An antique album of folk paintings was exhibited at the Odessa Art Museum

The Odessa Art Museum opened an exhibition and presented the first reprint of the 1929 album "Steppe Ukraine: Ornament." It features 30 examples of traditional wall paintings from southern Ukraine.

A photojournalist from Intenta attended the event.

The exhibition introduces visitors to the ornaments that were documented nearly a century ago during an ethnographic expedition in the Odesa region. The exhibition features the original album with lithographs created at the Odesa Art School. It was there that the entire publication was produced—from sketches and printing to design and binding.

As Alina Donets, the museum’s exhibition manager, explained, the idea to republish the album arose almost by chance during an exhibition marking the 150th anniversary of the Odesa Professional Art College.

“One of the exhibition visitors suggested, just as a random idea, that it would be cool to do a reprint,” Alina Donets said.

According to her, that conversation sparked the collaboration. Later, Oleksandr Savchuk visited the museum for one of the events. Together, they decided to produce a reprint, as it is both interesting and valuable: the album is nearly a century old.

The reprint was produced by publisher Oleksandr Savchuk and the Odesa National Art Museum. The modern edition was supplemented with three forewords and an afterword, which bring this century-old work up to date. The publication was made possible with the support of Dmytro Kazanin, owner and director of a transportation and logistics company.

According to Alina Donets, the fieldwork for the album was conducted by college student Olena Brychevska. She traveled through the villages of the Odesa region and sketched what she saw.

“It is now impossible to determine exactly in which villages a particular ornament was created,” explained the exhibition manager.

Donets attributes this to the tragic end of the Ukrainization campaign. According to her, many ethnographers who studied folk wall paintings were later subjected to repression.

The album is dedicated to Mykola Skrypnyk, one of the initiators of Ukrainization, who later died by suicide. Everything created during that wave of support for national traditions was subsequently destroyed just as rapidly. The publication also fell victim to this wave.

The original print run was 700 copies. It is not known exactly how many copies were published or how many have survived. Today, the album is a bibliographic rarity.

The first reprint had a print run of 1,500 copies. “Steppe Ukraine” can be purchased at the museum shop and on the publisher’s website.

Ірина Глухова