The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival 9780271082578

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The Icon and the Square

Maria Taroutina

THE ICON AND THE SQUARE Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

This book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​ Publication Data Names: Taroutina, Maria, author. Title: The icon and the square : Russian modernism and the Russo-​ Byzantine revival / Maria Taroutina. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Charts the rediscovery and rigorous reassessment of the medieval Russo-​Byzantine artistic tradition in Russia in the years 1860–1920. Explores the link between Byzantine revivalism and modernist experimentation, which ultimately made a significant and lasting impact on twentieth-​century avant-​garde movements”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: lccn 2018007213 | isbn 9780271081045 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Art, Russian—19th century. | Art, Russian—20th century. | Art, Modern—Byzantine influences. | Modernism (Art)— Russia. | Art, Byzantine—Influence. Classification: lcc n6987 .t37 2018 | ddc 709​.47​/09034—dc23 lc record available at https://​lccn​.loc​ .gov​/2018007213

Copyright © 2018 Maria Taroutina All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-​free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992. Additional credits: page ii, Vasily Kandinsky, Concentric Circles, 1913 (fig. 91); page v, Mikhail Vrubel, Annunciation, 1884 (fig. 39); page vii, Mikhail Vrubel, Six-​Winged Seraph (Azrael), 1904 (fig. 59); page xii, Kazimir Malevich, Self-​Portrait, 1933 (fig. 111); page xvi, Jean-​Joseph Benjamin-​ Constant, The Empress Theodora at the Coliseum, 1889 (fig. 9); page 12, Andrei Rublev, Virgin of Vladimir, fifteenth century (fig. 28); page 58, Saints Boris and Gleb, fourteenth century (fig. 30); page 96, Angels, Last Judgment, twelfth century (fig. 43); page 136, The Fiery Ascension of the Prophet Elijah, fifteenth century (fig. 77); page 178, Vladimir Tatlin, Painterly Relief, 1913–14 (fig. 105); page 218, Natalia Goncharova, Religious Composition: Virgin (with Ornament), 1910 (fig. 73); page 224, Mikhail Vrubel, Lamentation i, 1887 (fig. 51); page 250, Aleksei Afanasiev, Saints John the Apostle and James the Great, 1894–97 (fig. 108).

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations  vii Acknowledgments xiii Note on Transliteration, Translation, and Dates  xv

Introduction 1

1 Byzantium Reconsidered: Revivalism, Avant-Gardism, and the New Art Criticism  13

2 From Constantinople to Moscow and St. Petersburg: Museums, Exhibitions, and Private Collections 59

3 Angels Becoming Demons: Mikhail Vrubel’s Modernist Beginnings 97

4 Vasily Kandinsky’s Iconic Subconscious and the Search for the Spiritual in Art  137

5 Toward a New Icon: Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, and the Cult of Nonobjectivity  179 Epilogue 219 Notes 225 Selected Bibliography  251 Index 261

Illustrations

1. Andrei Rublev, Old Testament Trinity, 1425–27. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  14 2. Simon Ushakov, Old Testament Trinity, 1671. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  15 3. Andrei Voronikhin, Kazan Cathedral, St. Petersburg, 1801–18. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  16 4. Ivan Martos, Saint John the Baptist, 1804–7. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  17 5. Vladimir Borovikovsky, Saint Catherine, 1804–9. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  18 6. Karl Briullov, Assumption of the Virgin, 1836– 42. Photo © 2017, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. 19 7. Koimesis, 1105–6. Fresco. Church of Panagia Phorbiotissa, Asinou, Cyprus. Photo © 2017, A. Dagli Orti / SCALA, Florence.  20 8. Vladimir Borovikovsky, Royal Doors with Christ, the Virgin, the Archangel Gabriel and the Four Evangelists, 1804–9. Photo: Bridgeman Images. 21 9. Jean-​Joseph Benjamin-​Constant, The Empress Theodora at the Coliseum, 1889. Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images.  24 10. Vasilii Smirnov, The Morning Visit of a Byzantine Empress to the Graves of Her Ancestors, 1889. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  27 11. Detail of Vasilii Smirnov, The Morning Visit of a Byzantine Empress to the Graves of Her Ancestors, 1889. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  28 12. Lunette Mosaic of Saint Lawrence, fifth century, Galla Placidia Mausoleum, Ravenna. Photo: De Agostini Picture Library / A. Dagli Orti / Bridgeman Images.  28

13. Detail of Vasilii Smirnov, The Morning Visit of a Byzantine Empress to the Graves of Her Ancestors, 1889. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  29 14. Mosaic of Apostles with Fountain of Life, fifth century, Galla Placidia Mausoleum, Ravenna. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  29 15. Detail of Vasilii Smirnov, The Morning Visit of a Byzantine Empress to the Graves of Her Ancestors, 1889. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  30 16. Detail of Mosaic of Empress Theodora and Her Retinue, sixth-​century, Church of San Vitale, Ravenna. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  30 17. Constantine Thon, Cathedral of Christ the Savior, Moscow, 1837–82. Photo: Calmann & King Ltd. / Bridgeman Images.  32 18. Iakov Kapkov, Metropolitan Alexis Healing the Tatar Queen Taidula of Blindness While Dzhanibeg Looks On, 1840. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  35 19. Dionysius and workshop, Metropolitan Alexis Healing the Tatar Queen Taidula of Blindness, detail of Metropolitan Alexis Vita Icon, 1480. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  36 20. Grigorii Gagarin, murals of the Betania Monastery, from Le Caucase pittoresque, 1847. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  37 21. Interior view of the Cathedral of St. Vladimir, Kiev, 1862–82. Photo: Galina Mardilovich.  40 22. Prerestoration photograph of Andrei Rublev’s Old Testament Trinity with its revetment, 1904. 62 23. Prerestoration photograph of Andrei Rublev’s Old Testament Trinity without its revetment, 1904. 63

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24. Vasilii Vereshchagin, A Room in Alexander Basilewsky’s Residence in Paris, 1870. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  65 25. Saint Theodore the Dragon Slayer, thirteenth century. Photo © The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. 66 26. Installation view of Christian antiquities in the Russian Museum of His Imperial Majesty Alexander III, 1898. Photo © 2017, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.  69 27. Christ Pantocrator, 1363. Photo: The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.  70 28. Andrei Rublev, Virgin of Vladimir, fifteenth century. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  70 29. Installation view of the Novgorod Icon Chamber in the Russian Museum of His Imperial Majesty Alexander III, 1914. Photo © 2017, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.  72 30. Saints Boris and Gleb, fourteenth century. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  73 31. Saint John the Evangelist and Prochorus, from the Zaraisk Gospel, 1401, fol. 157v. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  74 32. The Pashkov House, Moscow, 1784–86.  75 33. Vladimir Sherwood and Anatolii Semenov, Approved Design of the Historical Museum Building, 1875. Photo: Russian State Library, Moscow / Bridgeman Images.  80 34. Emperor Leo VI Prostrated Before Christ Pantocrator, 1880s, restored 1986–2002. Photo © The State Historical Museum, Moscow.  81 35. Saint George, eleventh century. Photo © The State Historical Museum, Moscow.  82 36. The Battle of Novgorod with Suzdal, 1880s, restored 1986–2002. Photo © The State Historical Museum, Moscow.  83 37. Alabaster figures of prophets and peacocks, 1880s, restored 1986–2002. Vladimir Room, State Historical Museum, Moscow.  84

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Illustrations

38. Mikhail Vrubel, Angels’ Lamentation, 1884. Photo © The Museum of St. Cyril’s Church, Kiev. 98 39. Mikhail Vrubel, Annunciation, 1884.  100 40. The Virgin Mary, eleventh-​century mosaic, St. Sophia Cathedral, Kiev. Photo: Bridgeman Images. 100 41. Annunciation, late twelfth century. Photo: De Agostini Picture Library / Bridgeman Images. 101 42. Mikhail Vrubel, Two Angels with Labara, 1884. Photo © The Museum of St. Cyril’s Church, Kiev. 102 43. Angels, detail of Last Judgment, twelfth-​century mosaic, Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello, Venice. Photo: Mondadori Portfolio / Archivio Magliani / Mauro Magliani & Barbara Piovan / Bridgeman Images.  103 44. Mikhail Vrubel, A Man in a Russian Old-​ Style Costume, 1886. Photo © 2017, SCALA, Florence. 104 45. Christ Pantocrator with Archangels, eleventh century, St. Sophia Cathedral, Kiev. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  105 46. Mikhail Vrubel, Seated Demon, 1890. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  106 47. Detail of Mikhail Vrubel, Seated Demon, 1890. Photo: author.  107 48. Mikhail Vrubel, Portrait of Savva Mamontov, 1897. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  108 49. Reproductions of Paul Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-​ Victoire and Mikhail’s Vrubel’s Demon Looking at a Dale. 109 50. Viktor Vasnetsov, Holy Trinity, 1907. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  111 51. Mikhail Vrubel, Lamentation i, 1887. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  115 52. Detail of Mikhail Vrubel, Lamentation ii, 1887. Photo © 2017, SCALA, Florence.  116

53. Mikhail Vrubel, Study for the Virgin, 1884. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  119 54. Mikhail Vrubel, Head of Demon, 1890. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  119 55. Mikhail Vrubel, Head of an Angel, 1887, or Head of the Demon, 1890. Photo: Bridgeman Images. 120 56. Mikhail Vrubel, The Standing Demon (also known as Seraph), 1904. Photo © 2017, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.  121 57. Mikhail Vrubel, Demon Cast Down, 1902. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  122 58. Mikhail Vrubel, Head of John the Baptist, 1905. Photo © 2017, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. 123 59. Mikhail Vrubel, Six-​Winged Seraph (Azrael), 1904. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  124 60. Detail of Mikhail Vrubel, Six-​Winged Seraph (Azrael), 1904. Photo: author.  125 61. Mikhail Vrubel, The Vision of the Prophet Ezekiel, 1905. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  126 62. Mikhail Larionov, Blue Rayonism (Portrait of a Fool), 1912. © ADAGP, Paris, 2017. Photo © Leonard Hutton Galleries, New York.  127 63. Vasilii Polenov, Moscow Courtyard, 1878. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  129 64. Gustave Caillebotte, Paris: A Rainy Day, 1877. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  129 65. Naum Gabo, Head No. 2 (1916), enlarged version, 1964. The Work of Naum Gabo © Nina & Graham Williams. Photo © 2017, Album / SCALA, Florence.  132 66. Mikhail Vrubel, Head of a Lion, 1891. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  133 67. Mikhail Vrubel, Eastern Tale, 1886. Photo: State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow / Bridgeman Images. 134 68. Gabriele Münter, Vasily Kandinsky at His Desk in His Apartment at 36 Ainmillerstraße,

Munich, June 1911. Photo: Gabriele Münter- und Johannes Eichner-​Stiftung, Munich.  140 69. Vasily Kandinsky, The Blessing of the Bread, 1889. Photo: State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.  141 70. Vasily Kandinsky, Untitled, 1906–7. Photo: Gabriele Münter- und Johannes Eichner-​ Stiftung, Munich.  142 71. Isaiah’s Prayer with Dawn, from the Paris Psalter, tenth century, fol. 435v. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.  143 72. Vasily Kandinsky, Colorful Life (Motley Life), 1907. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  145 73. Natalia Goncharova, Religious Composition: Virgin (with Ornament), 1910. © ADAGP, Paris, 2017. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  150 74. Saint George and the Dragon, nineteenth century. Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-​ CCI, Dist. RMN-​Grand Palais. Droits réservés. 155 75. Vasily Kandinsky, In the Black Square, 1923. Photo: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Art Resource, New York.  155 76. Vasily Kandinsky, Yellow-​Red-​Blue, 1925. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  156 77. The Fiery Ascension of the Prophet Elijah, Novgorod icon, fifteenth century. Photo © Bibliotekar.ru. 157 78. Vasily Kandinsky, All Saints i, 1911. Photo: Peter Willi / Bridgeman Images.  158 79. Vasily Kandinsky, All Saints ii, 1911. Photo: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.  159 80. Vasily Kandinsky, Red Spot ii, 1921. Photo: De Agostini Picture Library / Bridgeman Images. 160 81. Vasily Kandinsky, Impression iv (Gendarme), 1911. Photo: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. 161 82. Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, fifteenth century. Photo © State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.  162

Illustrations

ix

83. Vasily Kandinsky, Last Judgment, undated. Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-​CCI, Dist. RMN-​ Grand Palais. Droits réservés.  163 84. Detail of Last Judgment, seventeenth-​century fresco, St. Sophia Cathedral, Vologda. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  164 85. Detail of Last Judgment, seventeenth-​century fresco, St. Sophia Cathedral, Vologda. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  164 86. Vasily Kandinsky, Composition v, 1911. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  164 87. Detail of Vasily Kandinsky, All Saints i, 1911. Photo: Peter Willi / Bridgeman Images.  165 88. Detail of Vasily Kandinsky, Yellow-​Red-​Blue, 1925. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  165 89. Last Judgment, Novgorod icon, sixteenth century. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  166 90. Vasily Kandinsky, Composition vii, 1913. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  167 91. Vasily Kandinsky, Concentric Circles, 1913. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  168 92. Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915. Photo: author. 180 93. Posledniaia futuristicheskaia vystavka kartin 0,10 (nol’-desiat’) (Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10 [Zero-​Ten]), Khudozhestvennoe Buro, Petrograd, December 1915–January 1916. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  181 94. Vladimir Tatlin, Corner Counter-​Relief, 1914–15. Photo © St. Petersburg State Archive of Cinema, Photo, and Sound Documents.  181 95. Vladimir Tatlin, Corner Counter-​Relief, 1914–15. Photo © St. Petersburg State Archive of Cinema, Photo, and Sound Documents.  182 96. Lef Zak, Parody of a Kazimir Malevich Painting, 1908–9. Photo © RGALI.  185 97. Kazimir Malevich, Self-​Portrait (Sketch for a Fresco Painting), 1907. Photo: Bridgeman Images. 186

x

Illustrations

98. Vladimir Tatlin, Sailor, 1911. Photo: Bridgeman Images. 187 99. The Heavenly Ladder of Saint John Climacus, twelfth century. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  188 100. Vladimir Tatlin, Female Model (Nude 1: Composition Based on a Female Nude), 1913. Photo: Sputnik / Bridgeman Images.  189 101. Vladimir Tatlin, Seated Figure, 1913. Photo © RGALI. 190 102. Natalia Goncharova, The Savior in Majesty, 1917–18. © ADAGP, Paris, 2017. Photo: State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.  192 103. Henri Matisse, Spanish Still Life, 1910. © Succession H. Matisse. Photo: Bridgeman Images. 193 104. Vladimir Tatlin, Composition-​Analysis, 1913. Photo © Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. 194 105. Vladimir Tatlin, Painterly Relief, 1913–14. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  195 106. Vladimir Tatlin, Study of Apostle Thomas on the Cupola of the Church of St. George, Staraia Ladoga, 1905–10. Photo © 2017, SCALA, Florence. 201 107. Apostle Thomas, twelfth-​century fresco, Church of St. George, Staraia Ladoga. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  202 108. Aleksei Afanasiev, Saints John the Apostle and James the Great, 1894–97. Photo: author.  203 109. Deceased Kazimir Malevich in the funeral hall, May 17, 1935. Photo © 2017, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.  210 110. Kazimir Malevich, Suprematism: Self-​Portrait in Two Dimensions, 1915. Photo: Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.  212 111. Kazimir Malevich, Self-​Portrait, 1933. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  214 112. Virgin Hodegetria of Smolensk, ca. 1450. Photo: Bridgeman Images.  215

113. Nikolai Suetin, Train Car with UNOVIS Symbol en Route to the Exhibition in Moscow, 1920. © Nikolaj Mihailovic Suetin / BILD-​KUNST, Bonn–SACK, Seoul, 2017. Photo © 2017, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.  216 114. Pussy Riot performing “Punk Prayer: Mother of God, Drive Putin Away!,” February 21, 2012, Moscow. Photo © ITAR-​TASS.  220

115. Alexander Kosolapov, Caviar Icon, 1996. © 2017, Alexander Kosolapov / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow / Bridgeman Images.  222

Illustrations

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Acknowledgments

The publication of this book would not have been possible without the generous support of a number of different individuals and institutions. As is the case with many first books, work on this project began during my graduate-​school years in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University. Accordingly, I am grateful to the faculty and graduate students of the department for providing a rigorous, vibrant, and intellectually rich environment, in which this text was first conceived and elaborated. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my two dissertation advisors, Tim Barringer and David Joselit, whose generosity, attentiveness, and continued support have benefited me far beyond the course of my graduate studies. I am likewise deeply indebted to Robert S. Nelson for his sagacious guidance, unfailing good counsel, and sustained attention to my work. I am especially thankful for his thoughtful and constructive reading of the final manuscript in its entirety. Molly Brunson has been an inspiring interlocutor, guide, and mentor in the field of Russian art, both at Yale and beyond. Finally, I must thank the two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, whose incisive and penetrating comments have both deepened and enriched the present work. I have been privileged to be part of a small international community of exceptionally gifted and creative scholars of Russian art, whose collective interest in and feedback on my work has helped me to develop my ideas and research in exciting new directions. In particular, I would like to mention Rosalind Polly Blakesley, Wendy Salmond, Jane Sharp, Galina Mardilovich, Margaret Samu, Aglaya Glebova,

Kristin Romberg, Maria Mileeva, Alison Hilton, Louise Hardiman, Nicola Kozicharow, Myroslava Mudrak, Allison Leigh, and Maria Gough. I am likewise fortunate to have found a stimulating academic milieu at Yale-​NUS College in Singapore, where a number of attentive and spirited colleagues have offered advice, guidance, and support throughout the writing process. I am especially thankful to Mira Seo, Jessica Hanser, Robin Hemley, Nicholas Tolwinski, Sarah Weiss, Andrew Hui, Nozomi Naoi, Pattaratorn Chirapravati, and Rajeev Patke. In Russia, I am grateful to these institutions for facilitating my research: the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the State Historical Museum, the State Hermitage Museum, the State Russian Museum, the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, the Russian State Library, and the Federal State Cultural Establishment Artistic and Literary Museum–Reserve Abramtsevo. Special thanks are also due to the following individuals for their invaluable help with obtaining images: Marina Ivanova, Vera Kessenich, Zhana Etsina, Eteri Tsuladze, Vyacheslav Kornienko, Marta Koscielniak, and Giulia Leali. I would also like to acknowledge the staff at Pennsylvania State University Press for their superb assistance throughout the publication process. The executive editor, Eleanor Goodman, has enthusiastically supported this project from the very beginning, and it has been an absolute pleasure to work with her at every stage. Cali Buckley and Hannah Hebert have lent valuable help throughout the production process. I am likewise exceedingly grateful to Keith

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Monley for his meticulous, attentive, and sensitive copyediting of the manuscript and to Matthew Williams for his design and production expertise. The completion and publication of this book would not have been possible without the generous funding provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Georgette Chen Trust, and Yale-​NUS College. Portions of this material have appeared in the following publications: Byzantium/Modernism: The Byzantine as Method in Modernity, ed. Roland Betancourt and Maria Taroutina (Leiden: Brill, 2015); “From Angels to Demons: Mikhail Vrubel and the Search for a Modernist Idiom,” in Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art, ed. Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow (Cambridge: Open Book, 2017); “Second Rome or Seat of Savagery: The Case of Byzantium in Nineteenth-​Century European Imaginaries,” in Civilisation and Nineteenth-​Century Art: A European Concept in Global Context, ed. David O’Brien (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016); and “Iconic Encounters: Vasily Kandinsky’s and Pavel Florensky’s ‘Mystic Productivism,’ ” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 7, no. 1 (March 2016): 55–65. My heartfelt thanks to a wonderful group of steadfast and devoted friends, whose kindness, warmth, and good humor have enriched my life over the years that I have been at work on this book, especially Sarah Karmazin, Jeanne-​Marie Jackson, Tatsiana Zhurauliova, Lauren Turner, Vanessa Cervantes, Roland Betancourt, Jorge Gomez-​Tejada, Tomasz Siergiejuk, and Marta Herschkopf.

xiv

Acknowledgments

Finally, and most importantly, I must thank my family. Without their love, unconditional faith, and moral support, this book would never have been written. I am grateful to my parents-​in-​law, Denis and Ghislaine Pitard, for their kind encouragement and sincere interest in my work. My remarkably energetic grandmother, Antonina Rogailina, not only tracked down rare books and manuscripts in Russia but also contacted archivists and curators on my behalf, facilitating the progress of this project in a way that few grandmothers probably could. I would also like to acknowledge my late grandparents, Vladimir Konko, Alla Taroutina, and Mikhail Rogailin, whose passion for the arts continues to reinforce my own dedication to the discipline of art history. Most of all, I thank my parents, Igor and Evgenia Taroutina, to whom I owe not just my life but every possible academic, professional, and personal success. Words cannot express my profound gratitude for their never-​ending patience, love, and understanding, and especially for their numerous sacrifices in support of my academic goals and aspirations. I would also like to recognize Genelyn Manderico, whose valuable work enables my own. Last, I thank Josselin, Michel-​Eugene, and Juana, who never take me too seriously and who fill my life with sunshine, warmth, and endless laughter. My family continually reminds me to write for a wider audience beyond the academe, and so this book is for them.

