Finland’s largest art museum, the Ateneo, has changed artist Ilya Repin’s nationality from Russian to Ukrainian following a campaign by Ukrainians for the institution to recognize his true heritage.
As first reported by Finnish news site Suomen Kuvalehti, Repin, a 19th-century realist painter, was first cataloged by the museum in 2021 as Russian. The decision sparked protest from some Ukrainians, most notably Ukrainian journalist Anna Lodygina, who wrote a thorough investigation for Pravda of Ukraine in which he proved that he was born in territory belonging to the current Ukraine.
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According to museum records, Repin’s parents were Russian and were born in the Moscow region. Lodygina, however, recovered church records indicating that the artist’s father and grandfather were born in Ukrainian territory.
He also highlighted how this misrepresentation of his origins was common in exhibitions of his work. A major exhibition of Repin’s works, for example, organized by the Finnish museum together with the Tretyakov Gallery and the Museum of Russian Art six months before the Russian invasion of Ukraine included Repin as a Russian national.
talking with the Kiev post office, recounted his conversations with the curator of the exhibition: “In one of the letters he sent a link to his material, which indicated that Repin’s parents were Russians born in the Moscow region. I asked Olga Shevchenko, deputy director of research at the Repin Museum in Chuhuiv, to send copies of the metric books of the artist’s family, as proof that his roots are Ukrainian, not Russian.”
Repin was one of Russia’s most popular realist painters of the 19th century, and is especially noted for his portraits of Russian literary and artistic luminaries of the time, including Mikhail Glinka, Pavel Tretyakov, and Leo Tolstoy. From portraits to street markets or war snapshots, he was adept at imbuing a scene with emotion and a sense of mystery. He became a deep admirer of the Impressionists after two years in Paris, and carried their spirit into his work, which thereafter became increasingly allegorical.
The Finnish museum’s decision follows a trend of returning Ukrainian heritage to artists listed as Russian in museums around the world. In February 2023, the New York Metro reclassified Ilya Repin and Ivan Aivazovsky as Ukrainian artists, rather than Russian artists. The following month, the Stadelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands, which holds one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of abstract artist Kazimir Malevich, similarly reclassified his nationality.
