The oil painting shows a carnage of darkness and menacing sharp edges, stricken through by a lightning bolt. Curled at its centre: a vulnerable fragment of text in the Hebrew alphabet, its significance buried by history.
Painted in Kyiv in the turbulent years of 1918-1920, El Lissitzky’s painting, titled Composition, is one of dozens of artworks secretly transported out of Ukraine under heavy bombardment after Russia’s 2022 invasion.
They toured top international art museums as the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s.
This was for safekeeping, as bombs rained on Ukraine and museums in occupied territories were looted. It was also an act of “cultural diplomacy”, in the words of curator Katia Denysova, aimed to cement international acceptance of a specifically Ukrainian chapter of art history, distinct from that of the invader.
RM Block
The fact that these paintings could be viewed at all was, in itself, a remarkable story of survival. Most had been slated for destruction, caught on the wrong side of Stalinist ideological intolerance in the 1930s, and were hidden for decades in a secret cache in a museum basement.
The collection includes the works of leading Ukrainian modernists, such as Oleksandr Bohomazov and Vasyl Yermilov, as well as those like Lissitzky who worked in Kyiv before becoming famous elsewhere.
I first saw Lissitzky’s Composition when the exhibition came to the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. The fragment of text caught my notice. Though abstract, the painting was infused with a violent energy, and the placement of the text cradled in its centre seemed significant.
I took a close-up photograph of the lettering. I wanted to find out what it meant.
The exhibition curators, I was told, did not know. “The National Art Museum of Ukraine, they have some experts looking at it, but no one has been able to decipher and find out where this text is coming from yet,” Denysova told me at the time.
Had it been lost to history? There was something about this secret at the heart of the painting that stayed with me.
I was determined to figure it out.
My first breakthrough in identifying the text at the centre of Composition came from asking friends who know Hebrew if they could read it.
They could not. It was in Yiddish, the language traditionally spoken by the Ashkenazi Jews of central and eastern Europe, which is Germanic but uses the Hebrew alphabet.
That pointed to a very specific place and time.
Composition was created during a brief moment of cultural flowering in Ukraine in the early decades of the 20th century, amid the tumult of the collapse of empires, the Ukrainian war of independence, and the emergence of the Soviet Union.
It was a time of terror for Jewish communities, which then made up 12 per cent of Ukraine’s population, as the instability unleashed brutal mob violence against them that killed tens of thousands.
But amid the carnage was a period of relative cultural freedom. Tsarist prohibitions on the Ukrainian language fell away, and new literary movements sprang up in Kharkiv and Kyiv. A ban on printing in the Hebrew alphabet ended with the 1917 Russian Revolution, and new theatre and publishing incorporating Jewish themes boomed.
It was a time when ideas of nationhood, not least in Ireland, were inspiring struggles for autonomy and cultural movements dedicated to celebrating and furthering national identity.
Lissitzky began his career in this environment, travelling to Jewish towns and villages to record their ancient artefacts and illustrating Yiddish-language children’s books.
He cofounded the art section of the Kultur-Lige in Kyiv in 1918, a cultural organisation dedicated to fostering Yiddish-language theatre, music, art and intellectual life.
The aim of his circle was to develop a distinctly Jewish modernist art, just as Ukrainian-language artistic groups were fostering their own “national culture”.
In these early years the Bolsheviks accommodated the use of local and minority languages, seeing this as a way to unite the diversity of the emerging Soviet Union and embed communism within its many ethnic communities.
Lissitzky was swept up in the moment of optimism, depicting the revolution as God’s will and creating a poster encouraging Jews to support the Bolshevik side in Russia’s civil war.
But the moment of liberation was to prove short-lived.
In 1919, Jewish organisations were designated enemies of the revolution, as part of a general crackdown against religion. Synagogues and Jewish cultural organisations were ordered to close, and the Hebrew alphabet was denounced as anti-communist.
Lissitzky stopped incorporating Jewish themes in his art, left behind Yiddish book illustration, and abandoned his Hebrew name, Eliezer, becoming “El”.