Note on Transliteration, Translation, and Dates

In the interest of readability and familiarity, this book uses a modified form of the Library of Congress system of transliteration. I generally omit diacritical marks and yer signs except in the titles of Russian publications listed in the reference notes. I use ii and yi at the end of proper names except in cases of commonly established spellings, such as Kandinsky, Florensky, and Tolstoy (instead of Kandinskii, Florenskii, and Tolstoi). I likewise use familiar English variants of place names, first names, and the names of rulers, for example Moscow instead of

Moskva, Alexander instead of Aleksandr, and Nicholas I instead Nikolai I. The dates of artworks, exhibitions, important historical events, and the reigns of different rulers are included in parentheses on first mention, as are the birth and death dates of key individuals. All dates conform to the postrevolutionary Gregorian calendar. Unless otherwise stated, all Russian and French translations are my own. When quoting existing translations, I have sometimes made slight modifications in the interests of clarity and precision.

xv

INTRODUCTION

In 1910 the Russian artist, critic, and art historian Alexander Benois (1870–1960) proclaimed that “one way or another, all new artists are guilty of Byzantinism”—a trend that, according to him, was neither isolated nor localized, but signaled a widespread “turning point” in the artistic culture of the early twentieth century. Singling out Henri Matisse as one of the most important pioneers of “Byzantinism,” Benois wrote: “Matisse develops mistakes and blunders into a system, a theory. . . . A return to ‘correct’ design, to ‘accurate’ coloration, is no longer possible for him. Any such return would be a compromise.” For Benois, the term “Byzantinism” signified not only a particular set of modernist pictorial values, which he identified as a “simplified style, monumentality, and primitive decorativeness,” but also a new theory of art that firmly rejected the slightest hints of representational illusionism as an aesthetic “compromise.”1 Benois’s deployment of the word “Byzantinism” can be interpreted in two ways: either as a convenient metaphor or historical analogy for “modernism” or as a genuine (mis)reading of Byzantine goals and aesthetics as anachronistically protomodern. In any

case, he was not alone in equating “Byzantinism” with modernist painting. Only two years before him, Roger Fry had similarly described the Postimpressionist works of Signac, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Cézanne as “proto-​Byzantine,” articulating a cyclical—rather than a teleological—theory of artistic development. He argued that Impressionism has existed before, in the Roman art of the Empire, and it too was followed, as I believe inevitably, by a movement similar to that observable in the Neo-​ Impressionists—we may call it for convenience Byzantinism. In the mosaics of Sta Maria Maggiore . . . one can see something of this transformation from Impressionism in the original work to Byzantinism in subsequent restorations. It is probably a mistake to suppose, as is usually done, that Byzantinism was due to a loss of the technical ability to be realistic, consequent upon barbarian invasions. In the Eastern Empire there was never any loss of technical skill; indeed, nothing could surpass the perfection of some Byzantine craftsmanship. Byzantinism was the necessary outcome of Impressionism, a necessary and inevitable reaction from it.2

1

Modern art was thus understood by Benois and Fry as an essentially Byzantine revival, one that had intentionally shifted the representational paradigm, much like Byzantine art had done centuries before. This definition of modernism significantly departs from conventional accounts of the subject, which have largely prevailed to this day. According to these narratives, Edouard Manet and the Impressionists inaugurated a distinctive new style in painting in the 1860s and 1870s as a direct response to the changing fabric of everyday life and especially to transformations in the urban landscape and in middle-​class leisure. The defining characteristic of this novel modern art was a progressively self-​ conscious emphasis on its own materiality and the two-​dimensionality of the canvas. Clement Greenberg famously professed that Manet’s became the first Modernist pictures by virtue of the frankness with which they declared the flat surfaces on which they were painted. The Impressionists, in Manet’s wake, abjured underpainting and glazes, to leave the eye under no doubt as to the fact that the colors they used were made of paint that came from tubes or pots. . . . It was the stressing of the ineluctable flatness of the surface that remained, however, more fundamental than anything else to the processes by which pictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism.3

By contrast, the early twentieth-​century Russian theorists Nikolai Punin (1888–1953) and Nikolai Tarabukin (1889–1956) argued that Manet and the Impressionists marked the “end” of the “whole tradition of European art,” instead of a new beginning, since their practice was still essentially rooted in the naturalist transcription of external reality, a project that began during the Italian Renaissance.4 For them,

2

The Icon and the Square

Manet’s Olympia was nothing more than a modernist revision of Titian’s Venus of Urbino, rather than a complete rejection of that representational paradigm tout court. Describing the Renaissance as a bankrupt tradition, Punin pessimistically observed in 1913 that “since the fall of the Byzantine Empire . . . European painting had slowly and gradually edged toward its demise. . . . Manet, Monet, Degas, Renoir . . . this entire mass of international artists, this entire school of followers—[is] an enormous procession of the dead.”5 One explanation for this negative view was the absence of a historical Renaissance in Russia, which meant that the nation’s artists and critics had to identify a different artistic “golden age” that they could claim as their cultural patrimony. Furthermore, the external markers of modernity that were so ubiquitous in Paris in the aftermath of Hauss­ mannization were much less pronounced in Moscow and St. Petersburg. By the close of the nineteenth century, Russia was significantly underindustrialized in comparison to the other Great Powers. The country’s population was still largely agrarian, and despite increasing urban development, the growth in Moscow and St. Petersburg could not compete with the dizzying proliferation of arcades, department stores, street cafés, bars, and cabarets that were so prevalent in other European capitals. As a consequence, several scholars have characterized Russian modernism as an exemplary case of “alternative modernity,” which neither protested nor retreated from the modern world, but instead recast it “as a new, spiritual age.”6 Thus, for example, in her study of Silver Age poetry, Martha M. F. Kelly astutely observes that, “in Russia’s case, modernism often takes on the aspect of a neo-​religious model of modernity,” and the writings of poets such as Alexander Blok, Mikhail Kuzmin, and Anna Akhmatova

actively fuse “the legacy of the Western humanities” with the “ritual and insight” of Russian Orthodoxy—a combination that the authors believed could “restore the fractured body of modern society.”7 In the realm of the visual arts, critics such as Benois, Punin, and Tarabukin looked equally to Byzantium and to Russia’s Orthodox heritage as models of visuality and systems of thought alternative to and distinct from the cultural heritage of western Europe, models that they believed possessed the capacity to revitalize the hackneyed image world of modernity. For young Russian artists, not only did Byzantine and medieval Russian art provide a pictorial alternative to the pervasive salon painting still propagated by the European academies, but it also offered a formal and conceptual genealogy different from that of ascending French modernism, which in turn allowed the emergent Russian avant-​garde to lay claim to complete originality and independence from its European contemporaries and—by extension—to avoid the damning accusation of “derivativeness.” Indeed, following Matisse’s visit to Moscow in 1911, Russian commentators repeatedly claimed that the Frenchman had come to Russia to learn about modernism—especially from the country’s medieval art—rather than to explain or expound on modernist practices to Russian audiences.8 More importantly, the Byzantine visual tradition offered artists, beyond purely pictorial affinities, new ontological, phenomenological, and philosophical possibilities for refiguring the modern artwork. Accordingly, moving beyond the examination of strictly stylistic influence or art-​historical tendencies, The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-​Byzantine Revival analyzes a dense network of theological, political, aesthetic, and revivalist ideas and motivations, as well as the discursive spaces and artistic praxes that they engendered.

The term “Russo-​Byzantine” is itself a cultural construction and for that reason is a fluid and multivalent designation. In the late nineteenth century scholars such as Nikodim Kondakov (1844–1925) and Dmitrii Ainalov (1862–1939) used this term with reference to a type of medieval art and architecture that was produced on Russian soil but manifested “complete subjection to the Byzantine style.”9 Accordingly, in his various publications, Kondakov went to great lengths to distinguish between “Byzantine,” “Russo-​Byzantine,” and purely “Russian” pictorial languages, carefully attending to the minute variations in style and iconography. By contrast, during Nicholas I’s reign (1825–55), the term “Russo-​Byzantine” was applied to a hybrid revivalist style, in nineteenth-​century architecture and design, that drew on both Byzantine and medieval Russian prototypes. Popularized by architects such as Constantine Thon (1794–1881) and artists such as Timofei Neff and Fedor Solntsev (1801– 1892), this style was interchangeably referred to as “Byzantine,” “Neo-​Byzantine,” “Russo-​Byzantine,” and even “Neo-​Russian” throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, thus demonstrating the porous nature of these categories. More generally, the rediscoveries of Byzantium and medieval Rus could be said to constitute two sides of the same coin, which fit into the broader transnational category of romantic medieval revivalism that spread through Europe in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. As a result, in multiple instances interest in Byzantium tended to stimulate and perpetuate interest in medieval Rus and vice versa.10 However, by the opening decades of the twentieth century and in no small part thanks to the pioneering work of Kondakov and his students, commentators began increasingly to differentiate

Introduction

3

between the “Byzantine” and “ancient Russian,” and the “Neo-​Byzantine” and “Neo-​Russian” classifications as discrete cultural, art-​historical, and aesthetic categories. In addition to advances in archaeological and art-​historical knowledge, rising nationalism played a significant role in the ideological recasting of the icon as a medieval “masterpiece” and a manifestation of a purely “Russian” artistic genius, especially in the wake of the Russo-​Japanese War (1904–5) and as a response to the rising international tensions on the eve of World War I. Over the past forty years, the word “Russo-​ Byzantine” has been applied both to the early medieval Russian art and architecture produced under Byzantine tutelage and to the subsequent revivalist projects of the mid to late nineteenth century.11 More importantly, this designation has also come to be used as a broader signifier or shorthand for the Eastern Orthodox aesthetic canon, which comprises a multiplicity of different styles, schools, and iconographies but ultimately derives from medieval Byzantium and expresses similar spiritual, material, and ornamental values.12 In the present book, I employ the term “Russo-​Byzantine” in this final, more expansive way to signify a discrete aesthetic, theological, and philosophical tradition that began in Byzantium and was subsequently elaborated in Russia and its neighboring territories and stood apart from the mainstream practices of western Europe. In doing so, I take my cue both from a number of early twentieth-​century theorists such as Nikolai Tarabukin and from contemporary scholars such as Jane Sharp, who have all used the “Russo-​Byzantine” designation similarly. Having said that, I nevertheless maintain a distinction between “Byzantine” and “ancient Russian” in instances where period commentators have made a conscious decision to emphasize these as separate artistic categories.

4

The Icon and the Square

Also wanting definition as I use it is the term “revival.” Needless to say, the revivalist Russo-​ Byzantine cathedrals, erected in the nineteenth century, were, not strictly speaking, “reconstructions” of the medieval prototypes. Instead, they were heavily mediated by the aesthetics, tastes, and ideas of the period. Even ostensibly historically responsible restoration projects often tended toward a “fictional” reimagining of medieval monuments in their own nineteenth-​century image.13 As such, the Russo-​Byzantine revival was not simply an innocent recovery of a lost artistic tradition but an invested, purposeful, and contingent phenomenon. This is hardly surprising, given the broader pan-​European interest in resurrecting the artistic achievements of past epochs in the service of new aesthetic goals, cultural needs, and political demands. In many ways, the “long” nineteenth century can be characterized as a succession of revivalist movements in art and architecture, the most well known of which include Jacques-​Louis David and neoclassicism, the German and English Romantics and the Gothic Revival, and finally the Aesthetic and Symbolist movements and a renewed interest in Hellenism. However, many of these movements were not conservative or retrograde “returns” to past traditions and styles but radical protests against the prevailing tastes and artistic practices of a particular period. To state it slightly differently, revivalism was often deployed as a vanguard strategy for bringing about change and innovation in the visual and decorative arts. In Russia—as in the rest of Europe—there were a multitude of different antiquities from which to choose, including ancient Greece and Rome, Egypt, Scythia, and even Persia.14 However, more often than not fascination with these various civilizations tended to follow the transient fashions and trends

of western Europe. What is more, it was frequently refracted through the centrifugal forces generated by the increasingly dominant interest in Byzantium and Russia’s pre-​Petrine heritage. Thus, in her seminal study of Russian Egyptomania, Lada Panova observes that it was a quintessentially belated phenomenon, largely driven by an Occidental, European attraction to the exotic, ancient “Orient.”15 More importantly, she writes that Russian engagement with Egypt was initially stimulated by pilgrim travelers to the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai—one of the most ancient and steadfast strongholds of the Orthodox faith. In other words, interest in the “monastic Egypt” of early Christianity anticipated and stimulated the subsequent turn-​of-​ the-​century preoccupation with the exotic Egypt of Cleopatra and the ancient Pharaohs.16 Similarly, in Russia’s Rome: Imperial Visions, Messianic Dreams, 1890–1940, Judith Kalb contends that Russian interest in ancient Rome was in large part shaped by the “Third Rome” ideology, in which Byzantium, as Second Rome, played an integral role in legitimating Muscovy’s claims to being the “Third Rome” (a popular theory discussed in more detail in the second chapter of this book).17 As these examples demonstrate, by the second half of the nineteenth century Russian enthusiasm for different ancient civilizations progressively concentrated into a much more profound and ubiquitous focus on Byzantium—a phenomenon that can be summarized as the fundamental transformation from a detached study of the cultural and religious “other” into a more sustained investigation of the cultural and religious “self.” The Byzantines were increasingly viewed as kindred souls and the immediate ancestors of the modern Russians, in contrast to the ancient Romans and Egyptians, who were

understood as Latin and Oriental “others.” Moreover, vestiges of Byzantine culture in the form of religious ritual and public devotion, theological thought, and Orthodox art and architecture persisted in Russia well into the modern period as living, breathing traditions. As Vera Shevzov points out, Russia on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution had one of the largest Christian cultures of modern times, with more than eighty million “official” Orthodox Christians in European Russia alone, which constituted some 85 percent of the population.18 Accordingly, many of the artists, scholars, collectors, curators, and critics discussed in this book were practicing Orthodox believers, while those who considered themselves to be atheist or agnostic had nevertheless grown up surrounded by Orthodox culture and were intimately familiar with its key tenets, emblems, and iconic images. In this sense, the Russo-​Byzantine revival was not so much a momentary rediscovery of a distant and “dead” civilization that could be mined for literary, artistic, and theatrical content, as a continuous, evolving, and exhaustive inquiry into the origins of Russian religious, philosophical, and visual culture and the ways in which it could shape both contemporary life and future developments. Thus, although initially born of an academic, historicist, and imperialist impulse, the Russo-​Byzantine revival rapidly evolved into a crucial catalyst for modernist experimentation and a means of articulating avant-​garde theory and aesthetics that had far-​reaching implications for artistic practice in the twentieth century. The final terms that require some explanation are “icon” and “iconic,” which I use in their original medieval sense and not simply with reference to the portable panel icon with which we associate them today. In Greek, the word εἰκών (eikōn), or “icon,” was applicable to any religious image,

Introduction

5

which included frescoes, mosaics, illuminated manuscripts, woodcarving, enamels, and ivories, as well as portable panel icons. I therefore explore a wide variety of different media throughout the course of the book, demonstrating how artists engaged with a number of diverse materials and representational strategies under the rubric of “icon.” It is also important to note here that in the Russian language the word ikonopis originates from the verb pisat’, which means “to write” rather than “to paint.”19 The icon, then, is not “painted” but “written,” thus theologically equating the visual image with the spoken word. As such, the icon testifies to God’s presence as much as the “word” in that both participate in the same project of incarnation: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” ( John 1:1–14, KJV). Consequently, in addition to aesthetic concerns, the icon raised important semiological questions about presence, representation, and signification enabled by the sign and its dialectical function in the theorization of the modern artwork and the idea of “iconicity.” Furthermore, in Russian there is also a semantic distinction between ikonopis, or religious representation, and zhivopis, or secular representation, which literally means “to render from life.” While the former implies a transcription of a metaphysical reality, the latter is firmly rooted in a physical, observable reality. This is an important differentiation, since the association of “truth” with empirical vision had become increasingly attenuated in the course of the nineteenth century. As David Peters Corbett observes, the formulation of new scientific theories had undermined the notion of a fixed, stable, and visible reality and had rekindled public interest in the supernatural, the otherworldly, and the divine:

6

The Icon and the Square

developments in nineteenth-​century science . . . led to a switch in attention from the visible to the invisible worlds. In contrast to the analysis of the physical sciences, which focused on penetrating to the deepest, most arcane levels of reality, the visual increasingly appeared preoccupied with surface, with mere phenomenal appearance. Reality, it seemed . . . , took place at a level below that which sight could register, in the movement of invisible but pervasive particles through the universe, a process too deep for vision, which was now merely one of a number of ephemeral manifestations riding on the deceptive surface of the world.20

Analogous argumentation was advanced in the 1910s by thinkers such as Pavel Florensky (1882–1937) and Nikolai Tarabukin, who contended that the medieval conception and visualization of the universe, with their emphases on the “symbolic” and the “abstract,” were in fact closer to the ethos of modern science and twentieth-​century epistemology than to the positivist ideas and representations that had prevailed in the nineteenth century. Thus, in his 1913 essay “The Stratification of Aegean Culture,” Florensky argues that society’s invisible arteries and nerves are being nourished and stimulated by the thought of the Middle Ages, which until quite recently was thought dead and buried.

