As quickly as the primary air-raid sirens sounded final winter, Elena Subach, a photographer and curator in Lviv, started to fret. “Lviv is itself an open-air museum,” she instructed me. “You can not cover it in a bomb shelter.” Throughout Ukraine, curators mobilized to attempt to shield what they may and switch movable objects for safekeeping. In Lviv, museum workers and volunteers rushed to protect the town’s treasures, placing metal plates over stained-glass home windows and getting ready canvases for transport. Subach photographed these efforts. On the Lviv Nationwide Gallery, she discovered a lady’s portrait obscured by bars of packing tape—the identical tape that Ukrainians quickly discovered to make use of to forestall their home windows from shattering underneath the influence of Russian assaults.
The protected artworks remind us of all that would not be saved, of the size of Ukraine’s irrevocable loss. Whereas Lviv’s artworks have to this point survived, the identical can’t be mentioned of these in Melitopol, Mariupol, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, and much too many different cities the place museums—and communities—have been leveled by missile strikes.
After we spoke lately, Subach recalled watching curators prepared the 18th-century baroque picket sculptures of Johann Georg Pinsel, “the Ukrainian Michelangelo,” for storage. On that day, in late February, Pinsel’s angels may barely be seen beneath their bubble wrap. The angels (under) now reside in an unknown location, Subach instructed me, silently guarding Lviv from their short-term refuge. “Till the victory, nobody will take them out.”
This text seems within the October 2022 print version.
