 |
| Feed me … one of Prymachenko’s works which c |
Cannibalism and genocide: the horrific visions of Ukraine’s best loved artist
Maria Prymachenko created seemingly happy scenes of rural life. But look closer and you see the terror unleashed on her country by Stalin. Now her work has once again become a national symbol, duplicated at rallies worldwide
Jonathan Jones
Friday 18 March 2022
Friday 18 March 2022
At the 1937 International Exposition in Paris, two colossal pavilions faced each other down. One was Hitler’s Germany, crowned with a Nazi eagle. The other was Stalin’s Soviet Union, crowned with a statue of a worker and a peasant holding hands. It was a symbolic clash at a moment when right and left were fighting to the death in Spain. But somewhere inside the Soviet pavilion, among all the socialist realism, were drawings of fabulous beasts and flowers filled with a raw folkloric magic. They subverted the age of the dictators with nothing less than a triumph of the human imagination over terror and mass death.
