I
have no concrete idea how I ended
up in Ukraine last week finding out
about the national art and seeing
how it was being saved from Rus-
sian bombs. All gods move in mys-
terious ways, but the gods of art are
especially fickle.
It started a fortnight ago with a
meeting in London of ten of Poland’s
most important museum directors.
They had come over to discover why
British culture appeared to be so unin-
terested in Polish culture. They told me
their story, and I was asked about mine.
So I told them.
How my mother was born in Ukraine
in what were then Polish lands. How in
1939 the Russians invaded and put her
on a cattle truck to Siberia. She was 16.
How, when the Russians turned against
the Nazis two years later, they opened
up the labour camps and she walked
from Siberia to the Middle East with
hundreds of thousands of other newly
freed Poles. How she fetched up in Eng-
land. And had me. How art was my way
of seeing light at the end of the tunnel.
When she was 60, I fixed it for my
mother to swap her tatty “stranger’s
papers” for a proper British passport,
and took her back to the Ukrainian
village of Lipica Dolna where she was
born, some 60 miles from Lviv. The
house was still there: big in her
thoughts, tiny in reality. We went to
Lviv, too, visited the cathedral, visited
the museums. And we sobbed our eyes
out together under the statue of Adam
Mickiewicz, Poland’s national poet. So
for me, Ukraine was personal.
Spilling all this to the Polish
museum directors was causing me to
tear up pathetically, so, in an effort
to distract myself from me, I asked if
they knew what was happening to
Ukraine’s art and to Lviv’s museums?
Were they safe?
They’re being looked after, piped up
the director of the National Museum
in Poznan, Tomasz Lecki. A couple of
weeks earlier he had driven a five-tonne
truck to Ukraine filled with the most
precious material a museum needs
in times of war — bubble wrap. The
Ukrainians were hiding their art. They’d
run out of packing materials. The Polish
museums were resupplying them.
You can go and see for yourself, headded. I suppose I can, I whispered
back, wishing I was as evidently Polish
and brave as he was. That must be
when the gods of art got involved.
Because the next thing I know, Tomasz
and Marta de Zuniga, the unstoppable
life force from the Polish Cultural
Institute who organised the event, are
jointly planning my journey.
Lviv is 45 miles from the Polish bor-
der. Driving there in the dark we pass
regular checkpoints, chicanes made of
sandbags, flanked by homemade tank
traps that look like giant metal sea
urchins. The people from the Polish
consulate in Lviv, who had met us at
the border and got us through, tell us
not to film any Ukrainian soldiers. They
might shoot us.
On the drive to Lviv, giant billboards
keep looming up in the dark embla-
zoned with stirring Slavic calls to arms.
“Be ready to join the army and save
Ukraine,” says a prosaic one. “Our ene-
mies fade away, like dew in the sun-
shine,” says a poetic one. “Russian war
ships, f*** you!” says one with a clear
Slavic ambition to get to the point.
Every few miles, these rousing national
addresses pop up out of nowhere, like
stage whispers from the gods.
Lviv is exactly as I remembered it.
Such a beautiful city. Cobbled and
gothic, the streets untouched by yel-
low lines, the architecture with a fairy-
tale mood to it that you just don’t getCOVER STORY
‘DON’T FILM ANY SOLDIE
west of Berlin. We visit the Lviv
National Art Gallery, the largest
museum in Ukraine. Rumour has it
that all the nation’s important art
treasures have been sent to Lviv for
safekeeping. So where are they?
Throughout its entire history
Ukraine has been a motorway for any-
one heading west or east in Europe.
Whether you’re Napoleon marching
on Moscow or the Golden Horde riding
to Berlin, you pass through Ukraine.
And all these cultures — Scythians,
Tatars, Germans, Russians, Poles,
French — have left their mark on the
local art. The result is a wild mix of
styles and influences that make Ukrain-
ian art spectacularly varied. Now it is
all under threat.
The museum in Lviv is next door to
a refugee relief centre where busy
volunteers hand out packages to the
lucky few waving the correct ticket at
them. You register online. Get a QR
code in return. Wait your turn. Then
pick up your package from counters
scattered about the city. It’s how west-
ern aid is being distributed in Ukraine.Our art critic Waldemar Januszczak
reports from Ukraine on its astonishing
wartime mission to stop the destruction
of its artistic treasures
200 milesPOLAND
UKRAINE
ROMANIA
Lipica Dolna
Kyiv
Lviv
The
return
Our art
critic’s
mother,
Regina,
was born
in Lipica
DolnaArt on the front line Our critic outside
the Lviv National Art GalleryMATT CONWAY4 10 April 2022