The Bookplate in the Artistic Culture of Ukraine at the Turn of the 21st Century

The object of research in this article is the ex-libris sphere of Ukraine in the period from the beginning of the 1990s to the present day. Ukrainian ex-libris actually began to exist in 1991, when it became possible to speak about the Ukrainian bookplate as a phenomenon of art rather than about it as a segment of Soviet graphic art. It has headily changed its character and started a different transformation since the early 1990s. Over the past 20 to 25 years, the Ukrainian bookplate not only has come out of the shadows, turning into a valuable work of art, but also has received several new roles, inheriting the stages of transformation that took place in other countries. If earlier the book plate mainly served as an identifier of the owner, had mainly an informative function and was hidden from the eyes of the public, now it has become not just a work of graphic art, but an art object that, due to its typological diversity and specific artistic qualities, quickly acquired the status of not only an exhibited work of mini-print, but also a collectible. Ex-libris is more often exhibited, it is collected by artists, graphic artists, bibliophiles, and patrons. It has become a kind of an instrument for intercultural dialogue, promoting international communication. The change in the functional characteristics of ex-libris, the expansion of the circle of customers, the rapid growth of interest in the bookplate, and the increase in demand for it provoked a change in the status of the bookplate among artists themselves. If earlier the book platewas only one of the pages of the creative biography of a number of artists, now there are many masters who specialize in it, who have turned it into the main object of their professional interest. The commercialization of the phenomenon has developed: EL has become a kind of a pass to the international art space for young artists. The Ukrainian cultural field received its center of popularization of the bookplate as a self-valuable work of art of small-form graphics in 1993, when the Ukrainian ex-libris club was created in Kyiv. In the winter of 1993/94, the first international exhibition Woman in Ex-Libris” was held in the Ukrainian capital. In 1994, the international ex-libris competition Many Religions - God Is One was organized. Since the beginning of the 1990s, there has been a clear tendency to separate several leading schools. The most original, with characteristic stylistic features, schools of the modern Ukrainian bookplate became Lviv, Odessa, Kyiv, Kharkiv. There are also several hotbeds of ex-libris popularization in Ukraine, with great professionals in the field of mini-print, but they are few to speak about independent schools: Luhansk, Mukachevo, Severodonetsk, Sumy, Chernihiv, Chernivtsi. In today’s art space of the country, the bookplate owes its survival primarily to collectors and patrons, and its main, perhaps, the only, way to preserve it in the art world is to transform it into an instrument of intercultural dialogue, integration into the international field, without losing its national identity.

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