Aivazovsky Gallery called the recognition of the artist in the United States as a Ukrainian absurd

The director of the Feodosia Art Gallery named after I.K. Aivazovsky, Tatiana Gaiduk, called the announcement by the Metropolitan Museum in New York of Russian artists, including Ivan Aivazovsky, Ukrainians, complete absurdity.

“Of course, Aivazovsky was an Armenian, he was a bearer of Armenian and Russian culture,” Gaiduk said.

According to her, in the house of the artist, in everyday life, “Armenian traditions reigned.” At the same time, “for everyone, Aivazovsky is a representative of the large Russian world.”

The director of the gallery noted that Aivazovsky “became known throughout the world as a Russian artist, one of those who glorified Russian art”, she also said that “he was very patriotic, in his paintings he sang all the outstanding victories of the Russian sailing fleet.”

Earlier, the Metropolitan Museum of Art declared Ukrainians artists Arkhip Kuindzhi, Ilya Repin and Ivan Aivazovsky.

On the page with Aivazovsky’s painting “Ship in the Moonlight”, the museum posted information that the author of the painting is Ukrainian.

The same statement appeared on the page with the work “Portrait of Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin”.

According to Gaiduk, such editing of annotations can be accepted by the public, whose cultural knowledge is rather narrow.

She spoke about a fact from the life of Aivazovsky, who studied his skills at the Academy of Arts around the same time as kobzar Taras Shevchenko.

“They were classmates,” Gaiduk said. “The kobzar did not recognize Aivazovsky as a compatriot, there was no friendship between them.” Moreover, Shevchenko envied Aivazovsky’s success and took him as a prototype for the image of a gloomy, lonely, dull and rather malicious artist in one of his stories.

Chairman of the Union of Artists of Russia Andrei Kovalchuk called the decision of the Metropolitan Museum of Art a political insinuation and a provocation.