As Josef Stalin built his totalitarian dictatorship from the late 1920s, artistic independence increasingly became impossible.
Much of what had been celebrated before was now denounced as “formalist” or “bourgeois nationalism”.
Ukrainian intellectuals were an early target. The man-made Holodomor famine killed millions, hollowing out Ukraine. The generation of artists and thinkers killed during the Stalinist purges came to be known in Ukraine as the “executed Renaissance”.
Soviet realism became the only officially approved art style. Unacceptable art was seized from public view and museum collections.
Hundreds of artworks were marked for destruction and hidden in a secret archive, the Spetsfond, kept in the basement of the Ukrainian state museum. But the process of destroying them was slow, perhaps with the connivance of museum workers who still saw value in the art.
Once I knew the text was in Yiddish, my next step was to look for help with transcription. I found it in David Nathan-Maister, a rare book collector who was able to extract most of the words from my photograph.
This revealed four lines that were clearly a fragment from a larger text, their meaning difficult to interpret without the rest of the page. But a reference to “Chaldea”, an ancient term for an area in the Middle East, indicated a biblical commentary or history, Nathan-Maister suggested.
He shared his work with his community of fellow bibliophiles, and this produced another breakthrough. A user of X with the handle kommdaweg – who did not respond to my messages asking for their name, to credit them – ran a search for the transcribed words in online databases.
There was a result. There it was on page 23 of A General Jewish History, by Simon Dubnow (1920), a Yiddish-language book that had been digitised and uploaded in a searchable format to the Internet Archive by the non-profit Yiddish Book Centre.
Visually comparing the fragmented text in the painting with the words on the page confirmed an exact match. The words, and the arrangement of the lines on the page, were identical.
Seeing the unbroken sentences revealed the meaning of the text. It describes the ancient wanderings of nomadic Semitic tribes in the lands that are now the Middle East.
The preceding paragraph recounts the command of God to Abraham to leave his homeland, promising that from him, a great nation would come. He and his family “decided to go to Canaan, or Palestine”, the text recounts, and there God promised Abraham to give the land to his children.
It’s the “promised land”, the foundation myth of Israel.
Zionism was born in Ukraine, as a response to the persecution of Jewish people.
The ferocious attacks on Jewish communities by street mobs in the lands that made up the Russian empire between 1881 and 1884 gave rise to the Russian word “pogrom”.
It also inspired students in Kharkiv to found a group called BILU. It was the world’s first political organisation intent on the systematic colonisation of Palestine. It sent its first settlers in 1882. They founded what later became the Israeli city of Rishon LeZion, and town of Gedera.
Each further wave of persecution convinced more Jewish people that they needed their own homeland to thrive.
Zionism was popular in Ukraine at the time Composition was created, but it had not yet become a dominant ideology. Dubnow’s General Jewish History – the text at the centre of the painting – lays out an alternative vision of Jewish nationhood. The book is intended as a “history of our nation”, Dubnow wrote, showing how throughout the “violent crises” of thousands of years of history, the Jewish people survived to organise their own “autonomous national life”.
It’s a Jewish national text, but not a Zionist one. Dubnow was the leading advocate of an “autonomism”, an alternative to Zionism. It argued that Jewish communities should be self-governing wherever they resided, rejecting assimilation with the local culture.
It was cultural nationalism, without a territory. The Jewish people were a “spiritual nation”, Dubnow wrote, their lack of a land meaning that, unlike the nation states of Europe at the time, they could “never become aggressive and warlike”.
It took the calamity of the Holocaust to tip the scales in favour of Zionism, convincing Jewish survivors and international powers that a state of Israel was the only way.
Composition is a survivor. Along with the other works of the Modernism in Ukraine exhibition, Composition outlived the brutal Nazi conquest of Kyiv, the death of Stalin in 1953, and now Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Understanding the text at its centre adds a richness of meaning to the painting. It is a portrait of the survival of the Jewish people, clinging together as a community amid violence and destruction.
It’s a postcard from the past that was somehow prophetic of the horrors of the century to come. Unexpectedly, it links the two conflicts that define the present day: in Ukraine, and in Palestine.
