She is Ukraine’s most famous artist. She painted, drew, decorated ceramics, and embroidered. Her designs have graced postage stamps and coins, and she remains an inspiration to artists and textile designers today.
The world rediscovered Maria Prymachenko on February 27, 2022, when the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported that Ivankiv Historical and Local History Museum (in Kyiv Oblast) had burned down following a Russian bombardment. Twenty-five of the artist’s works were inside, and local residents managed to rescue some of them.
Maria Prymachenko was born in 1909 into an artistically talented rural family in the village of Bolotnia. Her mother did embroidery, her father was a carpenter, and her grandmother painted Easter eggs. Just like another outstanding female artist—the surrealist painter Frida Kahlo—Prymachenko suffered from polio as a child, and she also wore long, hand-embroidered skirts to conceal her paralyzed leg.
She learned to draw, paint, and embroider at home. Even though she never acquired any artistic qualifications and had just four years of primary education, she became a professional embroiderer at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s. For the next few years, she worked in nearby Ivankiv until her talents were discovered in 1935 by Tetiana Floru, a textile artist and embroiderer linked to the Ukrainian Folk Decorative Art Museum in Kyiv. Some say she was impressed by Prymachenko’s embroidered shirts on sale at an Ivankiv market. Others claim that Floru was sent out by the Soviet authorities (initially, USSR cultural policy welcomed naïve folk art) to travel around the villages in search of folk artists and was enchanted by Maria’s embroidery on display at a cultural center.
Belated Plagiarism
Flora invited Prymachenko to a workshop (we would call it an artist residency nowadays) at the museum’s Central Experimental Workshop. Alongside other creators, professional and non-professional, the artist produced works for the First Soviet Folk Art Exhibition, which opened in Kyiv in 1936 and was later presented in Moscow, Leningrad, and Warsaw. A year later, selected works by Prymachenko were sent to the World’s Fair in Paris. After seeing them, Picasso supposedly declared, “I bow down before the artistic miracle of this brilliant Ukrainian.” Her talent also caught the eye of Louis Aragon and her fellow artist, the eminent painter Marc Chagall. He even admitted to being inspired by Prymachenko’s paintings, which wasn’t the case with another textile designer, who simply stole one seventy years later.
I’m referring to Kristina Isola, an employee of the Finnish design giant Marimekko, who came to fame thanks to her mother, Maija Isola. Her design Metsänväki (Forest Creatures) appropriated one of the Ukrainian artist’s paintings. Perhaps no one would have noticed if Finnair hadn’t used the design for its fleet livery, at which point it was found to be a copy of Prymachenko’s 1963 painting Rat on a Journey. Isola’s design omitted the animal figures but was otherwise indistinguishable from the original. Due to the scandal, Finnair decided not to use it on their aircraft, and a Maria Prymachenko exhibition was organized in Finland.
While the brilliant painter’s works were traveling around the world, she went to Kyiv for treatment. After several orthopedic operations, her mobility greatly improved, allowing her to return to her beloved Bolotnia.
Subversive Folklore
After World War II, USSR authorities’ attitude to art and folk artists changed. Folklore lost its innocence as officials began to suspect it was an expression of Ukraine’s desire for independence. Prymachenko avoided the Stalinist purges, but she had to work on a collective farm to support herself and her son, as her husband had been killed during the war. Undeterred by her tough life, she tried to remain active by embroidering and drawing, and gradually she returned to painting. Though still dominated by fantastic animals, colorful flowers, and rural scenes, her work also began to incorporate satire aimed at the authorities. The bucolic idyll evaporated, and her fairytale animals started to resemble the political leaders responsible for war, poverty, and the deaths of millions of people.
