Ukrainian Mosaics of the Soviet Period: Between Official Ideology and National Sensibility | Kultura 2025

Emma Louise Leahy (PhD Candidate)

📍 Università La Sapienza

Doctoral student in History and Cultures of Europe, Università La Sapienza

Lecture Title:

Ukrainian Mosaics of the Soviet Period: Between Official Ideology and National Sensibility

Lecture Synopsis:

Stalin’s death brought about seismic shifts in architecture and the arts. With the 1955 decree “On the elimination of excess in design and construction,” laconic concrete silhouettes and industrially prefabricated building components became standard across the Soviet Union. The new paradigm of utilitarian modernism enabled a rapid increase in construction but produced sterile cityscapes with few orientation markers. As a corrective, the new genre of “monumental and decorative arts” arose.

A meeting point of fine arts and folklore, large-format plastic interventions in the architectural environment were meant to restore a sense of place to socialist cities. In Ukraine a young generation of “artist-monumentalists” gravitated towards the mosaic medium. Polychromic compositions of smalt, ceramic, and coloured cement began proliferating on walls of factories and schools, bus stations and residential buildings, cinemas and restaurants. Many young “Sixtiers” saw their artistic practice as part of a cultural mission to rediscover a Ukrainian self-consciousness that recent traumas of famine, purge, and war had brutally repressed.

At the same time they worked within the constraints of the state art system, which prohibited them from straying too far in pursuit of free creativity. In their stylistic experimentations the Sixtiers drew inspiration from historical arts, including the recently rehabilitated interwar modernists; the folklore-infused neobyzantinism of Mykhailo Boichuk and his Kyivan school proved particularly influential on artistic production in “mature socialism.”

Today, mosaics in Ukraine enjoy reappreciation even as they face urgent risks to their conservation — from habitual neglect to wartime devastation.