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UNESCO Recommends Placing Kyiv, Lviv On Endangered Heritage List

A pedestrian walks past the Bell Tower (C) of St Sophia's Cathedral (Back right) in central Kyiv on November 25, 2022. © Bulent KIlic, AFP
A pedestrian walks past the Bell Tower (C) of St Sophia's Cathedral (Back right) in central Kyiv on November 25, 2022. © Bulent KIlic, AFP
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UNESCO Recommends Placing Kyiv, Lviv On Endangered Heritage List

A pedestrian walks past the Bell Tower (C) of St Sophia's Cathedral (Back right) in central Kyiv on November 25, 2022. © Bulent KIlic, AFP
A pedestrian walks past the Bell Tower (C) of St Sophia's Cathedral (Back right) in central Kyiv on November 25, 2022. © Bulent KIlic, AFP

Kyiv's Saint Sophia Cathedral and the historical center of western Ukrainian city Lviv should join UNESCO's list of World Heritage sites in danger due to the Russian invasion, a senior official at the UN body said Tuesday.

"These sites are threatened with destruction. There have been attacks on the buffer zones around these sites and we don't know what will happen in the future," the head of the World Heritage programme Lazare Eloundou told AFP in Paris.

The World Heritage Committee, set to meet from September 10-25 in Riyadh, will "likely" make the decision "based on experts' opinion" that the sites are "demonstrably in danger", Eloundou added.

The center of Ukrainian port city Odesa is already on the list of endangered World Heritage sites, and several of its buildings were destroyed in late July in what UNESCO described at the time as a "brazen" attack.

Another historic building was bombed in Lviv in early July, with the UN body saying it was the first strike on an area protected by the World Heritage Convention and the first "violation" by Russia of the text since its invasion.

UNESCO has tallied damage to 270 Ukrainian cultural sites since Moscow's tanks rolled into Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

Along with Kyiv Pechersk Lavra monastery, the Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv's historic center is "one of the major monuments representing the architectural and the monumental art of the early 11th century", UNESCO says on its website.

They have been on the World Heritage list since 1990, while Lviv's medieval center was added in 1996.

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Hong Kong Museum Puts Picasso in Cross-cultural Dialogue

Artworks by Pablo Picasso are pictured during the media preview of 'Picasso for Asia: A Conversation' at M+ in Hong Kong. May JAMES / AFP
Artworks by Pablo Picasso are pictured during the media preview of 'Picasso for Asia: A Conversation' at M+ in Hong Kong. May JAMES / AFP
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Hong Kong Museum Puts Picasso in Cross-cultural Dialogue

Artworks by Pablo Picasso are pictured during the media preview of 'Picasso for Asia: A Conversation' at M+ in Hong Kong. May JAMES / AFP
Artworks by Pablo Picasso are pictured during the media preview of 'Picasso for Asia: A Conversation' at M+ in Hong Kong. May JAMES / AFP

More than a century ago, Pablo Picasso smashed the Sacre-Coeur Basilica in Paris into a web of tangled lines on his canvas, deconstructing reality with the brushstrokes of a master cubist.
At a Hong Kong exhibition opening Saturday, that painting will be shown alongside a more literal form of destruction -- a "gunpowder drawing" by Chinese-born artist Cai Guo-Qiang -- as part of a cross-cultural exchange, AFP said.
"Interest in (Picasso's) life and work hasn't subsided at all, including in Asia" in the half-century since his death, said Doryun Chong, artistic director and chief curator at the M+ museum.
The show will pair more than 60 masterpieces loaned from the Picasso Museum in Paris with around 130 works by Asian and Asian-diasporic artists.
Highlights include "Portrait of a Man" from Picasso's Blue Period, a 1937 horse head sketch for "Guernica" and "Massacre in Korea", a 1951 expressionist anti-war painting.
"Exhibitions on Picasso tend to be very monographic," said Chong, who co-curated the event.
"We felt that it's more productive for understanding Picasso... that we create these unexpected juxtapositions and dialogues."
Cecile Debray, president of the Picasso Museum in Paris, hailed the approach as being "decentered from the Western point of view".
The last major Picasso showcase in Hong Kong, a more straightforward affair, took place in 2012 and drew huge crowds.
In the intervening decade, Picasso's reputation has been dented by the #MeToo movement as critics decried his abusive treatment of wives and girlfriends.
"We are of course very open and honest about the rather disturbing aspects of his biography, but we also shouldn't let that determine the meanings of his whole career," Chong said.
Hong Kong officials have touted the four-month exhibition as part of "Art March", hoping that high-brow events at museums, fairs and auction houses can boost the city's international appeal.
Since opening in late 2021, M+ has seen more than eight million visitors -- a bright spot for Hong Kong's loss-making West Kowloon Cultural District.
Chong said the museum connects visual culture between Asia and the world, citing the example of how Picasso is placed next to self-taught local painter Luis Chan.
Chan, who drew ample inspiration from the Spanish master, was "of the older generation when formal training in art was not possible in Hong Kong".
"Still he felt connected to the center of the art world at the time in Paris, and the very important figure in that context (that is) Picasso."