Soviet Ukraine's art history education in a historical context

This chapter analyses art-historical education in Soviet Ukraine. New training in this field of knowledge was established only after World War II. In contrast with pre-Revolution education with its degrees in Theory and History of Art, Soviet institutions awarded degrees in the so-called ‘Mysteztvoznavstvo’ (Kunstwissenschaft). The first graduation in ‘Mysteztvoznavstvo’ took place in 1964 at the Kyiv State Art Institute, which due to Soviet policy of centralised education had for a long time the sole department of theory and history of art in Ukraine. The development of both art-historical scholarship (we shall call it so for a matter of convenience, but we shall mean ‘Mysteztvoznavstvo’) and the training of specialists in this field was not a continuous historical process. The pre-Revolution school of art history formed in the late 19th century in Kyiv, Odesa and Kharkiv universities was destroyed during Stalin’s time. The majority of art historians were repressed. In the mid-1930s, a new system of art-historical education came to shape in the Soviet Union. The state introduced a unified standard and curricula that were designed in Moscow and Leningrad and distributed to the ‘provinces’. Curricula were mainly focused on issues of Soviet ideology and the history of Russian art. In the mid-1930s, one could not even graduate from Ukrainian departments or ‘subdivisions’ of theory and history of art for they were supposed only to train artists, architects and museum professionals, who finished their education without any degree awarded.