The new iconography is playing a key role in helping Greek Catholics revitalize a culture of sacred art-making all but lost to them during a half century of Soviet persecution, when the only images most of the faithful kept were holy cards in a syrupy-sentimental French Catholic style. Greek Catholics worshipped in the underground for almost 45 years, until Mikhail Gorbachev restored their legal status in 1989. When these once Polish regions of West Ukraine were annexed by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II, the Kremlin engineered a one-sided merger of the Ukrainian Greek Catholics with the Russian Orthodox with Ukrainian church property (and its sacred art holdings) passing to the Moscow Patriarchate. Stalin was suspicious of this “Latinized” Orthodox faith community with links to the Vatican. The dominant faith in the region is Ukrainian Greek Catholicism, which claims allegiance to the Holy See in Rome but follows the Eastern Orthodox form of worship, including the veneration of icons. It also lies on the boundary where the Byzantine East meets the Latin West. Known, variously, as Lwow, Lemberg, Lvov, and, now, Lviv, the city has been a historic crossroads of different cultures ruled (and occupied) in modern times by the Poles, the Austrian Habsburgs, Tsarist Russians, the Nazis, and Soviet Communists. That Lviv should be the home of an experimental school of iconography came as no surprise to me. This was worth a pilgrimage to the old East Bloc to see the real thing. Looking at holy images in various modern styles, often made on unusual grounds like glass, “found” objects, and metallic tapestries, I realized the special role this gallery in Lviv could play in pushing the boundaries outward of a conservative sacred art form traditionally based on the copy of historic prototypes. The ICONART website came up one day during an internet search for modern Madonnas. One specializing in contemporary iconography is a Pearl of Great Price. Galleries featuring modern sacred art are a rare commodity. Abstract modernism combined here with the detailed markings of manuscript miniatures. Christ as both the maker and redeemer of the universe appeared in a stylized Crucifixion scene set among the wonders of Creation, bringing together the themes of the show. The seventh day was illustrated by an ethereal icon of Christ in Glory, preparing the viewer for images of the Passion. Spaced along a wall of the tiny show room, a row of uniformly sized panels painted in muted colors depicted the first six days of Creation with painstakingly lined figurarive forms on geometric backgrounds. The show proved to be an eye-opener in the truest sense of the word. I joined a crowd of mostly young art lovers gathered on a pleasant evening for the opening of the solo exhibition of Lviv Painter Natalya Rusetska on the theme Agape: From Creation to Salvation with keen anticipation. I came in search of a new style of iconography and found it a short walk away from the city's historic Market Square in the ICONART Contemporary Sacred Art Gallery, occupying two storefront rooms on a side street of the city's old Armenian quarter. My first visit to the West Ukrainian cultural capital of Lviv in the summer of 2017 was a voyage of discovery.
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