Reception of the Artistic Heritage of Ukraine of the 20th and Early 21st Century in Contemporary Artistic Practices: The Role of Museum and Private Collections in the Cultural Dialogue between Ukraine and Poland

Abstract

This article examines the reception of Ukraine's artistic heritage from the 20th to the early 21st century in contemporary artistic, museum, exhibition, and collection practices, considering the Ukrainian-Polish cultural dialogue. The starting point is the understanding of reception as a process of perception, comprehension, interpretation, and the subsequent integration of a cultural phenomenon into a new sociocultural context. It is argued that Ukrainian art of the 20th and early 21st centuries took shape amid political instability, imperial divisions, short-lived forms of Ukrainian statehood, the institutional rise of the 1920s, and the violent curtailment of the modernist experiment in the 1930s. It has been established that, in contemporary reception, museum and private collections no longer function merely as illustrative confirmation of historical and art-historical propositions but rather serve as a medium for the formation of new knowledge about a work of art, its origin, attribution, institutional history, and possibilities for public presentation. In this sense, the collection serves as a space where scientific reconstruction, museum interpretation, the preservation of cultural heritage, and international cultural communication intersect, especially in the context of the military threat to Ukraine's heritage. To illustrate these processes, exhibition case studies are presented as examples of museum representation, institutional cooperation, and cultural communication. Its scientific novelty lies in presenting a comprehensive and well-founded analysis of the reception of 20th- and early 21st-century Ukrainian art within the Polish cultural sphere, as well as in identifying directions for the further development of the Ukrainian-Polish dialogue through museums, private collections, research, and educational initiatives.

Keywords: reception of artistic heritage, contemporary artistic practices, museum collections, cultural dialogue, Ukrainian–Polish relations, Ukrainian art of the first third of the 20th century, cultural sustainability; provenance ethics; heritage protection; museum diplomacy.