. . . And in fact the work that has been done in

systematising the knowledge we have accumulated, the efforts made to create reference books on all branches and spheres of science, the very consolidation of what has been gained—surely it is nothing but the accumulated results of a culture that is over. . . . All of these encyclopedias, reference books and dictionaries—are they not just the deathbed wishes of that culture which emerged in the fourteenth century? To comprehend the

life-​understanding of the future, we must turn to its roots, to the life-​understanding of the Middle Ages; the Middle Ages of the West and especially the East. To understand the philosophy of the New Age, we must turn to the philosophy of Antiquity.21

By the same token, the Russo-​Byzantine revival was deeply indebted to nineteenth-​century positivism, predicated as it was on the inevitable processes of modernization, such as secular scholarship and new techniques of cleaning and restoration, without which the public rediscovery of Russia’s artistic patrimony would not have been possible. Accordingly, over the course of five chapters The Icon and the Square examines the generative tension between nostalgia for the past, traditionalism, and nationalism, on the one hand, and technological progress, radicalism, and avant-​gardism, on the other, demonstrating how the Russo-​Byzantine revival was both a manifestation of and a response to the onslaught of modernity. By concentrating on moments of discontinuity and dissonance in addition to continuity, this book resists presenting a steady teleological narrative, highlighting instead the rich plurality of artistic responses that marked this cultural phenomenon. To this end, I examine the works of four very different artists—Mikhail Vrubel (1856–1910), Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944), Kazimir Malevich (1878– 1935), and Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953)—focusing on their distinctly divergent approaches and aspirations while simultaneously considering how their individual engagements with Russo-​Byzantine art drove each artist to push beyond the boundaries of his respective artistic and intellectual milieu. In doing so, these artists not only transformed their own artistic practices but also influenced major paradigm shifts in the trajectory of Russian and

modern European art more broadly. To highlight these shifts, I analyze the artistic and theoretical output of each artist through the prism of prominent twentieth-​century critical voices that were instrumental in advancing both the new theories of iconic representation and those of the newly minted avant-​ garde. Mikhail Vrubel’s body of work is interpreted alongside Nikolai Tarabukin’s writings; Kandinsky’s oeuvre is read in relation to the philosophy of Pavel Florensky; and Vladimir Tatlin’s and Kazimir Malevich’s projects are examined through the argumentation of Nikolai Punin. At the same time, I illustrate that the transition from nineteenth- to twentieth-​century artistic practices was not simply one of rupture and revolution. Although the Soviet avant-​garde project has typically been described as a radical break from the period—both in its art and its criticism—I posit that the former would have been impossible without the latter. Paradoxical though it may sound, the revivalist impulse of the late nineteenth century played a pivotal role in ushering in the formal and conceptual innovations of the twentieth. Building on the pioneering work of an older generation of scholars such as Camilla Gray, John Bowlt, and Dmitrii Sarabianov, The Icon and the Square aims to shift the chronological origin of Russian modernism from the beginning of the twentieth century to the closing decades of the nineteenth.22 By the same token, instead of producing yet another linear teleology, I allow my proposed trajectory to fold back onto itself, demonstrating how subsequent avant-​garde theorists and critics reappropriated nineteenth-​century artists such as Vrubel in order to create a mythical origin or native starting point for themselves. As such, I construct a circular narrative that captures both the complexity and the symbiotic

Introduction

7

nature of the relationship between the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. In doing so, I propose a different methodological approach, which has significant implications for the study of Russian artistic culture beyond the Russo-​Byzantine revival. It is important to emphasize that this book does not claim to be comprehensive, given the scope, complexity, and breadth of this topic. The voluminous period literature on the subject provides a plethora of possible examples and avenues of inquiry, and the account presented here is necessarily selective. Certain artists, theorists, writers, collectors, and scholars have been privileged at the expense of others, and it is my hope that the present study will stimulate further investigation into this cultural phenomenon and will shed more light onto the figures, events, and institutions that I mention only in passing. Indeed, study of medieval revivalism and modernism has gained considerable momentum in recent years. A number of excellent publications have already addressed the subject of the “medieval/modern” encounter, broadly defined, such as Alexander Nagel’s Medieval/Modern: Art Out of Time (2012), Bruce Holsinger’s Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (2005), and Amy Knight Powell’s Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum (2012), signaling a surge of public interest in questions of medieval revivalism and modern and postmodern artistic practice. Robert S. Nelson’s Hagia Sophia, 1850–1950: Holy Wisdom Modern Monument (2004), J. B. Bullen’s Byzantium Rediscovered (2003), and the edited volume Byzantium/Modernism (2015) all explore similar issues, focusing specifically on Byzantine art and its pervasive influence on nineteenth- and early twentieth-​century European

8

The Icon and the Square

and American artistic production. The Icon and the Square builds on this discourse by analyzing Russia’s unique historical relationship to and understanding of Byzantium and its visual culture. As such, it moves beyond the generalizations of “medieval,” “Christian,” and “religious” art, on the one hand, and the broader pan-​European context, on the other. Akin to the aforementioned studies, the present book similarly interrogates the ideas of cross-​ temporal encounter and anachrony as viable models for critical inquiry and art-​historical analysis. Two important publications that examine the modernist appropriation of the iconic tradition in Russia and are instrumental in anchoring the present project are Andrew Spira’s Avant-​Garde Icon: Russian Avant-​Garde Art and the Icon Painting Tradition (2008) and Jefferson Gatrall and Douglas Greenfield’s Alter Icons: The Russian Icon and Modernity (2010). Both of these books engage with an immense body of artwork, ranging from famous avant-​garde masterpieces to previously unpublished works, and scrupulously analyze the myriad modernist citations of Orthodox iconography and form, as well as the key transformations in the production, circulation, and consumption of the Russian icon from the Enlightenment period to the post-​Soviet era. The latter work in particular provides an excellent and theoretically sophisticated overview of the multiple contradictions and intricacies inherent in the iconic revival. However, both books tend to focus almost exclusively on the twentieth century and generally limit their discussions to the portable panel icon at the expense of earlier periods and other forms of iconic representation. Conversely, The Icon and the Square strives to present a cohesive picture of the long and multifaceted process of historical unfolding intrinsic to the reevaluation of the

medieval image. In addition to individual artists, critics, and scholars, the present study examines major cultural institutions and associations such as the Imperial Academy of Arts, the Archaeological Institute in Constantinople, and the Hermitage, Rumiantsev, Imperial Russian Historical, and Russian Museums, and their ongoing activities over the course of several decades. As a result, rather than a series of disconnected historical vignettes or case studies, this book attends to the evolving dialogue between various generations of painters, architects, curators, archeologists, collectors, and theorists both within and between different institutions. It thus aims to provide a more expansive view of the broader cultural trends, as well as a rigorous, in-​depth analysis of the ways in which these broader trends affected, interacted with, and ultimately transformed the artistic practices of major avant-​ garde figures. In doing so, the book simultaneously adopts macro and micro approaches to the Russo-​ Byzantine revival, showing how the seemingly conservative interests and aspirations of traditional institutions such as the Crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with those of the radical, leftist, and postrevolutionary avant-​garde. It thereby strives to rethink the opposing binary categories of avant-​gardism and revivalism, historicism and innovation, secularism and religion, modernity and traditionalism, and regionalism and internationalization as they have been applied to the trajectory of modern art in both Russia and Europe. Other noteworthy publications on this topic are Wendy Salmond’s Arts and Crafts in Late Imperial Russia (1996), Oleg Tarasov’s Icon and Devotion: Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia (2002), and the edited volume Visualizing Russia: Fedor Solntsev and

Crafting a National Past (2010). All of these works examine the development of a specifically Russian national aesthetic and convincingly chart the complex ways in which the country’s nineteenth-​century visual culture underwent critical transformations, particularly in the realm of design, popular icon-​ painting methods, folk-​art traditions, and devotional practices. Building on this discourse, Jane Sharp and Sarah Warren have examined parallel issues from the perspective of the early twentieth-​century avant-​ garde in their monographs on Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962) and Mikhail Larionov (1881–1964) respectively.23 Sharp’s erudite account of Goncharova’s sophisticated strategy of cultural appropriation, which combined the icon and the broadsheet, the copy and the original, the high and the low, and the Eastern and Western aesthetic traditions, is especially valuable to the present book as it convincingly foregrounds a “different stake in modernist art history.”24 Finally, it is important to mention Iurii Savel’ev’s “Vizantiiskii stil’” v arkhitekture Rossii: Vtoraia polovina xix–nachalo xx veka (2005) and Gerold Vzdornov’s Istoriia otkrytiia i izucheniia russkoi srednevekovoi zhivopisi: xix vek (1986) and Restavratsiia i nauka: Ocherki po istorii otkrytiia i izucheniia drevnerusskoi zhivopisi (2006). All three of these publications have significantly advanced the understanding of the Russo-​Byzantine revival by bringing together important archival materials, primary documents, and period photographs. Unfortunately, these works are, for the time being, only available in Russian and are therefore inaccessible to a wider international readership. The Icon and the Square is thus one of the first English-​language studies to address the topic of the Russo-​Byzantine revival in Russia systematically and methodically, from its

Introduction

9

early stages in the mid-​nineteenth century to its culmination in the artworks of canonical modern artists such as Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin, all the while attending to the phenomenon’s broader historical, formal, and philosophical dimensions. The book begins with a general overview of the late Enlightenment period, examining how and why Byzantium was disparaged by the most prominent thinkers of the age both in Europe and in Russia. Drawing on a wide range of discursive intersections, the first chapter traces the gradual shift from the largely negative eighteenth-​century views of Byzantium to an active espousal of the Neo-​Byzantine and Russo-​Byzantine styles in the late nineteenth century and, finally, to their transformation into radical avant-​garde polemics in the early Soviet period. In particular, it analyzes the activities and publications of key figures such as Prince Grigorii Gagarin (1810–1893), Nikodim Kondakov, and Adrian Prakhov (1846–1916), who were instrumental in spearheading multiple excavation, preservation, and restoration initiatives throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Since numerous contemporary artists were enlisted in these efforts, the engagement with Byzantine art—in both its Greek and Russian variants—rapidly spread beyond narrow academic and archaeological circles. The chapter closes with a review of the twentieth-​century writings of Pavel Florensky, Nikolai Punin, and Nikolai Tarabukin, who argued that artistic encounters with Russia’s Byzantine heritage ultimately catalyzed the development of a self-​conscious modernist movement in the visual arts. Building on these themes and ideas, the second chapter considers how Byzantine—and subsequently medieval Russian—art was understood

10

The Icon and the Square

and presented to the broader museum-​going public in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the years 1860 to 1915. To this end, it investigates the formation, institutionalization, and exhibition of key nineteenth-​ century collections and analyzes the changes in cataloguing and display practices, which evolved from an ethnographic organizational logic to an art-​historical one. More specifically, it traces the clear shift in the understanding of Russo-​Byzantine artworks not simply as archaeological curiosities but as aesthetic masterpieces in their own right. The chapter concludes with a detailed discussion of the 1913 Exhibition of Ancient Russian Art, which was described by many critics and art historians as “the beginning of a new artistic consciousness in Russia” and which highlighted the culmination of the triangulating forces of modernism, Byzantinism, and avant-​gardism.25 The reinvention of canonical Russo-​Byzantine forms at a key historical juncture is at the heart of the book’s third chapter, which surveys the oeuvre of the influential but little-​studied artist Mikhail Vrubel. Active in the late nineteenth century, Vrubel came to understand Russo-​Byzantine art as an important forebear of an indigenous anti-​Realist, proto-​abstract painterly tradition that seemed to presage his own modernist innovations. Breaking with the photographic precision of the prevailing Realist school, Vrubel emphasized the material quality of the paint and the flatness of the canvas, creating a characteristically modernist visual syntax, reminiscent of Paul Cézanne. The chapter also considers how Vrubel’s shifting iconography in the late 1880s and early 1890s expressed a particularly fin de siècle experience of spiritual malaise and destabilized identity in the face of a religious crisis brought about by widespread secularization. The chapter ends with

an investigation of the myriad ways in which subsequent leftist art criticism espoused Vrubel as the mythical origin for the Soviet avant-​garde project by claiming that he not only anticipated but enabled many of the formal and conceptual innovations of the twentieth century. The last two chapters examine the formative and lasting impact that the Russo-​Byzantine revival had on the artistic production of canonical twentieth-​century artists. Chapter 4 traces Vasily Kandinsky’s nascent interest in iconic art on the eve of his move to nonobjectivity. Through a detailed analysis of several of Kandinsky’s paintings from the early 1910s alongside the complex iconic philosophy propagated by his exact contemporary and VKhUTEMAS and RAKhN colleague, Pavel Florensky, this chapter offers a new perspective on Kandinsky’s artistic evolution.26 Considering his well-​known formulation of a new spiritual art in the form of abstraction and situating it within the realm of Orthodox theology and aesthetics, The Icon and the Square advances an entirely novel set of as-​yet-​ unexplored interpretative possibilities for his oeuvre. More specifically, it discusses Kandinsky’s theories on art within the context of a renewed religious fervor, epitomized by the 1909 Vekhi (Landmarks) publication, which espoused a steadfast commitment to a progressive Christian humanism in contrast to the turn-​of-​the-​century crisis of spirituality.27

The book concludes with a discussion of the epoch-​making 0.10: The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting in St. Petersburg, where Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin presented their competing versions of a vanguard “new realism,” which, as I argue, drew on the icon’s unique ontological status as a “presentation” rather than a “representation” of an invisible metaphysical reality. Deliberately refiguring the icon into a new abstract idiom, Tatlin’s Corner Counter-​Reliefs inaugurated a novel phenomenology of the artwork by embracing “real space,” while Malevich’s Black Square enacted a powerful and enduring iconicity, quickly becoming “a sacred image itself within a modernist canon.”28 Although the iconic resonances of Tatlin’s and Malevich’s works have been discussed by scholars on numerous occasions, they have never been examined within the long trajectory of the Russo-​Byzantine revival—a neglected but vital history that brings texture and added meaning to the modernist masterpieces of these and other celebrated artists of the period. To sum up, then, The Icon and the Square, by reinscribing the Russo-​Byzantine revival into the larger narrative of Russian art history, proposes a new set of cultural coordinates from which to interrogate both the inherent mechanisms and theoretical underpinnings of Russian modernism and the far-​ reaching influence that it had on the art of the twentieth century.

Introduction

11

1 BYZANTIUM RECONSIDERED Revivalism, Avant-​Gardism, and the New Art Criticism

Over the centuries, Russia’s long, complex relationship with Byzantium and its cultural and artistic legacy underwent a number of different phases ranging from fervent admiration and imitation to outright contempt and rejection and finally to a gradual rediscovery and reconsideration. By the second half of the nineteenth century, a new interest in Byzantium and medieval Russia began to take root in the academic and artistic communities, spearheaded by prominent public figures such as Prince Grigorii Gagarin, Fedor Solntsev, Nikodim Kondakov, and Adrian Prakhov. Accordingly, this chapter examines how a number of important art historians, philosophers, theorists, and art critics, as well as artists, were all profoundly affected by the rediscovery of this previously neglected artistic patrimony—a rediscovery that not only redefined the course of Russian art history but arguably played a crucial role in catalyzing Russia’s contribution to the international avant-​garde. According to the Russian Primary Chronicle, it was the unparalleled aesthetic experience of Byzantine art and ritual that convinced Prince

Vladimir’s envoys to Constantinople that Kievan Rus ought to accept Eastern Orthodoxy as its official religion. After attending the liturgy at the Hagia Sophia, they claimed: “We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty. . . . We only know that God dwells there among men.”1 Consequently, following its conversion to Orthodoxy in 988, Kievan Rus became a major producer of monumental art and architecture, closely based on the Byzantine model. In the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, artisanal workshops proliferated in the cities of Kiev, Novgorod, Pskov, Vladimir, Suzdal, and Muscovy, where a rich array of icons, illuminated manuscripts, and metalwork were produced on a daily basis. However, by the closing decades of the eighteenth century this rich medieval artistic legacy fell into complete disrepute and near obscurity. The Westernizing reign of Peter the Great (1682–1725) in particular represented a drastic rupture with Byzantine traditions. His replacement of the patriarchate with the Holy Synod and its subsequent transformation into a department of state drastically

13

Fig. 1  Andrei Rublev, Old Testament Trinity, 1425–27. Tempera on wood, 55 3/4 × 44 4/5 in. (141.5 × 114 cm). Formerly in the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, Sergiev Posad, now in the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

