By Theresa Rézeau
The children are reading.
In Semen Natanovich Guyetsky’s Children Reading (1940), that ordinary act carries an unexpected weight. Two children absorbed in a book would hardly seem an image of resistance. There are no soldiers, ruins or fleeing families. Nothing in the painting announces catastrophe.
But the date changes how we look.
1940.
Guyetsky (1902–1974), also known as Simha Nusenovich, painted these children at a moment when Europe was already at war. More than eighty years later, the painting has acquired another context. Ukraine is again living through war, and the fragile things that allow one generation to speak to another — paintings, books, archives, museums, buildings and memories — have again become vulnerable.
I came to know Guyetsky’s work through a Ukrainian art dealer with whom I worked before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
She was more than someone selling paintings. She was deeply committed to Ukrainian art and to bringing artists from her country before audiences beyond its borders. Through her, paintings travelled. Names travelled. Histories that might otherwise have remained unfamiliar entered other rooms and other conversations.
That is one of the quiet powers of an art dealer.
We often think of the art world through its visible machinery: galleries, collectors, fairs, auctions, prices and acquisitions. But behind that machinery are people who perform another function. They carry culture from one place to another.
War exposes how fragile that work can be.
As the conflict deepened, our conversations changed. Art gradually gave way to survival. Messages became less frequent. The last time I heard from her was in September 2022.
She wrote with humour.
“I’m like a party frog now, moving and driving from country to country.”
The sentence made me smile before its meaning settled.
Movement can sound like freedom when described from a distance. Airports, borders, new cities, another country. But displacement is movement without the security of knowing where one belongs next.
She had been uprooted from the life she had built. Her husband and brother remained in Ukraine, unable to leave under wartime restrictions then applying to many men of military age. She was trying to imagine what could come next.
She told me she had no desire to become “a poor immigrant living off social support at the age of 50.” If she could sell enough art, she said, she might be able to buy a small home in Italy.
Then came the sentence that stripped away the humour.
“This is the pain of war in Ukraine.”
I never heard from her again.
I do not know what happened afterwards. I do not know where she is now, whether she returned to Ukraine, remained elsewhere in Europe or eventually found the small home she imagined. Silence does not permit conclusions.
So I will not invent one.
I continue to hope that she and her family are safe.
Her absence changed the way I think about the art that once passed between us. A painting can survive while the network of people surrounding it is scattered. The dealer disappears from your inbox. The gallery closes. The collector relocates. The artist works somewhere else. An archive becomes inaccessible.
The object remains, but the world that gave it meaning can be fractured.
That fracture is no longer abstract.
As of 29 July 2026, UNESCO had confirmed damage to 545 cultural sites in Ukraine, including 43 museums, 22 libraries and five archives, alongside religious sites, monuments, archaeological sites and hundreds of buildings of historical or artistic interest. The figure forms part of UNESCO’s preliminary damage assessment, based on reported incidents cross-checked against multiple credible sources.
In May 2026 alone, UNESCO reported severe damage to more than ten cultural institutions following strikes in the Kyiv region. The following month, it reported significant damage to the exterior and interior of the Dormition Cathedral within the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, part of a UNESCO World Heritage property.
These numbers matter, but numbers have limitations.
A museum is not only a building. A library is not simply shelves. An archive is not a collection of paper.
Each depends upon continuity: someone catalogued the object, someone preserved the document, someone taught the history, someone opened the building in the morning, someone brought a child inside for the first time.
Cultural destruction damages those chains of transmission.
This is why Children Reading has stayed with me.
Guyetsky did not paint a monument. He painted transmission itself.
A child bends over a book because somebody preserved the language in which it was written. Somebody printed it. Somebody taught the child to read. Knowledge has travelled across time and arrived in a pair of hands.
War can interrupt that journey.
On 26 March 2022, one month after the full-scale invasion began, I joined thousands of people in central London for the London Stands with Ukraine march and vigil. We walked from Park Lane towards Trafalgar Square in a procession of blue and yellow. I marched with my friend Dr Paul Bilokon, a Ukrainian-born academic and writer.
At the time, the scale of what lay ahead was impossible to know. What could be carried from Ukraine into that London crowd were its colours, its names, its stories and the presence of Ukrainians themselves. Solidarity could not protect a museum or stop a missile, but it could participate in another form of transmission: refusing to allow a people confronting war to become distant or abstract.
Cultural preservation asks something similar of us. A painting cannot restore a destroyed home. An archive cannot return a person who has been killed. Supporting an artist cannot undo displacement. Yet human beings do not live by survival alone. We inherit languages, images, songs, buildings, rituals, books and stories that tell us something about who came before us and where we belong.
When those things are destroyed, something more than property disappears.
This is where collectors, museums, galleries, curators, scholars and dealers acquire responsibilities that extend beyond the market.
An artwork purchased from an artist living through conflict may provide income. An exhibition can preserve visibility. Documentation can protect provenance and memory. Museums can safeguard objects displaced by danger. Scholars can record histories that war threatens to fragment.
None of these acts should be romanticised as rescue. Culture is not preserved by outsiders alone, and Ukrainian artists and cultural workers are not passive recipients waiting to be saved. They have continued the work of documentation, conservation, creation and rebuilding themselves, often under extraordinary conditions.
There is another danger in speaking about art during war: the temptation to make destruction beautiful.
Ruins photograph well.
A shattered museum can become an arresting image. A painter working beside a damaged building can easily be turned into a symbol of heroic resilience. The language of art can aestheticise suffering before we realise what we are doing.
Resilience is real, but nobody should have to become resilient because their home has been bombed.
The responsibility is therefore not to romanticise destruction, but to preserve evidence of what existed before it, what survived it and what people continued to create within it.
This brings me back to Guyetsky.
Children Reading was painted in 1940. The children do not know what the viewer knows about the century unfolding around them. They are occupied by the book before them.
That ordinary concentration now seems precious.
A child reading is participating in cultural memory without needing to know the phrase. Something created before them has reached them. They receive it, and one day they may carry it further.
This is how culture survives most of the time: not spectacularly, but through transmission.
A painting passes from one pair of hands to another. A story is repeated. An archive is protected. A language is taught. A museum reopens. An artist continues working.
And sometimes a dealer drives from country to country carrying whatever fragments of her former life she can still hold.
I still think about her.
I think about the humour of the “party frog,” the small house in Italy she hoped she might one day afford, the husband and brother she had left behind, and the paintings she had spent years trying to place into the world.
I do not know where she is.
That uncertainty belongs to the essay because war creates precisely these unfinished stories.
There is no conclusion I can responsibly give her life.
There is only the last thing she told me:
“This is the pain of war in Ukraine.”
And there is Guyetsky’s painting.
More than eighty years after he painted them, the children are still reading.
