Anxiety and prayer of Liuda Yastreb

This work of Liuda Yastreb is quite atypical for the creator’s style, as it is a collage, a combination of oil painting on hardboard with foil. It depicts the Medusa Gorgon – a peculiar take on self-portrait, created shortly before the artist’s untimely death.

Let us recall that April 10, 2015 will mark the 70th birth anniversary of Yastreb (1945-80). The painting Untitled (Medusa Gorgon) has a history of its own. What prompted Yastreb to portray the sinister chimera and identify herself with this mythical character? Many famous artists painted the Medusa, it would be enough to recall a self-portrait of proto-baroque artist Merisi da Caravaggio.

There are several interpretations of that mythic female image: Ancient Greek, with its emphasis on the Medusa’s “black side” as the embodiment of evil and curse, and even more archaic one, born in Asia Minor. This latter sees the Medusa as a woman who is suffering and doomed, but symbolizes the female secrets, wisdom, and cycles of nature.

Speaking about the circumstances of creation, the interpretation was strongly influenced in this case by the choice of material (hardboard, foil, oil). Yastreb, like many artists of her generation, was forced to work for the Art Fund, where these materials were widely used. They exposed her emotions, allowed her thoughts to materialize. Renowned artist Viktor Maryniuk, a zealous guard of his wife’s memory, recalls that the work was done in one go.

Yastreb was incurably ill in the last seven years of her life, and, living with the thought of imminent death, she was courageous enough to not tell anything to family and friends. Here, it is revealing that her work of the late 1970s features a double-headed image of predatory bird-monster that chases its prey, a kind of theme of good and evil. One can mention also painting A Walking Woman (1977), with its amazing rhythm and hidden tragic mindset. At the same time, the artist worked on bright topics as well, as shown by baroque Large Bathers, pampered and carefree, a new take on Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s series of the same name, or on an even earlier period in the history of art associated with Peter Paul Rubens.

Returning to the newly acquired painting of the Odesa Museum of Modern Art (OMMA), we note that the work in question is built on contrasts: impulsively and dynamically written picturesque background with serpentine bends of its forms contrasts with plane of the face mask, somewhat animated by asymmetrical, linearly schematic features. It interprets the static alienated image of the Medusa Woman. The cold glitter of foil-made face defines colors of its somber background, which are purple, white, pink and chilly black, and it lacks any aggression expected from the Greek interpretation. This is an image of a doomed person, and her state of mind is expressed in the pulsating background, whose entire design causes anxiety and alarm.

1979 was very fruitful for the artist. She stared intently at herself, wrote self-portraits, tried to understand her place in art and art movement with which she was involved, and published an essay that year that theoretically justified non-conformism as a new direction in painting (“The Artist’s Intellectual Stoicism in the Soviet Society”). Odesa citizens called non-conformism the “second avant-garde” (the first one was represented by Izdebsky’s Salons, the Society of Independents and the Boichukists) or the underground (“private exhibitions”), which restored the means of artistic expression. It is not superfluous to note here that the ongoing OMMA exhibition of this period is very harmonious, due to its chamber interior atmosphere, which, typically for Odesa homes of that period, combines objects of art and life. Henceforth, Yastreb’s painting Untitled will have its rightful place there.