A GULAG artist

Artist Volodymyr Kutkin who has served a nearly five-year sentence (for non-existing plot against Fatherland) in the Vyatka Camp, has not been recompensed for the period torn out from his life, neither by the communist regime, nor the independent Ukraine. For the most part we don’t appreciate our talented compatriots. It is only gratifying that artists, musicians, and writers are able to create conditions for their work.

Kyiv’s artist Volodymyr Kutkin did the same thing in his time. He chose his path, influenced by his grandfather Pavlo, his mother’s father who was schooled as an artist, but never became one. Grandfather Pavlo and grandmother Oleksandra closely followed the first creative attempts of little Volodymyr. When he was sitting and painting, his grandfather tiptoed not to bother him and reproached his wife for creating too much riddle in the kitchen. And they were all living in one room. When time came, Kutkin entered the Kyiv-based Taras Shevchenko School of Arts. He was a good student, thus he was awarded with a trip to Moscow. But it was not his fate to go there, as the war broke out. Like all children of war, Kutkin did not have any normal childhood. At nights he painted maps, text books, and portraits. On weekends he pasted billboards, he even sold all kinds of things, doing his best to help his grandparents to survive. They were his only family, as his mother was in evacuation and they could not get in touch with her, and his father died in a hospital of a grave wound.

After the war ended, Kutkin continued his studies at the school of arts, and entered the graphics department at the Kyiv State Institute of Arts. But that was not for long. A second-year student, Kutkin was arrested and sentenced by the Special Council in Moscow without any trial to eight years behind bars. Later, after the artist’s early release in 1956 (as the components of crime were lacking), he depicted the reminiscences of what he experienced in Vyatlag in a series of pictures entitled “GULAG.” Most impressive in these pictures are the expressive eyes of the convicts, a reflection of that terrible time, when several generations of people were building the light future with the hands of the dull present day. Besides, Kutkin created a number of engraving series based on Shevchenko’s oeuvre, twice (in 1963 and 1986) illustrated Kobzar, as well as Oles Honchar’s novel Tronka and Hryhorii Kosynka’s short stories. The artist worked in many graphic techniques: watercolors, etching, linocut, and pastel.

Kutkin died on March 9, 2003. There were few publications about the artist during his life, and even fewer – after his death. And he is worth of being known. Artist Hryhorii Poliovy was friends with Kutkin for his whole life, and he considers him not just talented, but a man of genius. Olena Voievodina-Kutkina, Kutkin’s widow said: “I have always liked his pictures, and as years passed I came to like them even more. Especially landscapes, they are very heartfelt, as it is not simply still and static nature on canvas, but something dynamic and living.”

Volodymyr Kutkin’s works are preserved in the funds of the National Museum of Arts (only two pictures are permanently on display at the Children’s Academy in Obolon). However, soon Voievodina-Kutkina intends to take them from there, because no exhibit can last that long, she considers. She will be keeping the pictures at home, waiting for an offer to arrange a worthy exhibit, because the pictures should be put in order and mounted, and the painter’s widow is lacking money for this.