The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has quietly reclassified some of its paintings. Two artists, once labeled Russian, are now categorized as Ukrainian and a painting by the French Impressionist Edgar Degas has been renamed from “Russian Dancer” to “Dancer in Ukrainian Dress.”
For one woman in Kyiv, Ukraine, these changes are a vindication of sorts. Oksana Semenik, a journalist and historian, has been running a months-long campaign to persuade institutions in the United States to relabel the historical works of art she believes are wrongly presented as Russian.
At the Met, they include work by Ilya Repin and Arkhip Kuindzhi, artists whose mother-tongue was Ukrainian and who depicted many Ukrainian scenes, even if the region was in their day part of the Russian empire.
Repin, a renowned 19th century painter who was born in what is now Ukraine, has been relabeled on the Met’s catalog as “Ukrainian, born Russian Empire” with the start of each description of his works now reading, ” Repin was born in the rural Ukrainian town of Chuhuiv (Chuguev) when it was part of the Russian Empire.”
On Semenik’s Twitter account, Ukrainian Art History, which has over 17,000 followers, she wrote that “All [Repin’s] famous landscapes were about Ukraine, Dnipro, and steppes. But also about Ukrainian people.”
