The Artistic Specificity of the Transcarpathian Material Culture in the Works by Sergey Makovsky: A Look at the Historical Tradition as a Fact of Modernity

Abstract

In the article, the life and many-sided activities of the historian, ethnographer and art critic Sergey Konstantinovich Makovsky (1877–1962) serves as the background to focus on his book Peasant Art of Subcarpathian Russia, published in Prague in Russian, Czech (1925) and English (1926) languages. Although not banned in Soviet Ukraine, it was not promoted either because of the writer’s emigre past and his proximity to the House of Romanov. However, the book was well known to specialists: the predominantly aesthetic approach to folk art, first applied in it, echoes in the studies of the 1960s and even later. Peasant Art of Subcarpathian Russia resulted for the exhibition, organized by the school department of the Uzhhorod Civil Administration in 1924. As an expert and director of the exhibition, Makovsky traveled all over Transcarpathia, where he studied art objects at the places of their production, talked to artisans, took photos and collected valuable items. Makovsky thought of the works of peasant art not only as of merely museum exhibits, but also a ”still living force”, a living testimony to the regional history. The authors of the article use a biographical, textual, historiographical, and comparative methods to conclude that in his book Makovsky is the first to explore the peasant art of Transcarpathia as a professional critic of modern art. In the Carpathians, he encounters peasant creativity, where decorativeness, which is also inherent in modernists, is the main property inextricably linked with applied expediency and local tradition. Makovsky is fascinated by this heritage, avidly perceives it, producing accurate observations and generalizations.