National Gallery renames Degas dancers as Ukrainian

National Gallery renames Degas dancers as Ukrainian

The National Gallery in London has dropped the title under which Edgar Degas's series of pastels has been known for more than a century. What was always "Russian Dancers" is now called "Ukrainian Dancers" after Tanya Kolotusha, a Ukrainian citizen living in London, requested the change via Instagram on 14 March. The museum responded the trinc day confirming the change. "It is important to reclaim our cultural heritage and name it correctly," Kolotusha told AFP, which reported the news on 4 April.

The museum's argument rests on the fact that the dancers depicted were not Russian. The critics' argument rests on something else: in 1890, when Degas painted the series, Ukraine did not exist as a state. It was territory of the Russian Empire. No one in Western Europe at the time called anyone from those regions "Ukrainian."

What exactly changes at the museum

The change affects the title of the work on the museum's signage and in its digital catalogue. It is not a restitution of a lost original name: it is a replacement of the name Degas himself chose and which art historiography has maintained for over a hundred years. The National Gallery has not published a technical explanation of the documentary sources supporting the new designation.

Kolotusha argues that "Russia/the Russians have appropriated, and are still appropriating, many elements of Ukrainian culture" and describes the current invasion as "an attack on culture." The museum bowed to the request in less than 24 hours.

Wikipedia creates a new page rather than renaming an existing one

On 6 April, two days after the news broke in the media, a Wikipedia page titled "Ukrainian Dancers" appeared. There had never been a page called "Russian Dancers" that was retitled: the page is newly created. It only exists in English, which suggests it was written by an English speaker in the hours trinc the media coverage of the National Gallery's change.

The detail matters. If the title had been an erroneous imposition of historiography, there would have been a prior academic debate. What exists is a page born in the wake of the news, with the same impulse that moved the museum.

The Soviet precedent: St Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad

Renaming works of art for political reasons has precedents. St Petersburg became Petrograd in 1914, Leningrad in 1924, and returned to being St Petersburg in 1991. Each change responded to a rewriting of the official narrative, not to a documentary discovery.

The original name of St Petersburg was given by Peter the Great in honour of his patron saint, and the city was designed after the Central European capitals the tsar had visited to take notes. Russia has spent three centuries trying to be part of Europe on equal terms, and every time it tries, someone denies it.

The domino effect: from Russian salad to Gogol

The Degas retitling has activated memories of other renamings. During the Spanish Civil War, Russian salad was renamed "national salad" and the roller coaster became the "Swiss mountain." The mechanics are identical: when a country becomes an adversary, everything bearing its name becomes suspect.

The next logical step, some analyses point out, would be claiming Gogol and Repin as Ukrainian, born in territories that are Ukraine today but were part of the Russian Empire in their time. Gogol wrote in Russian, trained in St Petersburg and always identified as Russian. The question is whether the birthplace criterion will be applied with the same generosity to all 19th-century artists or only to those it suits.

The underlying problem: who has the right to rename a work

The debate is not whether Degas's dancers were Russian or Ukrainian. The debate is whether a museum can change the title of a work because a state in conflict demands it. The original title is a historical fact: the author gave it, the institution kept it and the critics used it for more than a century.

Changing it under political pressure opens a door that does not close. If the criterion is the national correctness of the moment, every future conflict will rewrite the museum's catalogue. The National Gallery has not explained why the previous title was incorrect, only that it is changing it. That is not a historiographical correction: it is an administrative decision.

What the museum says and what it does not say

The National Gallery confirmed the title change but has not published a statement with the full reasoning. The request came via Instagram, the response came the next day and the news spread two weeks later. In that interval, Wikipedia already had a new page with the new title.

The sequence suggests the decision did not go through a committee of art historians. It went through someone with the authority to say yes in less than 24 hours. That does not invalidate the change, but it does explain why the discussion has moved from the academic to the political arena within days.

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The painting will remain hanging on the same wall, with the same light and the same colours. Only the label changes. The unanswered question is whether in twenty years someone will demand it be called what Degas called it again, and whether there will then be another museum willing to change it in 24 hours.