In this book, issues of identity, identification, and self-identification serve as common threads linking diverse Ukrainian art schools, artists, and movements with a focus on the historical avant-garde era. Myroslav Shkandrij brings together original studies and adaptations of previously- published essays aiming to improve the understanding of Ukrainian artistic achievements and their contributions to international art. The compilation primarily comprises art history studies by drawing on dates, names, artifacts, biographies, or sources, in addition to reconstructing forgotten works. Newer theoretical approaches remain widely unconsidered, however.

The author emphasizes international artistic interrelations with the west and argues that numerous biographies were shaped by them. He spans a broad arc from both internationally established artists (Alexander Archipenko) to less prominent ones (Sophia Levytska) and personalities more related to Ukraine (Mykhailo Boichuk) to others who were less related (Wladimir Baranoff-Rossiné). Among the distinctive features of the Ukrainian avant-garde, he identifies its “emergence from a specific milieu” or a “focus on local and national elements” (22). In addition, the book is concerned with “Politics and Paintings,” considering political posters, Jews in artistic and cultural life, and the years of “National Modernism.” This era, boosted by enthusiastic artistic interventions in political discourses is today considered to be highly relevant to Ukrainian cultural processes. Affirmative posters as created by the Boichuk School in a traditional lubok-style or Vasyl Yermilov's depiction of the Ukrainian writer Ivan Franko are illustrative examples for both the paradoxes of merging pro-Bolshevik agitation with national art and the contradictory, but fruitful artistic symbioses of mystification and incorporation. Furthermore, Shkandrij examines the concept of identity by analyzing five selected artists engaged in different art genres such as painting and surface based art, scenography, statuary, and film. Yet, the importance of Kazimir Malevich, David Burliuk, or Vadym Meller as representatives not only of the Russian or Soviet avant-garde, but of the much less recognized contemporary movement in Ukraine, has already received much attention (Dmytro Horbachov). However, the study also widens the perspective of Ukrainian cultural heritage on facets of Dziga Vertov's and Ivan Kavaleridze's works and biographies as well as on Jewish culture, thus challenging established narratives and discourses. Finally, the author reflects on the representation of the Ukrainian avant-garde in today's cultural memory, once again stressing the need to increase its recognition.

The appendix is comprised of an index and a bibliography, considering research up to 2017. Some footnote references, above all those to the author's own original articles, are not included in the bibliography (38). Twenty-seven monochrome images mainly present artifacts from the 1910s–20s, though some show later, sparsely-known productions by Kavaleridze and Burliuk. Particularly, the “passion for color” (22) as a distinctive feature of the Ukrainian avant-garde would benefit of images printed in color.

Taken together, the compilation testifies to the author's continuous exploration of artistic flirtations with political matters. An ambiguity of political commitment was specific for many Ukrainian artists in the post-revolutionary years. Although the subtitle promises to raise important questions on the creation, transformation, deformation, or deconstruction of cultural narratives and on how competing entities claim dominance of collective memory, this promise is kept primarily in the chapter about Kavaleridze. Moreover, instead of a more critical reflection the author appears to some extent to seize on polemics which were specific for Ukrainian discourses of the 1920s by emphasizing, for example, an “imperial reflex” or “how powerful Bolshevik propaganda was” (50). Agitation was not exclusively imposed by a so-called “other”; it was driven by domestic factors, as well. Many artists welcomed agitation, even more so, they used and transformed it often enough as an act of self-empowerment. Bridging the gap between political commitment and artistic autonomy was a challenge also for artists in other newly-established states in the 1920s, such as Czechoslovakia. Despite their enormous artistic and conceptual diversity, Ukrainian artists of the 1920s often are subsumed under the common label “avant-garde.” A fruitful discourse on whether phenomena such as Boichuk's school, Burliuk's late paintings, Kavaleridze's monumental statuaries, or the literary organization VAPLITE, with regard to whether established avant-garde theories can or cannot be unified under this label, remains as desiderata for subsequent works.

This compilation undoubtedly contributes to a better understanding of Ukrainian artistic achievements, however. Moreover, it provides evidence that identity issues were relevant not only to many artists of the 1920s, but still today occupy a fairly large place in Ukrainian nation building, academic discourse and, not least, in “contesting” for cultural memory.