The Sunday Times - UK (2022-04-10)

RS, THEY MAY SHOOT US’

The Argos way. Inside the museum it’s

dark and melancholy. An art gallery

without anything on the walls is a

lonely place. Most of the pictures have

been taken down. A few modest exam-

ples remain, but the important ones

have all been hidden. No one will tell

me where. Least of all the director

here, a pocket-sized Tatar dynamo

called Taras Voznyak, who meets me in

his office.

Voznyak is a card. He starts off by

complaining about the Russian fighting

forces being sent to Ukraine. They’re

young idiots, he says dismissively. They

don’t know what they’re doing. Espe-

cially when compared with hardened

veterans like him and Lecki; men who

know how to use a gun. “Old heroes,”

I quip. “Middle-aged heroes,” he hisses

back with a crooked Tatar smile.

Propped up on his cupboard is a

19th-century painting of an earlier

Ukrainian war showing a mounted

Chechen waving the decapitated head

of a Russian at us. “It pleases me,” he

answers when I ask him why he’s put

it there. Not in a million years can

A truck was filled with

the most precious

material a museum

needs in times of war —

bubble wrap

I imagine the director of Tate Britain

or the National Portrait Gallery being

as up for a scrap as Voznyak. Same

job. Completely different species.

I tell him that the picture I remem-

ber best in his museum, the one I

enjoyed most on my visit with my

mother, was The Money Changers by

Georges de la Tour, which shows a

mysterious financial transaction set in

gripping baroque darkness. De la Tours

are rare. The Money Changers is one of

his masterpieces. Can I see it? No. It’s

hidden. And no, he won’t tell me if

all of Ukraine’s art treasures are now

in Lviv. It’s a state secret. What he

can show me is where the de la Tour

used to hang.

So we march through the darkened

museum to a faded wall on which a

shadow of the great painting is still vis-

ible on the wallpaper. And the two of

us stand in front of the empty spot in

silence, two middle-aged art lovers,

struck simultaneously with sadness.

On the way back, an air raid siren

starts up. Voznyak ignores it and takes

me, instead, into the museum garden

to show me his sandbags. Don’t write

about anything you see in the museum

and its basements, he twinkles.

He is annoyed that people in the

West seem to have forgotten that the

war with the Russians started in 2014

with the invasion of Crimea. The pre-

sent fight is just the latest episode. So

Ukraine has had plenty of time to pre-

pare plans and regulations for moving

its national art to safety. Yes, many of

the art treasures from Kyiv, Kharkiv

and Dnipro have come to Lviv. But

many are hidden elsewhere. Where the

Russians won’t find them.

Outside the gallery, it’s lunchtime.

Time to take a stroll through beautiful

Lviv. Across the city, various windows

of various public buildings have been

boarded up. The stained glass of the

cathedral, where I took my mum, has

been wrapped in shiny protective

sheets. The statues surrounding the

church look as if they’ve been band-

aged up by a doctor. That’s where the

bubble wrap went.

Everywhere you look there’s the

Ukrainian flag, with its Van Gogh

In safe hands Above: workers at

the Andrey Sheptytsky National

Museum move an Annunciation to

safety in case of an attack on Lviv

In ruins Left: a Mariupol resident

passes a damaged monument to

the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko

Daily bread Right: May I Give This

Ukrainian Bread to All People

in This Big Wide World, 1982, by

Maria Primachenko, whose work

was targeted in an attack on the

museum in Ivankiv, north of Kyiv

Watch Waldemar Januszczak’s

film on his remarkable trip to

Ukraine

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ALEXANDER ERMOCENKO/REUTERSculture

BERNAT ARMANGUE/AP

10 April 2022 5