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The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has been quietly reclassifying some of his paintings. Two artists, previously described as Russian, are now classified as Ukrainian, and a painting by French Impressionist Edgar Degas “The Russian Dancer” is renamed “A Dancer in Ukrainian Dress”.

For a Kiev woman, these changes are a kind of justification. Oksana Semnik, a journalist and historian, has been campaigning for months to persuade American institutions to rename as Russian works of historical art that, in her opinion, are misrepresenting.

The Met includes works by Ilya Repin and Arkhip Kuindzhi, artists whose native language was Ukrainian and who depicted many Ukrainian scenes, even though the area was once part of the Russian Empire.

Repin is a famous 19th-century painter born in what is now Ukraine, renamed in the Met catalog as “Ukrainian, born in the Russian Empire,” and at the beginning of every description of his work now reads: “Repin was born in the rural Ukrainian town of Chuhuev (Chugov) when It was part of the Russian Empire.

“All famous landscapes,” he wrote on Semenik’s Twitter account, History of Ukrainian Art, which has more than 17,000 followers. [de Repin] They were around Ukraine, Dnieper and the steppe. But also about the Ukrainian people.

One of Repin’s lesser-known contemporaries, Kuindzhi, was born in Mariupol in 1842, when the Ukrainian city was also part of the Russian Empire. The text of Kuindzhi’s “Red Sunset” at the Met has been updated to include that “In March 2022, the Kuindzhi Museum of Art in Mariupol, Ukraine, was destroyed in a Russian airstrike.”

Referring to the recent renaming, the Met told CNN in a statement that the foundation is “constantly researching and reviewing the objects in its collection to determine the most appropriate and accurate way to catalog and present them.” The indexing of these works has been updated after an investigation conducted in cooperation with specialists in this field.