Prymachenko’s works reacting to the social reality were pure contemporary art. Nevertheless, she is best known for her paintings inspired by Ukrainian legends and traditions, which reference ornamental folk designs, and the old sayings and songs quoted in many of her works’ titles. Her drawings and gouaches are ablaze with color and teeming with incredible creatures, birds, and plants. Researchers of Prymachenko’s work and unique “mythology” (e.g., Oksana Semenik, Kateryna Iakovlenko, and Katya Zabelski) feel it was rooted less in Ukrainian folk culture than the suffering she endured during the wars, revolution, Holodomor, Stalinism, and her childhood marred by illness. Her vivid imagination allowed her to dream up amazing worlds and the creatures inhabiting them. For young Maria, their adventures were a substitute for contact with other children and, as an adult, they helped her cope with the traumas of war.
Prymachenko’s animals—lions, horses, bears, and completely imaginary, psychedelic-patterned beasts—often have human faces, so their intentions and characters are easy to read: some look kind, joyful, warm, charming, and funny, while others are sad and mistrustful. The Ukrainian artist’s birds are always portrayed respectfully as winged messengers bringing good tidings, heralding the spring and rebirth of life. They usually appear in pairs, symbolizing love and freedom. Their wings are often adorned with plant motifs, particularly flowers, which—alongside art—were her most important means of feeling and self-expression.
Prymachenko’s love of nature and yearning for the simple country life drove her, despite her successes (including abroad, before the war), to return to her native village. The garden she designed became crucial to her, and she would never pick its flowers, sacrificing only those she painted. She was especially fond of sunflowers, which she called “flowers of life” and painted with reverence, unlike other plants.
The artist felt compelled to show gratitude to her nearest and dearest, but also to her neighbors and compatriots: workers, farmers, cosmonauts, and soldiers. She dedicated many works to them, such as I Give Blue Cornflowers to Ukraine; A Bouquet for an Unknown Soldier: Honor and Glory to You; Dear Warriors! You Died for Us—and We Will Pray to God for You; and I Give You Flowers and Two Parrots; Let Them Twitter and Chirp, Watch over People, and Bring Them Luck.
She considered herself a part of both her small, rural community and the entire Ukrainian nation, whose culture, rich traditions, and customs permeated her work. For example, Prymachenko painted an imaginary couple, Ivan and Halia, in humorous scenes of their daily life. She never romanticized their relationship; on the contrary, she often poked fun at the roles culturally ascribed to women and men. The couple were depicted with irony and sensitivity, showing them as loving equals working side by side.
The Chernobyl Series
On the night of April 25 to 26, 1986, one of the reactors exploded at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Prymachenko’s native village of Bolotnia lay less than fifty kilometers away, in the exclusion zone, but the artist refused to leave. The authorities agreed to let her stay, in recognition of her life’s work and poor health. So began her Chernobyl series. Once more, the creatures in Prymachenko’s paintings—like the Stalin-faced beasts she painted after the war—looked terrified, furious, and sad.
At nearly seventy, the painter again proved that, beyond so-called naïve art, she was also a conscious artist, observing the surrounding reality with a careful, critical eye. She passed away in her native Bolotnia in 1997.
Both the Soviet and independent Ukrainian authorities tried to turn Prymachenko into an icon of folk art, yet her work transcends the label and continues to influence artists and graphic designers today. Young female artists, such as the painter Olga Haydamaka, acknowledge her style as an inspiration.
In reaction to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, murals of the dove from Prymachenko’s painting A Dove Has Spread Her Wings and Asks for Peace appeared in cities worldwide. Museums, private galleries, and public institutions began to organize exhibitions of the artist’s work as a symbolic gesture of solidarity with the Ukrainian people. The Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage was among the first, displaying reproductions of her paintings in its courtyard in April and May 2022.
A monumental exhibition, Maria Prymachenko: Glory to Ukraine, curated by Peter Doroshenko, was hosted at the Ukrainian Museum in New York in early 2024 (the exhibit ends April 7). This—the Ukrainian artist’s largest solo exhibition to date, and the first outside of Europe—has featured over one hundred paintings, as well as unique wooden objects, ceramics, and textiles (embroidered blouses and folk costumes produced over a sixty-year period).
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