding art. Imagine how terrible Putin or Trump's taste in art is.

Mykola Kasperovych - Ducks (1920s)

Mykola Kasperovych - Head of a Young Girl (c.1920)

Some of the art made during that time was, it seems intentionally, naive. Almost outsider art. Ducks in a pond and a self-portrait, both by Mykola Kasperovych, which I joked to Vicki was a painting of her when she was a little girl. Vasyl Yermilov, however, was anything but naive. He made propaganda art that combined agitational imagery with Ukrainian decorative traditions as well as working on typefaces for local publications and utilising the industrial aesthetic for his own self-portrait (below).

It juxtaposes well with Viktor Palmov's Hallowe'enish Group Portrait and Vasyl Sedliar's more traditional portrait of Oksana Pavlenko. It was shown at 1930's Venice Biennale along with Manuil Shekhtmn's far more political Jewish Pogrom,

Vasyl Yermilov - Self-Portrait (1922)

Viktor Palmov - Group Portrait (1920-21)

Vasyl Sedliar - Portrait of Oksana Pavlenko (1926-27)

Manuil Shekhtman - Jewish Pogrom (1926)

Anatol Pertytskyi - The Invalids (1924)

Kazymyr Malevich - Sketch of the painting for the conference hall of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Kyiv (1930)

Viktor Balmov - The 1st of May (1929)

Oleksndr Bohomazov - Experimental Still-Life (1927-28)

Ukrainian artists had earned their place on an international stage but it was the final room of the exhibition which was, perhaps, the greatest revelation of all and, once again, it was down to the incredible colour. Bohomaoz's Experimental Still-Life looks like Morandi through the looking glass, Viktor Balmov's 1st of May is a haunting meditation on a part of the world that seems to find peace hard to come by (for some reason, hmm), and Malevych's winter landscape is just sublime.

It's like a song, or a dream, in painted form. Wikpedia has Malevych down as Russian but he was born in Kyiv to a Polish family and it was the Ukrainian folk traditions he grew up around that influenced him. The landscape below differs from his more famous Suprematist style but what it lacks in revolutionary power it makes up for in grace.

Kazimir Malevich - Winter (Landscape) (1909)

Oleksandr Bohomazov - Sharpening the Saws (1927)

Works like Bohomazov's Sharpening the Saws and Semen Yoffe's Shooting Gallery are just as joyous but though the art at the RA show is, indeed, full of light and full of love there is, of course, a dark side too. Soviet power resulted in a radical change in both the political, and artist, climate and Socialist Realism forced out the era of modernist experimentation.

That was not the worst of it. Hundreds of writers, theatre directors, and artists (including many whose works are in this show) were sent to labour camps, imprisoned, and/or executed and their works destroyed. Slowly, the artists have been regaining the reputation they earned and deserved but mostly they have been placed under the umbrella of Russian art. As you can probably imagine, and bearing in mind history and present events, it's important that this is corrected and the Royal Academy have done a great job of doing just that. Thanks to Vicki for joining me. Slava Ukraini.