14

diminished the ecclesiastical authority of the church, with the result that secular tastes progressively came to dominate over religious dogma in questions of aesthetics. Variations on French, Italian, and German Baroque became the preferred styles for buildings in the newly founded capital of St. Petersburg, while the Imperial Academy of Arts, established in 1757, propagated a refined, academic style of painting based on western European models. By the mid-​ eighteenth century, medieval visuality had become so unpopular that even the most sacred ancient icons were repainted in line with more naturalistic, representational tastes. A comparison between the fifteenth-​century Old Testament Trinity icon (fig. 1) by Andrei Rublev (1360–1430) and a seventeenth-​century version of the same subject (fig. 2) by Simon Ushakov (1626–1686) clearly demonstrates the radical transformations in artistic taste that took place over the course of two centuries. In contrast to Rublev’s vivid blues, reds, and greens, Ushakov employed a much more muted palette of predominantly soft pastel and pale ochre hues. During Rublev’s time, icon painters rarely mixed their colors or employed shading techniques. Instead, they would apply a single pigment, subsequently adding only white or gold highlights to emphasize specific formal elements in the image, such as the folds in garments or the convex shapes of human bodies. By contrast, Ushakov attempted to create a sense of volumetric form and three-​dimensional, illusionistic space. In his version of the Trinity, the folds in the angels’ garments are carefully modeled in three dimensions with dramatic chiaroscuro effects replacing the linearity and flatness of Rublev’s image. Similarly, the angels’ faces in Ushakov’s work are much more rounded and naturalistically rendered with halftones and shadows,

Fig. 2  Simon Ushakov, Old Testament Trinity, 1671. Tempera on wood, 49 2/3 × 35 1/2 in. (126 × 90.2 cm). Formerly in the Church of the Exaltation of the Cross, Tavricheskii Palace, St. Petersburg, now in the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

departing from the more hieratic and stylized Byzantine mode of Rublev’s physiognomies. The furniture and table setting in Ushakov’s Trinity are likewise much more ornate and elaborate than in Rublev’s work. The bases of the table and chairs on which the

Byzantium Reconsidered

15

Fig. 3  Andrei Voronikhin, Kazan Cathedral, St. Petersburg, 1801–18.

angels sit are intricately carved with floral motifs. Meanwhile, a brilliant white table cloth, gathered into illusionistic folds that cast shadows, covers the table, on top of which stand a variety of richly decorated gold and silver vessels. Ushakov seems to have embraced the opportunity to depict a number of different textures and gleaming, metallic surfaces in order to demonstrate his skill as an artist. Even in his choice of background motifs, Ushakov radically departed from the medieval master by replacing the diminutive building in the upper left corner of Rublev’s icon with an imposing classical triumphal arch complete with Corinthian columns. Through it we see yet another Greco-​Roman building and what looks like a Roman Catholic basilica with a shining golden dome. Not only does this architectural ensemble introduce recession and perspectival depth into the image—both of which are entirely absent in Rublev’s work—but it also acts as a framing device for the central scene in the foreground, which is further emphasized by the strategic inclusion, on the opposite side of the image, of a

16

The Icon and the Square

large leafy tree that mirrors and complements the architectural motifs. Such formulaic framing techniques were often used by European Baroque artists such as Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) and Claude Lorrain (1600–1682), Ushakov’s exact contemporaries, whose luminous landscapes were avidly collected by the Russian royalty and aristocracy throughout the Enlightenment period. Although Ushakov repeated Rublev’s composition of the three angels sitting around a table, the sumptuous details and novel pictorial techniques that he incorporated into his version of the Trinity clearly betray his familiarity with and imitation of Italian Renaissance and Baroque styles. In fact, he was even criticized by certain conservative clerics, such as the archpriest Avvakum, for his overly Westernized “lascivious” depictions of “fleshly carnality.”2 Russian ecclesiastical architecture of the period equally looked to western Europe—and especially to Italy and France—for inspiration. Thus, for example, the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg, constructed between 1801 and 1818, combines elements

of Italian Baroque and French neoclassicism (fig. 3). Designed by Andrei Voronikhin (1759–1814), the cathedral is an imposing domed building, measuring just over 71.5 meters in height, with an elaborate semicircular colonnade, comprising 136 columns of Pudost stone.3 Voronikhin was purportedly inspired by St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and although the Kazan Cathedral was specifically built to house the medieval Virgin of Kazan icon, architecturally it radically departed from the Russo-​Byzantine prototype and was instead structured after a Catholic basilica with a central transept and three naves.4 The main entrance to the cathedral was fashioned after a Greek temple with a classical entablature, cornice, and triangular pediment. Meanwhile, the main doors were copies after Lorenzo Ghiberti’s bronze doors for the baptistery of the Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence and were cast by Vasilii Ekimov (1758–1837), a leading metalwork expert at the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Arts. Both the exterior and the interior decoration of the cathedral had very little in common with the traditional Orthodox canon. As is well known, the Orthodox Church’s prohibition on “corporeality” and “graven images” precluded any kind of three-​ dimensional sculpture, especially since it carried pagan, Hellenistic associations of idolatry. Accordingly, Orthodox church decoration was strictly limited to icons, mosaics, and frescoes. By contrast, the façade of the Kazan Cathedral was adorned with fourteen sculptural reliefs of biblical scenes by the academic sculptors Ivan Martos (1754–1835), Ivan Prokofiev (1758–1828), Fedor Gordeev (1744–1810), Stepan Pimenov (1784–1833), Vasilii Demuth-​ Malinovskii (1779–1846), and Jean-​Dominique Rachette (1744–1809). In addition, on the north side of the cathedral were four pilasters containing

Fig. 4  Ivan Martos, Saint John the Baptist, 1804–7. Bronze. Kazan Cathedral, St. Petersburg.

freestanding bronze sculptures of the Russian warrior saints Vladimir and Alexander Nevsky, executed by Pimenov, and of Saint John the Baptist (fig. 4) and Saint Andrew, sculpted by Martos and Demuth-​Malinovskii respectively. The interior of the cathedral was likewise decorated with statuary, bas-​ reliefs, and sculptural friezes, all of which reflected the prevailing neoclassical tastes of the period rather than the Orthodox artistic canon. Lastly, instead of the monumental frescoes and mosaics typical of the Byzantine tradition, the walls of the Kazan Cathedral were hung with large-​scale easel paintings, created by the leading artists of the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Arts, such as

Byzantium Reconsidered

17

Vladimir Borovikovsky (1757–1825), Vasilii Shebuiev (1777–1855), Fedor Bruni (1801–1875), Grigorii Ugriumov (1764–1823), Orest Kiprensky (1782–1836), and Karl Briullov (1799–1852). Executed in a slick, academic style, these works espoused the post-​ Renaissance aesthetic of religious painting that dominated the European academies of art at the time, rather than the traditional hieratic forms of Orthodox icon painting. Thus, for example, Borovikovsky’s representation of Saint Catherine (1804–9) (fig. 5) had more in common with his portraits of the Russian royalty and aristocracy than with a Byzantine icon. Rendered in a three-​dimensional, illusionistic space, Saint Catherine is shown standing in front of an Egyptian pyramid, with a crowd of onlookers extending into the background of the image, in a dimly lit evening landscape. Wearing an ornate crown and sumptuous garments lined with fur and trimmed with pearls and precious stones, Saint Catherine casts a longing, contemplative glance up to the heavens, where a semicircular chorus of cherubs emerges from the wispy clouds just above the saint’s head, intimating a halo. Borovikovsky’s painstaking attention to the different textures and surfaces of Saint Catherine’s attire, as well as his use of naturalistic modeling, rich tonalities, atmospheric lighting, and deep shadows, makes this work a triumph of Russian academic painting, but also a radical departure from traditional iconic representations of the saint. Similarly, for the central image of the cathedral’s side altar, Karl Briullov produced a painting of the

Fig. 5  Vladimir Borovikovsky, Saint Catherine, 1804–9. Oil on pressed cardboard, 69 × 35 ¾ in. (176 × 91 cm). Formerly in Kazan Cathedral, St. Petersburg, now in the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

18

The Icon and the Square

Virgin’s Assumption (1836–42) (fig. 6) in a style that closely imitated the Italian Baroque tradition. Painted shortly after Briullov’s return from Italy, where the artist had lived for more than a decade, this work clearly borrows from the religious paintings of Italian masters such as Guido Reni, Annibale Carracci, and Carlo Maratta. The Virgin is shown standing upright on top of thick, volumetric clouds, her garments and veil fluttering in the wind, while two angels and a group of chubby cherubs conduct her up to the heavens, where she is welcomed by a large chorus of singing and praying angels. Behind her head a glowing orb of light emphasizes her divinity, while two more cherubs part the heavens like two curtains at the very top of the image. The rich palette, deep shadows, and theatrical lighting, as well as the swirling fabrics and undulating lines, all serve to heighten the dramatic effect of the scene. The trompe l’oeil barrier at the bottom edge of the image, over which the cherubs spill into the viewer’s space, serves to heighten the illusionistic effects of the painting still further by self-​consciously blurring the separation between pictorial and real space. By contrast, traditional Byzantine representations of the Assumption, known in the Orthodox Church as the Koimesis (e.g., fig. 7), typically show the Virgin prostrate on a bier and surrounded by the twelve apostles in different attitudes of mourning. In the center of the exemplary image Christ is shown receiving his mother’s tiny soul into his arms in the form of a swaddled infant, as two or more angels

Fig. 6  Karl Briullov, Assumption of the Virgin, 1836–42. Oil on canvas, 223 × 112 ½ in. (568 × 286 cm). Formerly in Kazan Cathedral, St. Petersburg, now in the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

Byzantium Reconsidered

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Fig. 7  Koimesis, 1105–6. Fresco, Church of Panagia Phorbiotissa, Asinou, Cyprus.

descend from the heavens to carry the Virgin’s soul up to God. In fact, after seeing Briullov’s painting, the Slavophile Fedor Chizhov questioned whether “anyone can really mistake Briullov’s picture for an icon. . . . In front of the icon we pray to the holy face of the Virgin . . . in front of Briullov’s Assumption, forgive me, but you must agree that we honestly think about a voluptuous, beautiful woman . . . and that which ought to inspire prayer destroys holy prayer.”5 Even in the royal doors of the iconostasis, which symbolically function as the holiest part of the church, traditional Orthodox icons have been replaced by Borovikovksy’s glossy easel paintings of Christ, the Virgin, and the Evangelists (fig. 8). As with Saint Catherine, these works were executed in an academic style with the figures shown in three-​ quarter profile and set within a three-​dimensional illusionistic space. Although undoubtedly artistic masterpieces in their own right, these works were

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The Icon and the Square

subsequently vehemently criticized by thinkers such as Pavel Florensky and Leonid Ouspensky, who, much like Chizhov, contested their status as Orthodox icons, arguing that their naturalistic rendering violated the symbolic, ontological status of the icon as a mysterious imprint of divine essence.6 Moreover, period commentators often equated the secularization of icon painting with a broader decline in religion, public morality, and Orthodox collectivity and spirituality resulting from widespread modernization. The debates on the place and function of naturalism in sacred art thus extended far beyond the realm of aesthetics to include larger questions of national decay, disintegration, and spiritual degeneration (topics discussed in more detail in the last part of this chapter).7 One of the central reasons for the predominance of neoclassical rather than medieval aesthetics in the construction and decoration of the Kazan

Cathedral in the early nineteenth century was the widely espoused belief that Byzantine artistic culture was crude, primitive, and unworthy of emulation. Indeed, the ideas of prominent Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot dominated Russian intellectual discourse throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and molded the public’s derisive attitudes toward Byzantium—and by extension Russia’s medieval past. In 1734 Montesquieu declared that “the history of the Greek Empire is nothing but a tissue of revolts, seditions, and perfidies,” while Voltaire pronounced it to be a “worthless collection” of “orations and miracles. . . . a disgrace to the human mind.”8 In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel described Byzantium as “a disgusting picture of imbecility; wretched, nay insane, passions stifle the growth of all that is noble in thoughts, deeds, and persons. Rebellion on the part of generals, depositions of the emperors by their means or through the intrigues of the courtiers, assassinations or poisoning of the emperors by their own wives and sons, women surrendering themselves to lusts and abominations of all kinds.”9 However, the most influential text to shape public opinion on the Byzantine Empire was Edward Gibbon’s widely read History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, from 1776, which remained the authoritative work on Byzantium for several decades. Although it was first translated into Russian only in 1883 by Mikhail Nevedomskii, the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was already well known in Russian intellectual circles by the opening decades of the nineteenth century by way of Leclerc de Sept-​ Chenes’s French translation of 1788–90.10 Indeed, even as late as the early 1900s, scholars such as the renowned Byzantinist Nikodim Kondakov

Fig. 8  Vladimir Borovikovsky, Royal Doors with Christ, the Virgin, the Archangel Gabriel and the Four Evangelists, 1804–9. Medallions: oil on pressed cardboard, each 30 in. (73.5 cm) in diameter. Formerly in Kazan Cathedral, St. Petersburg, now in the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

Byzantium Reconsidered

21

continued to cite Gibbon’s “tendentious attacks” and “biased views” on Byzantium, suggesting that the Russian public still viewed the latter’s work as the definitive account of Byzantine history and culture.11 In Gibbon’s narrative, Byzantium emerges as a backward Asiatic despotism, devoid of all the virtues of the Latin West, and one that had not left posterity anything worthy of admiration or emulation. Describing Constantinople’s most celebrated architectural monument, the Hagia Sophia, Gibbon expresses nothing but disdain: “The eye of the spectator is disappointed by an irregular prospect of half-​domes and shelving roofs . . . destitute of simplicity and magnificence . . . how dull is the artifice, how insignificant is the labor.”12 In fact, on the rare occasion that Byzantine monuments were invoked in eighteenth-​century Russia for political and ideological reasons, the buildings on whose behalf they were summoned were instead paradoxically based on classical and Renaissance prototypes, since the Byzantine ones were considered aesthetically inferior.13 Thus, for example, the St. Sophia Cathedral (1782) in Tsarskoe Selo, just outside of St. Petersburg, was meant to function as a miniature “copy” of the Hagia Sophia Church in Constantinople, but in reality Charles Cameron’s design was based more on the Basilica of Maxentius, as well as on the Pantheon and other Roman architecture, than on the Byzantine original. As Anthony Cutler observes, “[T]he interior quadrilobe, opened with lesser niches, depends directly on Roman thermal architecture. . . . The exterior, on the other hand, exhibits such discrepancies as the Tuscan order of the columns and pilasters . . . and neoclassical moldings, acroteria and rosettes”—all architectural features that were entirely foreign to Byzantine monuments but were considered to be “improvements” on the Byzantine

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The Icon and the Square

style by eighteenth-​century viewers.14 Constructed on Catherine II’s direct orders, the St. Sophia Cathedral was meant symbolically to reinforce Russia’s territorial claims to Constantinople in the wake of the first Russo-​Turkish War (1768–1774), whose objective was the reestablishment of the Greek Empire with Catherine as its empress. It was not until the mid-​nineteenth century that Catherine’s grandson Nicholas I would employ actual Byzantine designs in the service of his expansionist politics. Indeed, Gibbon’s and other Enlightenment writers’ open contempt for the conservative and religiously minded Byzantine Empire made such a lasting impact on the way that the Russian public perceived its own Byzantine heritage that prominent nineteenth-​century thinkers and philosophers such as Alexander Herzen (1812–1870) and Petr Chaadaev (1794–1856) blamed all of Russia’s political and historical ills on its Byzantine past. Writing in 1829, Chaadaev lamented: “Obedient to our fatal destiny, we turned to the miserable, corrupt Byzantium, ostracized by all peoples, for a moral code on which to base our education. . . . Isolated by a fate unknown to the universal development of humanity, we have absorbed none of mankind’s ideas of traditional transmission.”15 Almost two decades later Herzen maintained an equally negative view of Byzantium: Ancient Greece had lived out her life when the Roman Empire covered and preserved her as the lava and ashes of the volcano preserved Pompeii and Herculaneum. The Byzantine period raised the coffin-​lid, and the dead remained dead, controlled by priests and monks as every tomb is, administered by eunuchs who were perfectly in place as representatives of barrenness. . . .

Byzantium could live, but there was nothing for her

to do; and nations in general only take a place in history

while they are on the stage, that is, while they are doing something.

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It was not until the mid-​nineteenth century that these long-​established negative views of Byzantine history, art, and culture began to change in both Europe and Russia.

From East to West: The Byzantine Revival in Europe As Robert S. Nelson and J. B. Bullen have convincingly demonstrated, the mid-​nineteenth century witnessed the steady rise of a new public interest in Byzantium across western Europe.17 In the wake of the Romantic movement, Enlightenment values were increasingly challenged by alternative sources of knowledge, particularly those coming from the East and the medieval past. As the quintessential representative of the “Eastern Middle Ages,” Byzantium finally started to garner considerable attention. In England, John Ruskin’s sympathetic descriptions of Veneto-​Byzantine architecture in his seminal publication of 1851–53, Stones of Venice, led to a growing reappraisal of Byzantine history and cultural production. At the same time, George Finlay published his two-​volume History of the Byzantine Empire (1853), and in the years immediately preceding, two important studies on Byzantine art and architecture had appeared in the English press: Lord Lindsay’s Sketches of the History of Christian Art (1847) and Edward Freeman’s History of Architecture (1849). In France, the architect André Couchaud published Selection of Byzantine Churches in Greece (Choix d’églises byzantines en Grèce, 1841), one of the first books devoted solely to Byzantine architecture.

In 1845 Adolphe Didron and Paul Durand collaborated on the publication of the Painter’s Manual of Dionysius of Fourna, which included multiple illustrations of a number of important Byzantine churches and became one of the principal sources of information about Byzantine painting throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.18 The archaeologist and historian Félix de Verneilh published yet another important study of Byzantine architecture in 1851, which claimed that French ecclesiastical architecture was, in fact, deeply indebted to Byzantine models.19 Lastly, in Germany, the publication of Wilhelm Salzenberg’s Ancient Christian Architecture in Constantinople from the 5th to the 12th Century (Alt-​christliche Baudenkmale von Constantinopel vom v. bis xii. Jahrhundert) in 1854 for the first time revealed the Byzantine mosaics of the Hagia Sophia that were uncovered by the Fossati brothers in Constantinople between 1847 and 1849. However, despite this rising interest in Byzantium, a large number of European scholars, as well as members of the general public, continued to view the Byzantine Empire as a barbaric and Oriental “other,” whose “primitive” art and architecture remained inferior to the more refined and sophisticated forms of the Gothic style.20 Thus, for example, Ruskin attributed the Byzantine use of polychromy in architecture to a timeless “Oriental” impulse,21 while Edward Freeman observed in A History of Architecture: As a form of art, [the Byzantine] cannot claim a place equal to those of Western Europe. . . .

. . . We have not to deal with Greeks or Romans,

Celts or Teutons. . . . It is a character fixed, staid, and immutable; it is not Persian or Arabian, not even

Byzantium Reconsidered

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Fig. 9  Jean-​Joseph Benjamin-​Constant, The Empress Theodora at the Coliseum, 1889. Oil on canvas, 62 × 52 1/2 in. (157.48 × 133.35 cm). Private collection.

