Finland's largest art museum recognises Illia Riepin as Ukrainian

Finland's largest art museum, the Ateneum, has changed the nationality signature under the name of artist Illia Riepin [better known by the Russian spelling of his name, Ilya Repin – ed.] from Russian to Ukrainian.

This is reported by the local outlet Suomen Kuvalehti.

In 2021, the Finnish museum, in collaboration with the Tretyakov Gallery and the Museum of Russian Art, held a major exhibition of Riepin's works. It showed that the artist was born on the territory of modern Ukraine, but presented him as a Russian. Since then, Ukrainians have approached the museum with the intention of restoring historical justice.

Among those who have asked the museum to change Riepin's nationality is Anna Lodyhina, a Ukrainian journalist at Ukrainska Pravda.Kultura (Culture). While preparing an article about the artist, she asked for more information about his life in Finland. The curator sent her an article stating that Riepin's parents were Russians and were born in Moscow Oblast. In response, Lodyhina sent evidence that this was not true – church documents showed that the artist's father and grandfather were born in Ukraine.

"Exactly a year ago, I wrote my first letter to the largest Finnish art museum, the Ateneum, asking for an interview with the chief curator Timo Huusko for one of my projects. I was researching Riepin's life in Finland – little is known about this period in Ukraine," Lodyhina says.

She added that she knew about the scandalous exhibition that the museum held six months before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in which it presented Riepin as a Russian artist. 

"My request transformed into a conversation and correspondence, during which we discussed the artist's ethnicity with Timo. In one of his emails, he sent a link to his article, which indicated that Riepin's parents were Russians born in Moscow Oblast. I asked Olha Shevchenko, the deputy director of research at the Riepin Museum in Chuhuiv, to send copies of the artist's family's metric books as proof that his roots were Ukrainian, not Russian," she recounts.

Lodyhina believes that the information from the Chuhuiv museum was crucial for the Ateneum: "A little later, I found out that under Riepin's painting in the new exhibition, it was written that he was a Ukrainian artist."

The decision to change Riepin's nationality took the Finnish museum more than two years from the time of the first requests after the exhibition in 2021. At the time, Ukrainian-born Finnish musician Łukasz Stasewski stressed that the Ateneum exhibition lacked information about Riepin's extensive ties to Ukrainian culture.

"Riepin grew up in Ukraine, Ukrainian themes were an integral part of his work, but the organisers simply ignored this, presenting Riepin exclusively as a Russian artist," he said. He started writing to the museum, raised the issue in the media, but it didn't work.

Finally, the museum decided to call Riepin a Ukrainian when they were preparing the exhibition "Questions of Time", which included one of the artist's works, said Ateneum curator Timo Huusko. 

The return of Ukrainian art

In February 2023, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York changed the nationality of the Mariupol-born artist Arkhyp Kuindzhi [often spelled as Arkhip Kuindzhi – ed.] from Russian to Ukrainian in its descriptions. They also added that the Russians destroyed the museum in his hometown dedicated to the artist.

Just a few days later, the Metropolitan Museum of Art also recognised Illia Riepin and Ivan Aivazovskyi as Ukrainian, not Russian, artists. In particular, the relevant marks appeared in the caption to Riepin's portrait of the writer Vsevolod Harshin and Aivazovskyi's seascape.

In March 2023, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (the Netherlands), which has one of the most complete collections of Kazymyr Malevych's works, changed the captions in the information about the abstract artist, calling him a Ukrainian.

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