On the second floor of the Ukrainian Museum in the East Village, visitors are transported to the distinctive landscape of the Carpathian Mountains through more than 100 watercolors and sketches by self-taught artist Nikifor (1895-1968). Born with a speech impediment that made him unintelligible to many people, Nikifor turned to drawing as a means of communication. He almost obsessively depicts the world around him, creating between a dozen and 100 sketches and paintings a day. Orphan and born into poverty, he drew on all the paper he found: used packaging, old boxes, used administrative forms and other scrap paper. To call him prolific is an understatement: he produced around 30,000 works during his lifetime. The pieces on display at the Ukrainian Museum represent only a tiny fraction of Nikifor’s production, but with The ultimate underdog Curator Myroslava Mudrak has grouped them into five sections that provide a compelling introduction to the artist, who is largely unknown in the United States despite being one of Central Europe’s most famous foreign artists.
The subject of the majority of Nikifor’s output is Krynica, a town in southern Poland, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when the artist was born. Krynica was and remains the region’s most famous spa town, known for its therapeutic mineral waters and beautiful rolling foothills. Every day, the artist would sit outside the tourist town and sketch his surroundings, sometimes selling his works to visitors or exchanging them for food. Nikifor was fascinated by the region’s diverse architecture and often focused on the region’s churches: the main wall of the exhibit – a section titled “Ecclesiastical Structures” – is filled with renderings of the onion-shaped domes of the Orthodox churches and Catholic church steeples, and almost feels like a guide to the region’s ecclesiastical architecture.
The section that initially seems the most tenuous curatorial link — “Naïve but still modern” — turns out to be the strongest. Mudrak compares Nikifor’s emphasis on linear, segmented compositions to the work of Paul Klee, while paralleling his explorations of geometric compositions in architecture with those of the Bauhaus. If these comparisons may seem gratuitous at first glance, visual connections become essential after being provided with this objective. This framing also encourages viewers to admire Nikifor’s meticulous cross-hatching and variance in his linework – to appreciate his artistry and not just his commitment to documenting this unique culturally hybrid pocket of the world.
The title of the exhibition refers not only to being orphaned and non-verbal, but also to ethnicity: Nikifor was a Lemko artist, an ethnic minority inhabiting the Carpathian Mountains and the foothills covering what is today today Ukraine, Slovakia and Poland. The Lemko people have been historically persecuted – Nikifor himself was forcibly displaced by the Polish communist state three times – and have a complex past. The most moving works in the exhibition are a number of self-portraits remarkable for their break with realism. In “A Dream about Fame”, the artist imagines himself at the top of a monument in the middle of a public square; in “Nikifor and the Saints on a Boat”, he floats down a river in the company of two haloed individuals. It is in these works – where we see the “outsider” Nikifor both positioning himself in the world and dreaming about it – that his artistic creation becomes more powerful than most verbal communication. Although the exhibition gives only a brief glimpse into the life and work of Nikifor, it offers a tremendous insight into the importance of the arts for the preservation of identity, especially in a part of the world in the such a controversial and complicated past.
Nikifor: the ultimate outsider continues at the Ukrainian Museum (222 East 6th Street, East Village, Manhattan) through April 15. The exhibition was curated by Myroslava Mudrak.