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Caucasian or Mongolian; it is not ancient, modern, or mediaeval; but, a term of all ages and races, it is Oriental.22

According to Freeman, Byzantine monuments had scarcely changed over the span of fourteen centuries from their fifth- and sixth-​century variants, leading him to conclude that “the structures reared to this day by the Mahometans in India exhibit far less deviation from the type of St. Sophia, than exists between the Basilica of St. Clement and the Cathedral of Sarum.”23 In other words, Byzantium was seen as a distinctly separate civilization, characterized by stasis and dogmatism in contrast to the progressive, constantly evolving artistic culture of western Europe. Such an understanding—or rather misunderstanding—of Byzantium persisted well into the late nineteenth century, as evidenced by William Edward Hartpole Lecky’s disparaging description of the Byzantine Empire as constituting “the most thoroughly base and despicable form that civilization has yet assumed . . . absolutely destitute of all the forms and elements of greatness.”24 Although published in 1870, Lecky’s History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne still echoed the Enlightenment critiques of Voltaire and Montesquieu, who portrayed Byzantium as a primitive and depraved Oriental despotism. Indeed, a painting such as Jean-​ Joseph Benjamin-​Constant’s Empress Theodora at the Coliseum (1889) (fig. 9) aptly visualizes these ideas. In this work the Byzantine ruler is depicted as a decadent, lethargic princess, who relishes a barbaric form of entertainment. In the middle ground on the right-​hand side of the painting, a tiger crouches over two prostrate and motionless human bodies. This tragic fate was typically reserved for Christian

martyrs in ancient Rome in the early days of Christianity. However, in the sixth century, by the time that Justinian and Theodora were in power, a scene such as this one would have been impossible. At best, Theodora might have attended chariot races at the Constantinopolitan Hippodrome, but both gladiatorial combat and animal fights had been banned during the reign of Constantine I, who considered them to be vestiges of paganism and at odds with Christian doctrine. And yet, in Benjamin-​Constant’s painting, the uncivilized practices of what was often understood to be a civilized and sophisticated culture—ancient Rome—were conveniently displaced onto Byzantium, which had become a plausible setting for such barbaric rituals. The visual rhetoric of the painting further emphasizes its narrative import. For example, the swirling scarlet fabric behind the empress and the predominantly red palette of the work underscore the bloody scene unfolding in the arena, and Theodora’s composed and relaxed demeanor reveal her cruel, wanton nature as she remains indifferent to the human misery before her eyes. A triumph of glossy art pompier, Benjamin-​Constant’s artwork draws heavily on all the standard tropes of Orientalist painting. The eroticized, semi-​reclining Theodora, surrounded by vibrant colors, opulent furs, and sumptuous fabrics, is reminiscent of the popular depictions of harem scenes and odalisques. The wide range of deep, rich hues of vermilion, auburn, ochre, russet, and shimmering gold produce a visual feast of color. Meanwhile, the luxurious textures of the marble column, velvet draperies, fur blanket, and Theodora’s silk garments all generate a seductive tactility that is further augmented by the soft, smooth, serpentine figure of the empress, whose silky peach skin is offset with iridescent jewels. In this painting,

Byzantium Reconsidered

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decadence meets barbarism, tantalizing the viewer both thematically and stylistically. Eschewing all historical accuracy, Benjamin-​Constant produced an image based on pure fantasy: a distant and foreign milieu of unbridled luxury, savagery, and vice. By contrast, a painting of a similar subject, produced in the same year but by a Russian artist, presents an entirely different view of Byzantium. In Vasilii Smirnov’s Morning Visit of a Byzantine Empress to the Graves of Her Ancestors (1889) (fig. 10), the Byzantine empress is portrayed as a virtuous and humble ruler. She begins her day by honoring her ancestors, and her court is a place of order, restraint, and respect for tradition. Unlike Benjamin-​Constant, Smirnov set his scene in an actual early Christian monument, the fifth-​century Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna. Given the nature of the empress’s visit, it is only logical that the action should take place in a well-​known ancient mausoleum. However, as I have argued elsewhere, an examination of the spatial layout and decoration of the mausoleum indicates that Smirnov went to great lengths to achieve archaeological accuracy in his painting.25 During his three-​year stay in Italy from 1884 to 1887, the artist had made numerous studies and sketches of Byzantine art and architecture, which he then used to inform the iconography in this painting.26 For example, in the lunette immediately above the heads of the Byzantine courtiers, we recognize the image of Saint Lawrence from the Galla Placidia (figs. 11 and 12), which depicts the saint standing next to the burning gridiron on which he was martyred. Above him, we see two white doves next to the fountain of life and the feet of two apostles (figs. 13 and 14). These images are almost exact copies of the original Byzantine mosaics on the walls of the Galla Placidia. Smirnov even went

26

The Icon and the Square

so far as to painstakingly reproduce the individual mosaic tesserae in oil paint in order to achieve complete verisimilitude. The Byzantine courtiers in Smirnov’s painting also radically depart from Benjamin-​Constant’s Theodora. Depicted standing, in long robes and with reverently bowed heads, these solemn, deferential figures are a far cry from the languid, lounging Theodora. The empress herself is dressed in a regal maroon mantle with an embroidered golden hem that Smirnov had copied directly from the sixth-​ century Byzantine mosaic of the empress Theodora in the Ravenna Church of San Vitale (figs. 15 and 16). Although the empress is not named in Smirnov’s title, the fact that she is portrayed in Theodora’s robes implies that her identity is indeed that of the famous Byzantine empress. In addition, the jewelry, colors, and patterns on the garments worn by her attendants closely resemble those of the courtiers in the San Vitale mosaic, again confirming her identity as Theodora. The Byzantium that emerges from Smirnov’s image is neither barbaric nor decadent, but an ancient civilization with its own particular customs, traditions, and culture, all of which are intended to be seen as worthy of respect and admiration. Instead of the imaginary, seductive, and Oriental evocation of Benjamin-​Constant’s work, Smirnov’s painting is characterized by an attempt to achieve painstaking archaeological accuracy and a Realist commitment to reconstructing a plausible historical scene. Although it is easy to dismiss these striking pictorial and thematic differences as the logical result of the disparate temperaments, styles, and artistic goals of the individual artists, I believe that they are, in fact, emblematic of a broader cultural politics that reflect the distinct difference between Russia and her

Fig. 10  Vasilii Smirnov, The Morning Visit of a Byzantine Empress to the Graves of Her Ancestors, 1889. Oil on canvas, 37 1/3 × 38 1/2 in. (95 × 98 cm). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

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Fig. 11  Detail of Vasilii Smirnov, The Morning Visit of a Byzantine Empress to the Graves of Her Ancestors (fig. 10), 1889. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Fig. 12  Lunette Mosaic of Saint Lawrence, fifth century, Galla Placidia Mausoleum, Ravenna.

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Fig. 13  Detail of Vasilii Smirnov, The Morning Visit of a Byzantine Empress to the Graves of Her Ancestors (fig. 10), 1889. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Fig. 14  Mosaic of Apostles with Fountain of Life, fifth century, Galla Placidia Mausoleum, Ravenna.

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Fig. 15  Detail of Vasilii Smirnov, The Morning Visit of a Byzantine Empress to the Graves of Her Ancestors (fig. 10), 1889. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Fig. 16  Detail of Mosaic of Empress Theodora and Her Retinue, sixth-​century, Church of San Vitale, Ravenna.

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European neighbors in their respective evolving attitudes toward Byzantium. Neither an outlier nor an exception, Smirnov’s portrayal of Byzantium reflects the mainstream turn-​of-​the-​century views of the Russian educated class and was the result of a decadelong reorientation in the country’s political, intellectual, and cultural life.

Changing Times, Changing Attitudes The reevaluation of Byzantine art and culture began in Russia at around the same time as it did in western Europe—in the 1840s and 1850s—but developed along markedly different lines. In the Russian context, the rediscovery of Byzantium became intimately linked with the rise of nationalism, the imperial ambitions of the state, and the emergence of the “Eastern Question.”27 The Napoleonic and Crimean conflicts in particular prompted a large sector of the Russian intelligentsia to reconsider both Russia’s Byzantine past and its contemporary relationship to western Europe. That said, it is important to emphasize that even during the Enlightenment period a number of dissenting voices questioned the country’s deference to and emulation of Western culture.28 For example, the historian Nikolai Karamzin expressed considerable skepticism toward Peter I’s sweeping reforms and his assault on medieval Russo-​Byzantine culture, famously stating that “we became citizens of the world, but ceased in certain respects to be citizens of Russia.”29 Similarly, Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov vocally criticized what he saw as the widespread moral corruption and “voluptuousness” engendered by Russia’s rapprochement with the West. Nonetheless, until the reign of Nicholas I, these voices were by and large

marginalized in favor of a rationalist state-​sponsored anticlerical and pro-​Western stance. Shcherbatov’s passionate critical essays did not appear in print until the mid-​nineteenth century; “in the eighteenth century,” as Andrzej Walicki astutely observes, “the old Russia was still too near in time, and the benefits of Europeanization were too obvious from the point of view of the general interest of the enlightened class.”30 By the beginning of the 1840s, however, the steady rise of Slavophile thought started to stimulate a growing interest in Russia’s pre-​Petrine past. The Crimean War (1853–56), which pitted Russia against Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire, precipitated an especially painful rupture with western Europe and a growing reorientation toward the East. Both official state policy and the public imaginary increasingly began to associate the Byzantine political and cultural legacy with contemporary Russia. Prominent Slavophile thinkers such as Aleksei Khomiakov (1804–1869), Ivan Kireevskii (1806–1856), and Konstantin Aksakov (1817–1860) argued that Russia’s Byzantine past was the source of her national strength, rather than her weakness. According to them, it was precisely this Byzantine heritage that had ensured that Russia evolved a religious, political, philosophical, and aesthetic value system that ran counter to the sterile materialism and rationalism of Western culture, which had led to the disastrous events of the French Revolution. In 1850 the historian Timofei Granovskii (1813–1855) published an eloquent apologia of Byzantium and a plea for serious Byzantine studies: We received from Constantinople the best part of our national inheritance, namely, religious beliefs and the beginnings of civilization. The Eastern Empire brought a young Russia into the family of Christian nations. But

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Fig. 17  Constantine Thon, Cathedral of Christ the Savior, Moscow, 1837–82. Photographer unknown (Russian, nineteenth century). Private collection.

besides these connections, we are bound up with the fate of Byzantium by the mere fact that we are Slavs. This side of the question has not been, and could not be, fully appreciated by foreign scholars. We have in a sense the duty to evaluate a phenomenon to which we owe so much.31

Rather than a dark stain in Russia’s history, the Byzantine epoch was increasingly understood as a period of cultural flowering and the key to Russia’s

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salvation, having safeguarded the nation from the political and religious turmoil associated with the Catholic Church, such as the Crusades, the Reformation, and the Inquisition. In 1859 Aleksei Khomiakov claimed that “to speak of Byzantium with disdain is to disclose one’s own ignorance.”32 By the mid-1860s, the idea of the Byzantine “East” as a symbol of barbarism, ignorance, and backwardness had increasingly given way to the notion of Byzantium as the source of an uncorrupted Christianity, civilization, and culture. To paraphrase the words of the philosopher and poet Vladimir Soloviev (1853– 1900), Byzantium was no longer seen as the East of Xerxes, but the East of Christ. In many ways this ideological and cultural reevaluation of Byzantium was stimulated by official state policy and acquired a distinct political flavor by the end of the Crimean War. By combining the undisputed authority of the monarch with the devout following of the Orthodox Church, the Byzantine political system and social order provided Nicholas I with the perfect historical example on which to base his own ideological dictum of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.”33 Accordingly, on March 25, 1841, an official decree was passed ordaining that “the taste of ancient Byzantine architecture should be preserved, by preference and as far as is possible,” in the construction of new ecclesiastical buildings.34 Although Nicholas I purportedly disliked the Byzantine style personally, he encouraged it out of political and ideological considerations. Ivan Strom (1823–1888), one of the architects of the revivalist St. Vladimir Cathedral in Kiev, recalled Nicholas saying, “I cannot stand this style, yet, unlike others, I allow it.”35 Thus, for example, the new Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow (1837–82) (fig. 17) was built in

an explicitly Russo-​Byzantine style, radically departing from the neoclassical model of the Kazan Cathedral, completed only two decades before Christ the Savior’s groundbreaking. Designed by Constantine Thon, the Moscow cathedral was supposed to invoke Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia both in grandeur and monumentality.36 Unlike the Kazan Cathedral, it was based on a Greek-​cross design and topped with five cupolas, recalling the style of the medieval Dormition Cathedrals of Vladimir (1158–61) and Moscow (1475–79). Instead of neoclassical porticoes and columns, Thon opted for gilded onion domes, kokoshnik gables, tracery, and icons on the façade. The interior decoration of Christ the Savior was also meant to adhere to the Russo-​Byzantine aesthetic canon.37 Instead of statuary and easel paintings, the walls of the cathedral were to be adorned with monumental frescoes of biblical stories and scenes from early Christianity and Russian history. As such, they were to visualize a clear political narrative wherein “Holy Russia” was portrayed as the descendant and rightful heir of early Christian Rome and Byzantium and was therefore preordained to preserve the Orthodox faith in modern times. Presided over by Christ, the Virgin, and the apostles, this version of Christian history was represented as part of an overarching divine plan. Although academically trained artists such as Fedor Bruni (1801– 1875), Aleksei Markov (1802–1878), and Petr Basin (1793–1877) were originally selected to decorate the interior of the cathedral, both stylistically and iconographically their murals were meant to correspond much more closely to the Orthodox pictorial canon than had those in the Kazan Cathedral.38 Nicholas himself insisted that he wanted the interior of the cathedral to be decorated with murals painted in the “ancient oriental, not in the new Western manner.”39

As evidenced by the intended pictorial program in Christ the Savior, the strategic deployment of the new Byzantine-​revivalist style had important international implications in addition to legitimizing Nicholas I’s domestic policy. It symbolized Constantinople’s historical ties with Kievan Rus, which in its turn served to bolster Russia’s expansionist policies in eastern and central Europe. In his widely read 1869 book Rossiia i Evropa (Russia and Europe), the Slavophile Nikolai Danilevskii (1822–1885) clearly articulated these aspirations by arguing that Russia alone had the right to Constantinople and that Russia’s historic mission was to restore the Eastern Roman Empire, much as the Franks had restored the Western Roman Empire. He advocated the creation of a Slavic federation under Russia’s political leadership, which would comprise the Slavic countries, Greece, Romania, and the Magyars, with its capital in Constantinople.40 As such, the espousal of Byzantium was predicated on a profound paradox: it was seen as both distinct and separate from the Latin “West,” but it was simultaneously not “Eastern,” barbaric, or primitive. Instead, Russian discourse constructed Byzantium, rather than the Roman Empire, as the legitimate heir to classical Greece—and by extension as the guarantor of classical civilization. In the wake of the Balkan uprisings (1875–76) and the Russo-​Turkish War (1877–78), the question of “safeguarding” the Byzantine legacy and “liberating” the Christian Orthodox peoples of the Ottoman Empire became even more urgent, as reflected in Sergei Zhigarev’s claim that it was Russia’s immediate imperative “to help her Eastern cobelievers and kindred in their struggle against Islam, toward national and religious self-​preservation, to remove them from Turkish enslavement, and to bring them into the family of cultured European peoples.”41

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Such passionate polemics fueled the Russo-​ Byzantine revival in art and architecture, and it was not a coincidence that specifically Byzantine designs were favored above all others in Russian colonial outposts. Neo-​Byzantine monuments began to appear all over central Asia, the northern Caucasus, and the Black Sea region, along the Trans-​Siberian Railway line. In recently conquered territories, the imposing scale and rich decoration of these newly built revivalist cathedrals functioned as material reminders to local populations of the might and wealth of tsarist Russia, particularly in regions that had retained local traditions, such as the Baltic provinces and Poland, where, as Richard Wortman observes, these “new churches and cathedrals ensured that the inhabitants would not forget who ruled their land.”42 Thus, for example, the massive Alexander Nevsky Cathedral (1894–1900) in Reval (Tallinn) was built on the Domberg, site of the city’s most prominent neighborhood, and was specifically constructed to tower above the numerous Lutheran churches, occupying “a beautiful, dominating location that is suitable for an Orthodox shrine in a Russian state.”43 Furthermore, imperial gains in the Balkans and central Asia brought former Byzantine territories under Russian influence and meant that ancient Byzantine monuments could now be studied more closely, providing fresh models for revivalist architects. This in turn “encouraged a kind of inverted archaeology: monuments were constructed to resurrect an invisible national past, particularly in regions deemed to need admonition and edification.”44 Byzantium was thus increasingly viewed in nationalistic terms, and the construction of the “Oriental Other” was displaced onto the Muslim populations of central Asia and the Caucasus, while the Byzantine

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The Icon and the Square

past occupied an entirely different imaginary space. Kievan Rus was progressively understood as a flourishing center of Byzantine culture and learning that was prematurely crushed by the rapacious Mongolian “hordes.” According to this premise, Byzantium emerged as the definitive origin of a sophisticated civilization in contrast to the subsequent barbaric, primitive tribes arriving from the Far East. Such ideas were already gaining currency in the mid-​nineteenth century, as evidenced by Iakov Kapkov’s 1840 painting Metropolitan Alexis Healing the Tatar Queen Taidula of Blindness While Dzhanibeg Looks On (fig. 18). According to the Nikonian Chronicle, in 1357 the metropolitan Alexis was summoned to the Mongolian horde by the khan Dzhanibeg to pray for the health of his sick wife, Taidula, who was afflicted with a debilitating eye disease. After curing the Tatar queen, Alexis was rewarded by the khan with lavish gifts and “high honors,” as well as special concessions for the Orthodox Church.45 Kapkov appears to have based his composition on one of the smaller scenes from the well-​known fifteenth-​century vita icon of Alexis attributed to the workshop of the master icon painter Dionysius and housed in the Dormition Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin until 1945 (fig. 19).46 In the icon, the ailing Taidula is propped up on her bed by an attendant as Alexis blesses her with holy water from a liturgical bowl held by one of his helpers. Although an academic painter, Kapkov seems to have relied on this medieval Russo-​Byzantine image as a primary source in his reimagining of the historical episode. He repeats the overall structure and composition of the iconic representation with a few significant modifications. One of these is the addition of Dzhanibeg himself, who is portrayed in the shadowy foreground of the painting, passively observing the

Fig. 18  Iakov Kapkov, Metropolitan Alexis Healing the Tatar Queen Taidula of Blindness While Dzhanibeg Looks On, 1840. Oil on canvas, 22 1/3 × 26 1/4 in. (57 × 67 cm). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

scene with his hands folded on his lap. Another important addition is the centrally positioned candle, held by Alexis, which serves as the main source of light in the painting. As such, the visual rhetoric of the work metaphorically articulates a series of symbolic opposites: darkness is pitched against light, blindness against vision, ignorance against knowledge, and impotence against action.

