The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam has reclassified Kazimir Malevich as a Ukrainian. Malevich is usually described as Russian.
A spokesperson for the Stedelijk Museum says that "now we communicate [about Malevich]: born in Ukraine of parents of Polish origin". This information has already been amended in wall texts and website pages and will be included in future communications, he adds. Malevich was born in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, in 1879, when the city was part of the Russian Empire.
The move comes shortly after the Met reclassified artists Ivan Aivazovsky, Arkhyp Kuindzhi and Ilya Repin as Ukrainian.
Art historian Oksana Semenik has launched a social media campaign for museums around the world to reclassify relevant Russian artists as Ukrainian. He told The Art Newspaper: “All the public attention helped. With Aivazovsky, I wasn't asking the Met to make it Ukrainian. But he is certainly not Russian; he was Armenian and lived in Crimea, Ukraine all his life”.