작품 상세

Kaniuka (1910-2000) was a Ukrainian artist intensely involved in resistance to the Soviet occupation and served two years in the early thirties in a Stalinist prison. In 1950 he emigrated to the U.S. Much of his work depicts scenes from the harsh times in the Ukraine, particularly the Holodomor in which Stalin used starvation to subdue the people. Appears to be Marilyn Monroe. Kaniuka's works are a major part of the Ukrainian Museum in Detroit and are included in the collection of the University of Minnesota. Olexander Kaniuka was born in 1910 1n the town of Huzhivitzi, Chernihiv, a province of the Ukraine. At 18 he was arrested, being accused of talking against the government, and was sentenced to 6 years in a Soviet concentration camp. It is of his life in the Soviet Union that he draws from for his subject matter, visually expressing an oppressed people hurt by a political power. My paintings revolve around the years beginning in 1928 and on when the Soviet communistic regime realized a need to make a communistic society. My people were told that all changes in religion and ways of thinking, as well as having to deny one’s own privacy, and join a collective farm should be voluntary on our part. Those that would not ‘volunteer’, however, were secluded, seclusion meaning jail, a concentration camp, or a banishment to Siberia. It was not uncommon for the persecution in these places to last 8-10 or even 15-25 years. Farmers, in general, received the most persecution because of their autonomous lifestyle. Very seldom were these farmers released from their places of persecution due to their unwillingness to go to a collective farm. In the Kiev concentration camp where I was a prisoner in 1930, I sat next to a women’s cell from which I heard mournful crying everyday around dusk. The interior to the women’s cells were the same as the men’s, except that their guards were women. I still cannot rid my memory of their choral wailing. My heart aches when I remember this experience and it is for this reason that I painted it. The women were sentenced to prison for denying to join the Colhosp (collective farm.) (Gulag No.2) Kaniuka, after his stay in the Soviet prison camp, was enlisted in the Red Army as a foot soldier during World War II. In 1941 he was taken prisoner of war by the Germans and was put into a concentration camp for the duration of the war. He then escaped by literally drawing his way out. “Food was low and prisoners were dying – wagonloads of them. I thought I would be next, because I hadn’t eaten for three days.” Kaniuka made an offer to a German officer to draw his portrait for a piece of bread. The offer was taken and the artist’s work became known through this to the commandant of the camp who also wanted a portrait but in a much more elaborate form. Kaniuka went daily to the commandant’s quarters. At first he went under guard, but then later was allowed to go alone which he took as an opportunity to escape. He followed a trek through Eastern Europe, via Poland, to East Germany, and then finally in 1951 came to the United States. He has been living in Minnesota since. Kaniuka graduated from the Munich Academy of Arts, and since 1952 has studied on and off at the University of Minnesota. His work has been included more than once in “West, Art and the Law,” a national juried exhibition sponsored by West Publishing Company of St. Paul. As a result of having his work in this well-known and well publicized exhibition, the government of the Soviet Union severed Kaniuka’s correspondence with his relatives living in the Ukraine. It is this background that has led Kaniuka to regard painting as a “search for aesthetic values, which inspire an eternal struggle for the honored place among men on earth. Why should I only entertain with my painting? People should become worried after they see the world painted from my point of view!”