As a representative of the Orthodox faith, Alexis miraculously delivers the Mongol infidels from the “darkness” of their barbaric ways, bringing them into the “light” of the Russo-​Byzantine faith and civilization. Dzhanibeg can only passively observe Alexis, who actively brings relief and salvation. In fact, it was around this time in the mid-​ nineteenth century that icon painting was for the

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Fig. 19  Dionysius and workshop, Metropolitan Alexis Healing the Tatar Queen Taidula of Blindness, detail of Metropolitan Alexis Vita Icon, 1480. Oil on wood, 77 ½ × 59 ¾ in. (197 × 152 cm). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

first time introduced as a serious subject of study at the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Arts. Initiated by the energetic Prince Grigorii Gagarin, the icon-​painting class was meant to train artists in the technical skills and painterly methods of iconic representation. Before being appointed vice president of the academy in 1859, Gagarin had served as a diplomat in Europe. In the late 1820s and early 1830s he spent considerable time in Constantinople, where he encountered important Byzantine monuments such as the Hagia Sophia and the Kariye Camii firsthand.47 In the 1840s Gagarin traveled in the Caucasus and was especially taken with the medieval Armenian and Georgian churches he saw in the region, so much so that he even published an extensive study

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The Icon and the Square

of these monuments, entitled Le Caucase pittoresque, which included numerous reproductions of his own sketches and architectural drawings (fig. 20).48 Gagarin believed that the new large-​scale architectural projects that were being undertaken by the state at this time, such as the construction of the St. Isaac Cathedral in St. Petersburg (1818–58) and the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, required artists who would be professionally trained in the methods and techniques of icon painting and monumental decoration, skills that a traditional academic education did not provide. Accordingly, Gagarin went to great lengths to secure an annual sum of 4,000 rubles to support the needs of the icon-​painting class.49 One of the main problems he encountered at the academy was a lack of high-​ quality examples of medieval Russo-​Byzantine art that students could use as models. As in the venerable academic tradition of having students copy Greco-​Roman plaster casts in order to improve their figure-​drawing skills, Gagarin believed that the icon-​ painting class for like reasons needed a sizeable collection of Russo-​Byzantine art objects. To this end, he went about establishing a museum of Christian antiquities at the academy in 1856 and personally oversaw the acquisition of medieval Byzantine and Russian icons, fragments of frescoes and mosaics, facsimiles of illuminated manuscripts, and color reproductions of the interior decoration of a number of important Byzantine and medieval Russian monuments, such as the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, the twelfth-​century Church of Christ the Savior on the Nereditsa, the St. Theodore of Heraclea Church in Novgorod, and the Betania and Gelati Monasteries in Georgia. A major donation in 1860 from the archaeologist and collector Petr Sevastianov (1811–1867)

significantly expanded the museum collection. Returning to Russia from a fourteen-​month expedition to Mount Athos, Sevastianov brought over a large number of Byzantine artifacts, which included 150 twelfth-, thirteenth-, and fourteenth-​century icons, a number of fresco fragments from the Pantocrator and Philotheou Monasteries, 200 architectural drawings, and 1,200 reproductions of icons, mosaics, frescoes, and illuminated manuscripts.50 That same year two additional important bequests were made to the museum, further augmenting its holdings. The first comprised a large number of applied-​art objects from the eleventh-​century St. Sophia Cathedral in Novgorod, including such rare pieces as the intricately carved sixteenth-​century Sophia ambon and a fifteenth-​century wooden sculpture of Saint George on horseback.51 The second consisted of both original artworks and high-​quality facsimiles of icons, royal doors, and liturgical objects from several medieval monasteries and churches in Pskov, Novgorod, and Staraia Ladoga. Thanks to these and other donations, by the end of 1860 the academy museum had received more than fifteen hundred new pieces of Byzantine and medieval Russian art.52 The following year Gagarin appointed Vasilii Prokhorov to oversee the collection, and in 1862 the latter began to publish a luxuriously illustrated journal, entitled Christian Antiquities and Archaeology, which publicized the museum collection and brought it to the attention of a broader public.53 Until the founding of the Russian Museum of His Imperial Majesty Alexander III in 1898, the academy’s Museum of Christian Antiquities was the only major collection of medieval Russian and Byzantine art in St. Petersburg—with the exception of the Hermitage—and as such played an important role in the revival, even more so than the short-​lived

Fig. 20  Grigorii Gagarin, murals of the Betania Monastery, from Le Caucase pittoresque, 1847. Private collection.

icon-​painting class, which ceased to exist in 1859. From its inception the class had encountered vehement opposition from the more conservative members of the academy faculty, who claimed that a return to Russo-​Byzantine pictorial traditions would lead to a decline in Russia’s artistic culture.54 Gagarin recalled that whenever he mentioned the importance of studying Byzantine art to his colleagues,

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he met with “ironic and disdainful” smiles and was showered “with a heap of witty remarks about the deformity of [Byzantine] proportions, the angularity of forms, the clumsiness of poses, the awkwardness and savageness of the compositions.”55 However, despite these setbacks, Gagarin’s and Prokhorov’s efforts eventually led in 1873 to the establishment at the academy of a permanent lecture series on the history of medieval Russian art, which were delivered by Prokhorov and were open to the general public, as well as the academy faculty and students. Not only was this the first course of its kind ever to be taught in Russia, but in 1876 it was made mandatory for all the students of the academy. Indeed, by the 1870s and 1880s the appearance of a new generation of dedicated scholars and professional restorers in the field of Russo-​Byzantine art began profoundly to transform attitudes both in the Imperial Academy of Arts and among the broader public. The famous art critic Vladimir Stasov directly attributed these changes to Gagarin’s activities, which he believed had made a lasting impact on the course of the Russo-​Byzantine revival. In 1885 Stasov wrote that “thanks to Prince Gagarin and his sustained efforts, in the practice of monumental religious art, we now have concepts and requirements that previously did not exist at all. Now artists are required to possess knowledge of archaeological, historical, costume, and other technical details and expertise, which were previously completely overlooked. We began with the study of Byzantium and finished with the study of all things Russian and Slavic.”56 By the end of Gagarin’s tenure as the vice president of the academy in 1872, the Museum of Christian Antiquities comprised one of the biggest collections of Byzantine and medieval Russian art in the country. When it was formally handed over to

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The Icon and the Square

the Russian Museum of His Imperial Majesty Alexander III in 1898, it contained “1,616 ancient icons, 3,346 different wooden artifacts, 141 carvings, miters, and liturgical objects.”57 Meanwhile, Gagarin’s vehement advocacy for both the preservation of ancient Russo-​Byzantine monuments and the revival of the Russo-​Byzantine style in contemporary architecture resulted in the advent of several major restoration and revivalist projects. For example, the St. Sophia Cathedrals in Kiev and Novgorod and the Assumption Cathedral in Moscow were cleaned and restored. Likewise, the revivalist St. Vladimir Cathedrals in Kiev (1862–82), Sevastopol (1862–88), and Chersonesus (1861–91) and the St. Demetrius of Thessaloniki Church (1861–66) in St. Petersburg were constructed at this time.

Restoration, Archaeology, and Scholarship A key figure in the restoration initiatives of the 1870s and 1880s was the archaeologist and art historian Adrian Prakhov. A professor at the St. Petersburg University and a leading member of the Imperial Russian Archaeological Society, Prakhov initiated a number of important projects, the most significant of which were the restorations of some of the oldest medieval monuments in the Russian Empire: the St. Sophia Cathedral, the Church of St. Cyril, and the Monastery of St. Michael of the Golden Domes in Kiev. From 1869 to 1873 Prakhov traveled extensively throughout Europe, the eastern Mediterranean, and the Middle East, visiting France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, among others, and went to great lengths to see as many early Christian sites as he could. As a result of these travels, he amassed an extensive collection

of drawings, sketches, photographs, and chromolithographs of a number of important early Christian and Byzantine monuments. A fervent admirer of Byzantine art and architecture, he at one point proposed that the Imperial Russian Archaeological Society sponsor an expedition to study the medieval churches of Greece and to copy the mosaics and frescoes in the monasteries of Daphni, Hosios Lukas, Meteora, and Mystras.58 Unfortunately, this ambitious project was never realized, and Prakhov turned his attention to the study and preservation of monuments closer to home. In 1880 he secured from the state 10,000 rubles for cleaning and restoring the twelfth-​century frescoes of the St. Cyril Church in Kiev, a project Prakhov described as “the first large-​scale archaeological undertaking begun in the prosperous reign of the Sovereign Emperor [Alexander II].”59 With the help of a team of artists from the Murashko School of Drawing, Prakhov removed the layers of later seventeenth-​century overpainting and reinforced the original medieval frescoes with enamel varnish and turpentine.60 Well-​preserved frescoes were left untouched, while partially preserved frescoes were retouched with minor additions. In places where the original frescoes had been entirely lost, Prakhov had the artist Mikhail Vrubel execute new ones (figs. 38 and 42) in a style meant to closely resemble that of the twelfth-​century originals (a style discussed in greater detail in the third chapter). In addition to restoring the frescoes, Prakhov constructed a new iconostasis for the church. In 1884 he had discovered a number of twelfth-​century frescoes in the apse of the altar depicting the life of Saint Cyril of Alexandria, to whom the church was dedicated, but they were completely obscured by a seventeenth-​century Baroque iconostasis.61 To remedy this, Prakhov

proposed to construct a new single-​tier marble templon above which the original frescoes could be seen. He designed the structure for the new iconostasis himself and commissioned Vrubel to paint for it four large panel icons depicting Christ, the Virgin and Child, and Saints Cyril and Afanasii. Two years later Prakhov became involved in the large-​scale restoration of the St. Sophia Cathedral, where he personally uncovered four previously hidden Byzantine mosaics: those of the Christ Pantocrator (fig. 45), an archangel, and the apostle Paul in the central dome of the church, and the figure of Saint Aaron on the triumphal arch. He also discovered the twelfth-​century frescoes of Saints Adrian and Natalia of Nicomedia, the martyrs Saint Domnius and Saint Philippol, the Baptism of Christ, and the eleventh-​century fresco of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste in the apse of the baptistery.62 Lastly, in 1888 Prakhov accepted a commission to clean and restore the twelfth-​century mosaics and frescoes of the Monastery of St. Michael of the Golden Domes. An important aspect of Prakhov’s restoration activities was his practice of making high-​quality life-​size copies in oil paint of all the frescoes and mosaics he restored, a practice he followed in Kiev and in other Ukrainian cities, such as Vladimir-​in-Volhynia and Chernigov.63 He would also document the entire restoration process with multiple photographs. Almost two hundred of these life-​size color copies were exhibited to the general public in St. Petersburg in 1883 and then in Odessa the following year and were accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue with detailed descriptions and explanations of all the images.64 As a celebrated expert of Russo-​Byzantine art, Prakhov was also commissioned to oversee several revivalist projects, the most important of which was

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Fig. 21  Interior view of the Cathedral of St. Vladimir, Kiev, 1862–82.

the interior decoration of the St. Vladimir Cathedral in 1885–96 (fig. 21). For this project Prakhov invited a number of eminent contemporary artists from the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Arts, including Viktor Vasnetsov (1848–1926), Mikhail Nesterov (1862–1942), Pavel Svedomskii (1849–1904), and

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The Icon and the Square

Mikhail Vrubel, as well as a number of lesser-​known Polish and Ukrainian artists, such as Wilhelm Kotarbinskii, Mykola Pymonenko, Viktor Zamirailo, Timofei Safonov, and Serhii Kostenko.65 Prakhov wanted the cathedral to reflect the religious, ethical, and aesthetic ideals of the times and therefore granted the artists a considerable degree of stylistic and iconographic freedom in the execution of the frescoes and mosaics. As a result, a striking feature of the new cathedral was the predominance of stylized ornamentation in the form of abstract, geometric patterns, as well as sinuous vegetal and floral motifs strongly reminiscent of international Art Nouveau, or stil modern, as it was called in Russia at the turn of the century.66 Accordingly, as this book contends, the Russo-​Byzantine revival became intimately linked with modern artistic expression and with the advent of a new, distinctly fin de siècle style. In other words, these new revivalist monuments became aesthetic microcosms of Russia’s larger engagement with and response to modernity, combining nostalgia for the past, traditionalism, historicism, and nationalism, on the one hand, with technological progress, artistic innovation, and avant-​garde experimentation, on the other. Perhaps the most instrumental figure in the Byzantine revival was the art historian and archaeologist Nikodim Kondakov, who is known today as one of the most celebrated founders of the modern study of Byzantine art both in Russia and abroad.67 Although he trained under the famous Slavonic philologist and linguist Fedor Buslaev, Kondakov soon turned his attention to the then-​nascent discipline of Byzantine art history, investigating a wide range of different media, including frescoes and mosaics, miniatures and icons, architecture and the decorative arts. His doctoral thesis, The History of Byzantine

Art and Iconography Traced in the Miniatures of Greek Manuscripts, was first published in Odessa in 1876 and then again in an enlarged French edition in 1886.68 This ambitious work challenged the idea of a “frozen” and “unchanging” Byzantine pictorial tradition by tracing an iconographic and stylistic evolution in the development of Byzantine art over the course of several centuries. It also attempted to draw parallels between Byzantine, Carolingian, and Renaissance art, arguing that Byzantium took part in a broader cultural and artistic exchange and was not as isolated and insular as was previously assumed. In some of his later publications, such as The Byzantine Churches and Monuments of Constantinople (1886),69 Kondakov even went so far as to claim that the Crusades had stimulated a renewal in Western artistic practices by bringing Europeans into direct contact with Byzantine art and architecture. According to Kondakov, this formative encounter ultimately sowed the first seeds of the Italian Renaissance. Kondakov’s multiple pioneering publications— The Ancient Architecture of Georgia (1876), The Miniatures of a Greek Manuscript: Psalter of the ixth Century (1878), The Byzantine Mosaics of the Mosque of Kariye Camii in Constantinople (1881), and Travels to Sinai: The Antiquities of the Mount Sinai Monastery (1882)70—earned him both a professorship at St. Petersburg University (1888–97) and the position of head curator of the medieval and Renaissance collections at the Hermitage Museum (1888–93). The curatorship brought Kondakov into close contact with Byzantine decorative-​art objects, fueling his interest in this art form and resulting in his seminal 1892 publication on Byzantine enamels, which was simultaneously published in French and German.71 It was positively reviewed in both the Russian and

the foreign press, including by leading European Byzantinists Charles Diehl and Paul Weber, and cemented Kondakov’s international reputation. In addition to being awarded a gold medal by the Imperial Russian Archaeological Society, Kondakov was made an honorary member of the European Archaeological Society in Italy and a grand officier in the Légion d’honneur in France.72 It was also at this time that Kondakov became one of the founders of the Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople, which was first conceived in 1887 and opened on February 26, 1895.73 Headed by Fedor Uspenskii, the institute was actively supported by the Russian ambassador to Constantinople, Alexander Nelidov, who took a keen interest in the enterprise and enthusiastically promoted all of its activities. As a major research center, the institute’s primary goal was to study the art, architecture, history, and culture of Byzantium. In the course of its existence, it managed to assemble a significant library collection and to oversee a number of important expeditions and excavations throughout the Ottoman Empire, including in Bulgaria, Macedonia, Syria, Palestine, and Mount Athos, which led to the creation of a Cabinet of Antiquities within the institute. With time, this cabinet gradually expanded into a small museum, whose collection contained many important Byzantine artifacts and works of art, such as the fourteenth-​ century icon of Saint Anastasia the Healer and a sixteenth-​century icon of the Christ Pantocrator from Mount Athos, both presently in the Hermitage Museum, as well as architectural fragments and reliefs from the Kariye Camii, the Hippodrome, and the Church of the Theotokos Chalkoprateia.74 The institute was open to all scholars of Byzantium, both Russian and foreign alike, and oversaw the

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publication of sixteen scholarly volumes of Izvestiia RAIK (News of the Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople), which comprised essays on the most recent discoveries and accomplishments of the institute. Some of its findings were also regularly featured in the Vizantiiskii vremennik, a leading scholarly journal of Byzantine studies, which was founded in 1894 and published by the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Sciences. In addition to its research activities, the Russian Archaeological Institute over the years adopted a more active role of protecting and restoring surviving monuments of Byzantine antiquity, which the Ottoman authorities had neglected for centuries.

From Constantinople to Muscovy As Stasov had already observed in 1885, the initial scholarly and public interest in Byzantium gradually extended to Russia’s medieval artistic heritage as well. Although some studies on Russian art had already appeared in the mid-​nineteenth century, such as Fedor Solntsev’s Antiquities of the Russian State (1849–53), Ivan Sakharov’s Exploration of Russian Icon Painting (1849), and Dmitrii Rovinskii’s History of the Russian Schools of Icon Painting Through the End of the Seventeenth Century (1856), they tended to be isolated endeavors undertaken by individual enthusiasts.75 The rigorous and systematic study of medieval Russian art as a field of serious scientific inquiry only began in the late 1880s and was largely brought about by Kondakov and his students, who became progressively interested in the differences and similarities between medieval Russian art and its Byzantine prototype. In 1888–89, Kondakov was personally involved in the archaeological

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excavations in Chersonesus, which brought him into direct contact with the surviving monuments and artifacts of the ancient Greek, Byzantine, and medieval Russian settlements of the Crimean Peninsula. As a result, he turned his attention to the exploration of the gradual evolution of Greek and Byzantine artistic forms into a recognizable, distinctively Russian pictorial tradition. Thus, for example, in 1888 Kondakov published a number of short studies on the Russo-​Byzantine monuments of Kiev and Theo­ dosia. It was in the years immediately preceding these new studies that Prakhov had first cleaned and restored the frescoes and mosaics of the St. Sophia Cathedral, the Church of St. Cyril, and the Monastery of St. Michael of the Golden Domes and had organized the accompanying exhibitions of life-​size copies of this monumental art in St. Petersburg and Odessa, attracting both scholarly and public interest to these monuments, including that of Kondakov. By the mid-1890s Kondakov had shifted his attention almost exclusively to the study of the early Byzantine influences on the monuments and art of Kiev, Vladimir, Novgorod, and Pskov.76 These new interests culminated in the publication of Russian Treasures from the Period of the Kievan Dukedoms (1896) and the definitive six-​volume encyclopedia Russian Antiquities in Monuments of Art (1889–99), which Kondakov co-​authored with Count Ivan Ivanovich Tolstoy, the vice president of the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Arts.77 The latter was a particularly comprehensive survey of the art produced in Russo-​Kievan territories from the Scythian era to the fourteenth century, and was the first all-​inclusive history of medieval Russian art ever to be published. It contained more than a thousand illustrations and was translated into French in 1891 so that it would be accessible to a wider international audience.78

In this publication Kondakov went to some lengths to distinguish between “Byzantine,” “Russo-​Byzantine,” and purely “Russian” pictorial languages. Thus, for example, he identified a clear artistic shift from the “Greek” mosaics and frescoes of the St. Sophia Cathedral in Kiev to those of the Monastery of St. Michael of the Golden Domes, arguing that the elongated proportions and exaggerated movements of the figures depicted in the latter betrayed a noticeable deviation from the more static and stylized monumentality of the St. Sophia representations. Kondakov concluded that this demonstrated the involvement of Russian craftsmen, who must have been enlisted in the decoration of the monastery in addition to the Byzantine masters. Moreover, Kondakov considered the monumental art in the cathedrals of Vladimir, Novgorod, and Pskov to have significantly departed from the recognizably Byzantine, or “Greek,” representational mode of the Kiev monuments to include purely Russian pictorial elements. This novel methodological approach to the analysis and categorization of medieval art and architecture in Russia marked an important departure from the way these monuments had been understood—or rather misunderstood—in the early and mid-​nineteenth century. As Iurii Savel’ev points out, the terms “Byzantine,” “Russo-​Byzantine,” “Byzanto-​Russian,” and “pre-​Petrine” had been applied indiscriminately to a vast number of early Christian and medieval monuments throughout the Russian Empire without due attention paid to their individual architectural and pictorial characteristics.79 Accordingly, in many nineteenth-​century Russian publications, the term “Byzantine” was used loosely to describe all medieval architecture that was not recognizably “Gothic” or “Romanesque.”

