The improbable story of how a Ukrainian village museum claimed to hold some of art history’s greatest masterpieces

Elena Semenchenko enters the room with a studied hand gesture towards the crown jewels of her countryside museum. The two paintings, one by Kazimir Malevich, the other bearing the signature of Russian avant-garde master Wassily Kandinsky, are masterpieces that cemented this rural outpost’s unlikely reputation as an artistic haven, giving the museum its moniker as “Ukraine’s Hermitage”.

The Malevich has particular significance, the museum’s director explains, because the future founder of the Suprematist movement actually lived here for a few years in the 1890s. It’s one of the few unusual things about Parkhomivka, an isolated village of about 3,000 inhabitants almost 400km east of Kyiv. Another is the museum itself and the incredible artworks exhibited between its walls. Semenchenko also proudly showcases a landscape by the French impressionist Camille Pissarro, two Picasso drawings, and a portrait by Rembrandt student Ferdinand Bol.

But when the obvious question comes — how did such masterpieces land there? — Semenchenko turns away, and briefly hesitates. The Malevich and Kandinsky paintings were both gifted to Afanasiy Lunev, a local history teacher who founded the museum in the early 50s and died in 2004. She does not know who the generous donor was, nor when Lunev came into possession of those invaluable treasures (the last Malevich work to be publicly auctioned sold for $85m).

Is she not curious? “In his entire life, he never said,” Semenchenko answers. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s his secret.”

Lunev’s secret is part of a story that made Parkhomivka, an otherwise unassuming village deep in the Kharkiv region, a self-proclaimed hidden gem of the Ukrainian art world, with a treasure trove of more than 6,000 exhibits (only a small part of which are exhibited) only accessible to those ready to drive the 100km of pothole-ridden roads from Kharkiv, the regional capital.

It’s a story of abnegation and passion, of a beloved history teacher who, thanks to his stubbornness and charisma, managed to attract the attention of some of the Soviet Union’s most famous artists, and create a one-of-a-kind village museum. It’s a story that Ukrainians have long enjoyed reading and re-telling, with hundreds of articles and blog posts written about it since the late 90s. Some of them mention other incredible artworks reportedly stored in the museum — a Gauguin, a Renoir, a painting by Rembrandt himself, Manet, Cezanne, Matisse. “[There’s] no need to go abroad to see Rembrandt, Malevich, and Picasso with your own eyes!” Ukrainian TV channel 24 wrote on its website in May 2018. In 2019, then-Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin praised the museum on his Facebook page, encouraging Ukrainians to “come to the museum and bring their foreign friends [...] to see this impressive collection.”

Parkhomivka sits between two long hills, stretching over eight kilometres and seemingly cut lengthwise by a road running along the valley. A sugar factory first built at the end of the 19th century stands in the middle, a couple dozen metres from the village’s main intersection where the shops, post office, and a Second World War memorial are located. In the summer, trucks passing through the main road kick clouds of dust on the nearby houses, giving the place the appearance of a frontier town.

The museum, housed in the rosy palace of a former local noble, is hidden up the hill at the end of a meandering road that goes past the factory, past the house where a young Malevich lived, and past an Orthodox church built in the early 20th century. But there’s another edifice on the slope of the other hill that is key to understanding the museum’s rise: a two-storied building of bricks and white paint where the museum’s founder, Anafasy Lunev, started teaching history in the late 40s. It’s still the village’s school, though not for long: just a few metres away, workers are putting the finishing touches on a freshly renovated building, part of a state-wide program giving additional resources to 200 schools across Ukraine.

Valentina Karabut has started her history lesson and, while the schoolchildren silently read their manuals, tells me another story. The tale of the Parkhomivka Museum is one the 58-year-old history teacher knows well, partly because she lived it as one of the schoolchildren who helped run the project, and partly because she’s been telling it to journalists for the better part of two decades. It is, in her words, first and foremost the story of a great man, Afanasiy Lunev.

But the story has a more political side, one that Karabut, Semenchenko, and most other people close to the museum did not experience first hand and omit in their stories.

Valentina Myzgina, the director of Kharkiv’s art museum, remembers it better than most.

I meet her some 100km east, in a large office tucked at the end of a cramped corridor at the museum where she has worked since 1970. Her eyebrows raise slightly when I tell her I was in Parkhomivka the day before. “So, you’ve seen the roads?”, she asks. I have; they’re not the best, I concede. Myzgina leans back in her chair. If it’s bad now, she says, imagine how it was in the 50s, when Afanasiy Lunev first set up the museum. “For that,” she says, “I have huge respect for him.”

The pictures of chaotic joy evoked by stories of Parkhomivka children coming back to the village on open-air trucks filled with artworks also give Semenchenko an explanation for the cloud of uncertainty surrounding many of the museum’s exhibits. “We often don’t know because the children didn’t always make receipts… so today we try to reconstruct where exactly they came from.” The implication is that, in most cases, Lunev himself decided on the name that would appear under the painting.

One notable exception are the Picasso artworks, in front of which Semenchenko can stop to give details. One of the many contacts that Lunev made in his letter-sending campaign was Ilya Ehrenburg, a Soviet writer and journalist who befriended Picasso during his exile in Paris between 1908 and the start of the First World War. Ehrenburg later became instrumental in organising the first ever Picasso exhibit in the Soviet Union in 1956, as well as the second, 10 years later, and was able to set aside the (most likely) reproductions, as well as a vase for the Parkhomivka Museum. Both Lunev’s correspondence with Ehrenburg as well as Ehrenburg’s friendship with Picasso are well-established.

The provenance of other works ranges from clearly set – French-Belarusian artist, Nadia Léger, donated two large mosaic portraits to the museum — to confused, such as with artworks like Camille Pissarro’s “Spring” painting that was reportedly given by Russian museums.

The Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg confirmed in an email having donated 345 exhibits to the Parkhomivka Museum between 1964 and 1988: religious icons, porcelain, ceramics, ancient Egyptian art, as well as 90 other drawings and paintings. But, crucially, it denies ever gifting the Pissarro painting.

And then there are the Kandinsky and Malevich paintings. While other world famous exhibits could be real but misattributed works of arts, these two painters’ distinctive style means the paintings exhibited in the Parkhomivka Museum can only be either genuine or forgeries. Konstantin Akinsha, an art historian and former curator at the Kyiv Museum of Western and Oriental Art, said in an email that he had seen the Malevich painting during an exhibition in the United States. Its authenticity is “highly questionable, to put it mildly,” he wrote.

The USSR was instrumental in Lunev’s success, and its collapse brought difficult times for both the village and the museum. The emergence of an independent Ukraine at first meant economic crisis for Parhomivka, as funds from Moscow dried up and the sugar factory became entangled in a complicated privatisation process. More importantly for Lunev, by then in his 70s, the Parkhomivka Museum became a branch of the Kharkiv art museum. Lunev effectively kept control of the institution until his death, but the transition left him bitter.