Kondakov’s scholarly contributions were thus instrumental in transforming the ways in which Russia’s medieval artistic heritage was understood and evaluated both in academic circles and among the broader public. Following his lead, a younger generation of scholars such as Dmitrii Ainalov (1862–1939), Egor Redin (1863–1908), Dmitrii Trenev (1867–?), and Alexander Uspenskii (1873–1938) began to take a keen interest in this subject matter, and a large number of scholarly studies on medieval Russian art were published at the turn of the century, including The St. Sophia Cathedral in Kiev: A Study of Its Mosaics and Frescoes, Ancient Monuments of Art in Kiev, The Iconostasis of the Smolenskii Cathedral in the Novodevichii Convent in Moscow, and The History of the Frescoes of the Assumption Cathedral in Moscow, among many others.80 All of these new publications indirectly stimulated the creation of the first significant public and private collections of Byzantine and medieval Russian art, which were presented to the general public in a number of watershed exhibitions (discussed in more detail in chapter 2). Thus, for example, in 1885 the Hermitage Museum acquired the extensive Alexander Basilewsky (1829–1899) collection of early Christian and Byzantine art objects, and in the late 1880s and early 1890s Nikolai Likhachev (1862–1936) began to assemble what eventually became one of the largest and most important private collections of Byzantine and Russian icons in Europe. Not only did these collections and exhibitions shed new light onto Russia’s rich artistic past, but they also began to stir a wider public interest in the preservation and reinstatement of what was then perceived to be a disappearing aesthetic tradition. Since many of the original artworks had been lost in the course of Russia’s Westernization, there was

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an increasing sense of urgency that the surviving ancient frescoes and icons needed to be salvaged for posterity, and the government launched several conservation and restoration projects. By 1890 the state had increased its annual subsidy to the Imperial Russian Archaeological Society from 17,000 to 45,000 rubles. Similarly, in 1886 and 1888 the government bequeathed 25,000 rubles and an additional annual subsidy of 5,000 rubles to the Imperial Moscow Archaeological Society.81 This funding was meant to support a number of different conservation programs throughout the Russian Empire, and by the close of the nineteenth century a large number of medieval monuments had been cleaned and restored, including the Church of the Tithes in Kiev, the Assumption and St. Demetrius Cathedrals in Vladimir, the Church of Christ the Savior on the Nereditsa, the St. George Cathedral in Iuriev-Polskii, and the Transfiguration Cathedral of the Mirozhskii Monastery in Pskov, among many others.82 Lastly, under Alexander II the state funded the establishment of a number of workshops for the cleaning and restoration of old icons. All of these conservation activities further fueled the discovery of a forgotten art: discovery in the literal sense, for it was only after the removal of numerous layers of varnish and repainting that the importance of this art could be fully appreciated. In addition to recovering the art of the past, the government began to advocate the study of contemporary icon-​painting practices, which were seen to be on a continuum with the past. The prevailing idea was that by observing contemporary practices in rural Russia and in the ancient centers of icon production such as Vladimir and Novgorod, it would be possible to regain some of this lost tradition. As part of this initiative, in 1902–3 Kondakov went on an

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The Icon and the Square

expedition through rural Russia to study current practices in icon painting and was deeply disturbed by what he considered to be its dismal state, on the verge of complete disappearance. As a result, Kondakov founded the Committee for the Encouragement of Icon Painting.83 This organization helped to open schools for the better training of the craftsmen who had preserved the icon-​painting tradition since the Middle Ages but were now suffering from unfair competition of chromolithography, which could produce greater numbers of cheaper icons. However, despite the long-​lasting impact of his scholarly activities on the Moscow and St. Petersburg art worlds, Kondakov himself took little interest in contemporary artistic movements. He remained largely unaware of the connections between his scholarship and the budding aspirations of a new generation of avant-​garde artists, who began to look to Russo-​Byzantine art as a divergent system of visuality and a powerful pictorial alternative to the then-​ pervasive nineteenth-​century naturalism propagated by the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg and the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. Kondakov was first and foremost an archaeologist and an art historian who was interested in Byzantine and medieval Russian art as relics of the past, not as revitalizing agents in a broader cultural revival. Despite his close friendship with the highly influential and nationalist critic Vladimir Stasov— who had repeatedly championed Kondakov’s work in the popular press—Kondakov himself did not share Stasov’s call to arms for an artistic revival on the basis of the medieval Russo-​Byzantine tradition. Although Kondakov’s vast scholarly output significantly contributed to the repositioning of Byzantine and medieval Russian art in the national consciousness and broader culture, Kondakov himself hated

the new “fashion” for icons that had arisen by the 1910s and that in many ways was brought about by his own work. He had nothing but contempt for the “aesthetes” and “dilettantes” who now scrambled to amass vast collections of iconic and medieval art. Furthermore, while not antinationalist, Kondakov had little interest in any Slavophile agendas. He valued Byzantine and medieval Russian art not as unique repositories of a national artistic genius but rather as important vessels of Hellenistic forms, which had persisted since antiquity. Kondakov believed that Byzantium, as the true heir of ancient Greece, was the center of development for all medieval art—Western and Eastern alike. Thus, rather than being diametrically opposed, both the Italian Renaissance and the Russian icon-​painting tradition were simply two different branches of the same Byzantine tree. In fact, instead of valuing the nonrepresentational and abstract qualities of Russo-​ Byzantine art, Kondakov argued that the most successful representatives of that artistic tradition were formally akin to Italian Trecento paintings or Hellenistic grave portraits, a contention that generated violent polemics among the younger generation of scholars and art historians who went on to challenge his legacy in the subsequent decades.

New Criticism and Contemporary Art Despite the considerable gains made in scholarship, as well as in exhibition and restoration practices, many twentieth-​century thinkers and critics still felt that the Russo-​Byzantine representational tradition was largely underappreciated aesthetically at the close of the nineteenth century. Writing in 1923, the art historian Pavel Muratov (1881–1950) stated:

“At the end of the nineteenth century, ancient Russian art did not yet have its own viewer, who could appreciate it as a unique artistic phenomenon; it did not have its own public, a sympathetic and appreciative milieu. Around 1910 this viewer appeared, this public was found, and the sympathetic milieu came into being.” Undoubtedly with Kondakov in mind, Muratov continued: There is no reason . . . to blame Russian scholars, Russian archeologists—all of those who studied Russian antiquities in the course of the preceding century—for “overlooking” the magnificence and beauty of old Russian art and failing to acquaint Europe with it. Those same objects were viewed by the people of the previous century with necessarily different eyes. In their judgments they relied on different evaluative criteria: their imagination was always predicated on a different aesthetic ideal.84

Muratov attributed this underestimation of medieval Russian art to the dominant nineteenth-​century taste for illusionistic and naturalistic depiction. He argued that it was only thanks to the Russian public’s exposure to and appreciation of modern French art in the collections of Sergei Shchukin (1854–1936) and Ivan Morozov (1871–1921) that it was finally able to apprehend and properly value the formal complexities and artistic intelligence of Russo-​Byzantine representations: “Manet, the Impressionists, and Cézanne were not only great masters in their own art but also great civilizers . . . educators of our eyes and sentiments.”85 Muratov’s pointed parallel between Russo-​ Byzantine visuality and modern European art was neither accidental nor exceptional. Unlike Kondakov and his contemporaries, the subsequent generation of art historians and intellectuals, such

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as Nikolai Punin (1888–1953), Nikolai Tarabukin (1889–1956), Iakov Tugenkhold (1892–1928), Igor Grabar (1871–1960), Vladimir Markov (1877–1914), and Aleksei Grishchenko (1883–1977)—to name but a few—were deeply invested in both the present and the future development of Russian art. Their interest in the past and the Russo-​Byzantine tradition was fueled not simply by historical curiosity but by a deep-​rooted desire to effect change in the contemporary art world. Addressing his own generation of art critics and art historians, Muratov advised that “the work of the researcher” ought to be joined with “the work of the theorist.”86 According to many of these thinkers, contemporary Russian art was in a state of crisis and stultification as it followed one of three dead-​end paths: the long-​impoverished naturalism of the Peredvizhniki, the hollow decadence of the Mir Iskusstva group, or the mindless subservient imitation of the French avant-​garde—none of which had produced original or innovative artwork. Writing in 1913, the art historian and critic Nikolai Punin pessimistically observed that Russian art had “lost all of its meaning,” had become “unnecessary” and “dead” for the majority of viewers.87 The artist Aleksei Grishchenko similarly stated that the Russian art world of that year was characterized by “opacity and confusion and a total disengagement with pictorial form.”88 What had saved European art in a similar “moment of darkness,” according to Grishchenko, was the “innovative genius” of Cézanne, “which catalyzed the experiments of Picasso and the Cubists.”89 However, since Russia lacked such a redemptive equivalent, the only way for young Russian artists to meaningfully contribute to international modern art was to look back “to the golden age of the Russian icon—the path to powerful painterly form.”90

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The Icon and the Square

Punin and Tarabukin expanded on Grishchenko’s arguments, claiming that European art was also in a state of terrible decline and was moving in the direction of a cold, rational, and empty formalism, where artists congratulated themselves on “successfully combining several coloristic patches on the behind of a prostitute.”91 Accordingly, Punin and Tarabukin believed that the aesthetic and ideaistic reevaluation of the Russo-​Byzantine tradition would not only revive Russian contemporary art but could actually pave the way for an international artistic revolution: “We believe that the icon . . . will set contemporary art on a path toward achievements different from those which have preoccupied European art in the last decade . . . we are searching for different values, a different inspiration, a different art.”92 As already mentioned, such frequent comparisons between Russo-​Byzantine art and European modernism were neither coincidental nor unprecedented, but were stimulated by a series of events in the years 1910–13. The first of these was Henri Matisse’s visit to Moscow in October of 1911. The artist was hosted by his patron Sergei Shchukin, a prominent art collector, and received a warm welcome among the Muscovite artistic and intellectual elites. By the time of his arrival, both Matisse and his work were already relatively well known in the Russian art world. About thirty-​two of his paintings were in Moscow collections, twenty-​five of them in Shchukin’s, which had been open to the public since 1907 and included such modernist masterpieces as Statue and Vases on an Eastern Carpet (1908), The Dinner Table (Harmony in Red) (1908), Spanish Dancer (1909), Coffeepot, Carafe, and Fruit Dish (1909), and the Dance and Music panels (1910).93 Matisse’s work had likewise been widely reproduced in various artistic journals in the years 1908–10, and even translations of his

celebrated “Notes d’un peintre” had appeared in the sixth issue of Zolotoe runo in 1909.94 It was in this critical context that Benois first labeled Matisse a “Byzantinist,” describing his art as the new “Byzantinism of our age.” Emphasizing that few contemporary artists had been able to achieve such widespread renown and recognition during their lifetimes as Matisse, Benois observed that an “entire school of artists in St. Petersburg” were following in the Frenchman’s footsteps.95 Consequently, at the time of his visit, Matisse was already enough of a celebrity in Russia to generate a considerable media flourish, and his stay was closely documented in Russkie vedomosti, Utro rossii, Rannee utro, Protiv techeniya, and Zerkalo, among other major newspapers. Of particular interest were Matisse’s comments on contemporary art and his responses to early Byzantine and Russian icons, which he had seen for the first time. The artist was repeatedly quoted as praising the icons’ aesthetic qualities and their superiority to the Western artistic tradition: Yesterday I saw a collection of old Russian icons. They are really great art. I am in love with their moving simplicity which, to me, is closer and dearer than Fra Angelico. In these icons the soul of the artists who painted them opens out like a mystical flower. And from them we ought to learn how to understand art.96 The Russians do not suspect what artistic treasures they possess. I am familiar with the ecclesiastical art of several countries and nowhere have I seen such expressivity. . . . Your students have here, at home, incomparably better specimens of art (with respect to icon-​painting) than abroad. French artists should come to learn in Russia. Italy has less to offer in this sphere.97

On October 27, 1911, Matisse visited the Tretyakov Gallery, where he saw a special exhibit of early icon painting. The newspaper Utro rossii reported the following morning that “yesterday the French artist, Henri Matisse, visited the Tretyakov Gallery where he got to know works by Russian icon-​painters. . . . Apparently, the pictures produced a great impression on the French artist. . . . Matisse grants decisive priority to the Russian icon over the ecclesiastical painting of the Italian Renaissance.”98 Matisse’s positive commentary on medieval Russian art—hyperbolically ventriloquized by the Russian press—dramatized the connections between the trajectory of modern art and the iconic tradition, already hinted at by Benois in his 1910 article for the journal Rech’.99 For a Russian audience the approval of a prominent French artist meant that the appreciation of icons was not simply the result of a circumscribed regional chauvinism or sentimental revivalism but had international relevance. Russia’s long-​neglected indigenous artistic tradition suddenly seemed to point the way forward to the most radical modernist innovation—and not just in Moscow but in Paris. In his 1917 publication The Russian Icon as the Art of Painting, Grishchenko went so far as to claim that Matisse, upon his return to Paris from Moscow, was so dissatisfied with his use of color that he cut up several of his works.100 Claims such as Grishchenko’s became even more prevalent after the 1913 Exhibition of Ancient Russian Art (discussed in greater detail in the next chapter). Organized by the Moscow Archeological Institute in 1913 in celebration of the three-​ hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty, the exhibition stayed open for five months and showcased a vast array of icons, illuminated manuscripts, metalwork, and embroidery. It received

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widespread coverage in the Russian press, with prominent art historians and critics, such as Dmitrii Ainalov, Alexander Benois, Pavel Muratov, Nikolai Punin, and Iakov Tugenkhold, writing lengthy laudatory reviews of the exhibition: “The current Moscow exhibition is a major step forward and is acquainting large sectors of the Russian public with the art of icon painting. Of course, in three or four years Europe will also be dreaming of a similar exhibition, and Russian icon painting will enter the collections of Western museums as a time-​honored guest.”101 At the same time as the exhibition, Sergei Shchukin collaborated with the art historian Iakov Tugenkhold on a major publication that catalogued the former’s entire collection of modern French art and paid special tribute to his recently acquired Cubist paintings by Picasso.102 The coincidence of the exhibition of ancient icons and the publication of Shchukin’s modern-​art catalogue did not pass unnoticed, prompting intellectuals to embark on the most diverse interpretations and comparisons of the ancient and the modern. Pavel Muratov’s journal Sofia launched the debate by juxtaposing an article by art historian Alexander Anisimov (1877–1937) on medieval Novgorod icons with a critique of Picasso by Nikolai Berdiaev (1874–1948), in which the latter described the artist as a “magnificent” and “deeply affecting” genius, whose art symbolized a deeper crisis in modernity, where everything was moving toward “decrystallization, dematerialization, and disincarnation.”103 Philosopher, theologian, and scientist Pavel Florensky responded to the debate with the 1914 publication The Meaning of Idealism, in which he vehemently censured Picasso for the cold and detached rationality with which the artist deconstructed objects, entirely removing spirituality and cohesion from art. As a result, Florensky argued

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that Picasso’s still lifes of musical instruments from 1912–13 were nothing more than mechanical “images of a four-​dimensional perception from the poisoned soul of a great artist.”104 By contrast, Florensky saw medieval icons as the ideal form of art, antithetical to Picasso’s “dead” paintings both in their formal structure and in their transcendental subject matter. In a similar vein, in his essay “The Corpse of Beauty,” Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944) described Picasso’s Cubist works as “black icons” that were symptomatic of a crisis in Western civilization and ominously prefigured the outbreak of the First World War.105 However, not all of the comparisons between the icon exhibition and Picasso’s Cubist paintings that appeared in the press at this time were disparaging of the latter, and several accounts were highly laudatory. For example, Grishchenko claimed that “in a strange way twentieth-​century Paris echoes medieval Muscovy,” emphasizing what he saw as meaningful formal resonances between the two: “it is wonderful [to see] that in several Moscow icons, such as the Deeses nos. 125–127, the coloristic problem of combining three different tonalities is masterfully solved, [a problem] only recently explored by Picasso in his famous portrait Woman with a Fan from S. I. Shchukin’s collection.”106 Similarly, Benois published two articles in the journal Rech’, “Letters on Art: Icons and the New Art” and “Russian Icons and the West,” in which he—like Muratov—credited Picasso and his contemporaries for opening the public’s eyes to the aesthetic merit of icons: “Not only does the fourteenth-​century Nicholas the Miracle Worker or Nativity of the Mother of God help us to understand Matisse, Picasso, Le Fauconnier or Goncharova; but through Matisse, Picasso, Le Fauconnier and Goncharova, we feel the great beauty of these Byzantine pictures much

better, the fact that they have youth, power and animation.” Furthermore, Benois claimed that beyond the aesthetic and formal affinities between modern French art and medieval icons, they possessed a deeper internal coherence, which imbued them with metaphysical significance beyond the purely visual: In the works of the Cubists, just as in icons, the “advice of good sense” ends, while a mad dream begins—the logic of the irreal—and art returns in full to its mystic meaning.

. . . what we admire in icons today is not simply

their bright colours, their wonderful graphic sense, their incomparable technique but the depth of the spiritual life depicted in them.

. . . for contemporary art to develop for itself an

essence like that of icons, a spiritual metamorphosis would be necessary, and not only of individuals but of artistic creation as a whole.

Benois saw a historical imperative behind the “highly significant meeting” of these two ostensibly disparate pictorial traditions. Describing it as an “intervention of fate” and a “preordained coincidence,” he argued that the Russo-​Byzantine revival would prove to be a vital catalyst for rejuvenating contemporary art, both in Russia and in Europe, by allowing “even the most ardent and daring innovators [to] see a valuable sign for themselves in something which up until now had appeared to have died away hopelessly.”107

Florensky, Punin, Tarabukin, and the Philosophy of the Icon By 1915 both specialists and the general public alike increasingly viewed the Russo-​Byzantine artistic tradition as representative of a national creative genius

that could rival that of the Italian Renaissance. However, Pavel Florensky, Nikolai Punin, and Nikolai Tarabukin went even further in their writings, asserting that Russo-​Byzantine art was by far superior to that of the Italian Renaissance and subsequent European painting on the basis of its transcendental and ideaistic supremacy. Constructing the icon primarily as a cipher of an alternate reality, these three authors attempted to analyze its role not just as a visual image but as a universal symbol of metaphysical, utilitarian, aesthetic, and cultural significance. In short, the icon was presented as an invaluable tool with which society could fashion a new philosophical and spiritual consciousness in the face of modernity’s constant flux, instability, and fragmentation. These ideas were in large part shaped by the religious humanism and romantic nationalism that had flourished in Russia at the turn of the century and subsequently came to be known as the Russian Religious Renaissance.108 Central to this discourse were the writings of the nineteenth-​century philosopher and poet Vladimir Soloviev and the authors of the Vekhi, or Landmarks, publication (1909) (discussed in more detail in chapter 4). Generally acknowledged to be the founder of Russian sophiology, Soloviev believed in the spiritualization of matter and the universal presence of divine wisdom in all of creation.109 In addition, he maintained that Russia had a unique historical mission to unite the tradition of Western rational philosophy with the spiritual wisdom of the East.110 In many ways Soloviev was heir to the mid-​ nineteenth-​century Slavophile school of thought, translating their political-​historical arguments into theological-​philosophical ones. He contended that the once-​formidable school of European philosophy had exhausted itself in the modern age through

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“decomposition” into different subdisciplines, such as metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics, and stressed the need to reintegrate the materialist, intellectual, spiritual, and religious aspects of human thought into a single dynamic whole, which he called “integral life.”111 He argued that spiritual cognition was by far superior to analytical rationalism, writing that “truth is contained neither in the logical form of knowing nor in its empirical content; in general, it does not belong to theoretical knowledge in its separateness or exclusiveness—such knowledge is not genuine. Knowledge of truth is only that which corresponds to the will for good and to the feeling for beauty.”112 Since beauty was a central tenet in Soloviev’s philosophy, he believed that art could “become a theurgic force capable of transforming and ‘transilluminating’ the human world.”113 Art had the potential to rejuvenate and reintegrate an alienated and moribund society, and artists “could once again become high priests and prophets.”114 Soloviev fundamentally rejected the idea of “art for art’s sake” and instead called on contemporary art to become “an instrument in the realization of the Kingdom of God on earth.”115 In other words, art could reveal the fundamental spiritual essence that permeates all material reality and in so doing help mankind to achieve a truly enlightened modernity through the fusion of religion and philosophy, rationality and faith, and the secular and the sacred. As loci of theophany, or divine presence, iconic representations embodied “the incomprehensible interpenetration of the divine and the material”—a theme that had preoccupied Soloviev throughout his career.116 By simultaneously participating in the physical and the spiritual, and the concrete and the symbolic realms, icons bore direct witness to a deified creation—and by extension eternal truth—and could

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thus function as vehicles of universal salvation, helping humanity to attain theosis, the ultimate unification with the divine energies of the Creator. As Andrzej Walicki astutely notes, Soloviev “became a bridge, as it were, across which the liberal Russian intelligentsia were able to move from ‘legal Marxism’ to a Slavophile interpretation of Orthodoxy,” thus paving the way for a younger generation of religious humanist thinkers.117 In The Russian Idea Nikolai Berdiaev observes that Soloviev “had an enormous influence upon the spiritual renaissance at the beginning of the twentieth century.”118 The impact of his far-​reaching theories can be traced in a number of different twentieth-​century philosophical, theological, literary, and art-​historical texts, not least in those written by Florensky, Punin, and Tarabukin. The latter two thinkers in particular used them to construct a robust theory of twentieth-​century art and are now widely acknowledged to be the founders of a rigorous analytical tradition of modern Russian art criticism. Maria Gough describes them as the two “staunchest defenders of the avant-​garde,” best known for their writings on nonobjective, Constructivist, and Productivist art.119 Similarly, Florensky’s steadfast dedication to scientific knowledge—his pursuit of the logical, the mathematical, and the rational—underpinned all of his aesthetic and theological inquiries. In many ways, Punin’s, Tarabukin’s, and Florensky’s theories of the icon emblematize one of the principal themes that continue to intrigue historians of Russian art: the coexistence of transcendental thinking and historical materialism, which persisted throughout the late 1910s and well into the 1920s, and according to some scholars even informed the dialectical ideology of Socialist Realism. Father Pavel Florensky was an ordained priest in the Russian Orthodox Church and was one of

the most influential thinkers of his time. He was exceptionally well versed in multiple disciplines, including biology, physics, mathematics, psychology, theology, philosophy, literature, and art history, and published on the most diverse subjects, ranging from imaginary numbers in geometry to onomatodoxy in philosophy. Although not an art historian by training, he was extremely erudite in the fields of archaeology, art history, modern art historiography, and criticism. As Nicoletta Misler points out, his art-​ historical writings demonstrate a striking similarity to the most up-​to-​date European scholarship: “his analysis of spatiality betrays a close resemblance to the theories of Ernst Cassirer, Erwin Panofksy and Alois Riegl; his investigations into iconography and anthropology bring to mind the conclusions of Fritz Saxl and Aby Warburg, while his personal elaboration of what could be called a Formalist methodology indicates a clear recognition of Conrad Fiedler, Heinrich Wolfflin and Wilhelm Worringer.”120 In fact, his knowledge of art—and Byzantine and medieval Russian art in particular—was so extensive that he was invited to teach courses on this subject first at the MIKhIM (Moscow Institute of Historical and Artistic Researches and Museology) in 1920 and then at the VKhUTEMAS from 1921 to 1924.121 According to Misler, “Florensky believed that his generation had attained a new, post-​Kantian and post-​ Euclidean conception of life and art, one that corresponded more closely to the vision of the Ancient World and the Middle Ages than to that of post-​ Renaissance Europe.”122 Indeed, for Florensky, the Middle Ages were a “contemplative and creative” era, in contrast to the “predatory and mechanical” modernity of recent times, and especially the modernity of the late nineteenth century.123 It was modernity that had glorified a positivist vision of the world and had

produced the cult of a “false” Realism, by which Florensky meant the illusionism of nineteenth-​century naturalism. This “false” Realism signified the arrogant “subjectivism of modern man,” as the image unfolded from the single, dominant viewpoint of the artist/ viewer.124 By contrast, the icon was objective, collective, and universal. It not only employed inverse perspective and polycentrism but was also produced “collaboratively,” as “in earlier periods . . . [there was] greater cultural cohesion than in ours.”125 The icon was thus the “true” Realist work of art inasmuch as it adhered to a transcendental and unbiased truth: Obviously, realism is in any event a kind of tendency that affirms some kind of realia or realities—in contrast to illusions—in the world, in culture, and particularly in art. In realism that which genuinely exists is opposed only to what seems to exist, the ontologically solid to the spectral, the essential and stable to the easily scattered conglomeration of random encounters. . . .

. . . The illusion that comes closest to reality is in

essence the furthest removed from it. “You want to reach out and touch it,” when what is before us is a flat canvas— isn’t this triumph of naturalism a fraud that temporarily succeeds and shows what does not in fact exist? . . .

. . . [Illusionistic] art does not express a cognition of

the truth of things, it obscures it.126

Accordingly, for Florensky the ideal form of visual representation was expressed in medieval art, and especially in the Orthodox icon, rather than in naturalistic easel painting. In his two most widely read essays, “Reverse Perspective” (1920) and “Iconostasis” (1922),127 the author elaborates on the subtle complexities of the medieval image, tracing the development of art from antiquity to modernity and arguing that in its espousal of pictorial illusionism

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“from the Renaissance on, the religious art of the West has been based upon esthetic delusion” rather than on the objective rendition of reality.128 Analyzing a variety of artistic masterpieces by celebrated artists, including Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Rubens, and Rembrandt, Florensky observes that almost all ostensibly perspectival works of art actually violated mathematical perspective and employed multiple viewpoints, contradicting registers, and instances of reverse perspective. He therefore concludes that

It may be suggested here that it is not actually the means of depiction as such that are found pleasing, but the naivety and primitive quality of the art, which is still childishly carefree in regard to artistic literacy. There are even connoisseurs inclined to proclaim that icons are charming childish babbling. But no: the fact that icons which violate the laws of perspective are actually the work of first rank artists, whereas a less extreme transgression of these same laws is primarily characteristic of second- and third-​rate artists, prompts one to consider whether the opinion that icons are naive is not itself naive. On the other hand, these transgressions against the laws of perspective are so

a representation is a symbol, always, every representation,

persistent and frequent, so systematic I would say, and so

whether perspectival or non-​perspectival, no matter what

insistently systematic moreover, that the thought invol-

it is, and works of art differ from each other not because

untarily arises that these transgressions are not fortuitous,

some are symbolic and others are ostensibly naturalistic,

that there is a special system for the representation and

but because, since all are equally non-​naturalistic, they are

perception of reality as it is represented in icons.131

symbols of various aspects of an object, of various world perceptions, various levels of synthesis. Different methods of representation differ from each other, not as the object differs from its representation, but on the symbolic plane. Some are more crude, some less so; some are more or less complete; some are common to all mankind, some are less so. But all are symbolic in nature.129

The ideas expressed here closely resemble some of the concepts articulated by Erwin Panofsky in his celebrated essay “Perspective as Symbolic Form,” except that Florensky’s “Reverse Perspective” actually predated the former by four years.130 Florensky also dismisses the idea that the Russo-​Byzantine “world perception” was somehow “naïve” or “primitive” or that the absence of linear perspective in the iconic image was a result of ignorance or lack of artistic ability. Instead, he argues that the greater the skills of the iconic artist, the more radical were his “violations” of linear perspective:

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The Icon and the Square

Using the language of rejection, revolution, and “rule breaking” typical of avant-​garde polemics, Florensky goes on to claim that Russo-​Byzantine art consciously discarded linear perspective—presumably after its initial invention and proliferation in the fifteenth century—in order to communicate a more complex and sophisticated idea than the mere simulacrum of the external world: “all the schoolroom rules are overturned with such daring, their violation is masterfully emphasised, and the resulting icon conveys so much about itself and its artistic achievements to a spontaneous artistic taste, that there can no longer be any doubt: the ‘incorrect’ and mutually contradictory details of drawing represent a complex artistic calculation which, if you wish, you may call daring, but by no means naive.”132 After all, Florensky reminds us that the essence of iconic art was not merely to duplicate reality or to concern itself with visual aesthetics; that was the role erroneously

adopted by art during the Renaissance period, which had led to its inevitable decline. In other words, religious art—the kind produced during the Renaissance—was fundamentally different from sacred art—embodied by iconic representations. The latter ought to be thought of as visualized theology or God’s words materialized as images, whose true function hinged on the articulation of what Florensky called a “divine reality.” Although “contemporary empirical positivism underestimates the icon,” considering it “pure art”—to which modernity ascribes the lowly role of cultural curiosity or visual entertainment—the icon is, in fact, an “energy” that allows humans to “attain ontological contiguity with the prototype itself.”133 This conception of iconic representation dates all the way back to the early church fathers, such as Saint John of Damascus (675–753) and Saint Theodore the Studite (759–826), who discussed iconic images in precisely these terms: The nature of the flesh did not become divinity, but as the Word became flesh immutably, remaining what it was, so also the flesh became the Word without losing what it was, being rather made equal to the Word hypostatically. Therefore I am emboldened to depict the invisible God, not as invisible, but as he came visible for our sake, by participation in flesh and blood. So material things, on their own, are not worthy of veneration, but if the one depicted is full of grace, then they become participants in grace, on the analogy of faith. These and suchlike I reverence and venerate and every holy temple of God and every place in which God is named, not because of their nature, but because they are receptacles of divine energy and in them God was pleased to work our salvation.134

Florensky thus believed that iconic representations had survived through the ages not merely as circumscribed objects of church ritual or popular superstition but because of their powerful salutary effect on the human psyche and their ability to transcend time and space. He contended that “eternity must be witnessed in and through the icon”; and it was precisely this invaluable transcendental quality that art had complacently abandoned over the centuries, being satisfied with nothing more than its own “thingness.”135 This line of reasoning recalls Soloviev’s earlier writings on the metaphysical role and crucial spiritual function of art in society, and together they can be said to constitute a modern theological iconology that went hand in hand with the better-​known formal accounts of Russo-​ Byzantine art expressed by the likes of Alexander Benois, Sergei Makovsky, and Pavel Muratov. In many ways Nikolai Punin and Nikolai Tarabukin too combined the theological and formal interpretations of the icon in their respective publications, and more importantly, the two theorists linked them to contemporary artistic practices and the burgeoning Russian avant-​garde movements. Both shared Florensky’s ideas on the exceptional nature and significance of iconic art. In his Philosophy of the Icon Tarabukin credited Florensky with influencing much of his thinking on the subject and explicitly cited several of the latter’s works throughout his own account.136 Like Florensky, Punin and Tarabukin attacked what they saw as the lingering dominance of naturalism and the prevailing “art for art’s sake” credo in the Russian art world. Having studied at the St. Petersburg University under Kondakov’s student Dmitrii Ainalov, Punin was well versed in the history and development of Russo-​Byzantine art, and his first publications dealt exclusively with this subject matter.

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However, his deep investment in contemporary art meant that he soon abandoned purely academic inquiry into past artistic traditions in favor of analyzing the most recent trends and developments in the visual arts of his own day. In several of the 1913 essays that Punin published in the journal Apollon, he outlined two key ideas that came to structure his subsequent body of scholarship on the theory of modern art.137 The first of these was the notion that contemporary art found itself in a state of decline due to its continued reliance on either nineteenth-​century naturalism or a derivative, Western-​inspired formalism:

He considered the latter to be the conclusion to an artistic tradition, rather than a departure point for a new art. For Punin, a new art could only be born out of the Russo-​Byzantine artistic heritage, which possessed both a symbolic integrity and a spiritual dynamism in addition to its pictorial accomplishments. Not only were the fresco and the icon compelling aesthetic examples for contemporary art, but they also signaled the importance of surpassing the simple appeal to the senses and the intellect by affecting the human consciousness on a much more profound psychological level:

And now—a strange phenomenon—naturalistic art returns

On the walls of the churches of Ravenna, Venice, Palermo,

us to the past, after five centuries of searching [it] brings us

Constantinople, and Phocis, we witnessed over the course

to the sources, on the banks of which it has stagnated, con-

of ten centuries those ideas and states of consciousness

stantly admiring its own reflection. Naturalism becomes for

that were subsequently embraced and transformed in

us a period of bygone art and a period of decline.

Russian icon-​painting and that we would like to see in contemporary explorations [of art].

what is the art of the second half of the nineteenth century—Impressionism!—in it everything is dead, every-

we need to reject from the outset the idea of seeing in the

thing is formal, everything external has its crown, its best

icon exclusively artistic characteristics—such as color,

expression. Never before had art been as cold and as vain

style, design. . . . In the present case, we are not interested

as the moment when Impressionism gained the right to be

in the aesthetics of icon painting; the icon for us is not so

an obligatory artistic school.

much a work of art as it is a living organism, a vessel . . . of unique spiritual values, embodied in a form as extraor-

Is it possible . . . to doubt that Russian icon painting is for

dinary as it is expressive. The monuments of ancient

us a vital and deeply important historical fact, to which we

Russian icon painting do not teach us to paint or to draw

will be forced to return for many years to come? [We face]

better, but to think better, to view the concept of art differ-

either emaciation, the formalism of art, or its rebirth

ently, and to find alternative ways of articulating it.139

through the revival of forgotten traditions.138

Punin contended that most European art since the Renaissance aspired solely toward elegance, balance, and beauty and that an obsession with form and aesthetics at the exclusion of all else linked Salon painting, Impressionism, and even Cubism.

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The Icon and the Square

Central to Punin’s second key idea was what he perceived to be a fundamental opposition between the individualism and subjectivity of Western artistic culture and the collective anonymity of Byzantine and Russian icon painting. The author emphatically condemned the gap between contemporary art and

the masses, claiming that a truly living art had to be accessible and meaningful to all: “[In Byzantium] . . . art did not appear to be the property of a few closed and isolated circles; it was accessible to all.”140 According to Punin, the universal, metaphysical symbolism of icons was antithetical to the superficial “private fantasies” of contemporary Russian Symbolist art, exemplified in the works of the Mir Iskusstva and Blue Rose groups.141 In contrast to the latter, iconic representations employed a symbolism that was relevant to and understood by all viewers, regardless of their education and social class: “[I]n this wise and living symbolism there was nothing subjective, nothing solitary, nothing estranged.”142 Almost identical ideas are articulated in Nikolai Tarabukin’s Philosophy of the Icon written three years later, in 1916, the same year the author moved to St. Petersburg and devoted himself exclusively to the study of art history and theory. That year Tarabukin met Punin, who, like Florensky, exerted considerable influence on the development of his theories on art.143 Much like Punin and Florensky, Tarabukin believed that a work of art expresses genius not because of its artistic, that is to say, ultimately formal, qualities, but because of the depth and breadth of the worldview it reflects . . . thanks to the attributes of its religious-​philosophical order. The author’s genius is not that of a master artist, but of a philosopher. As an artist he may possess more or less technical skill. Genius is a philosophical category, talent is a technical [one] . . .

. . . artistic skill can be learned. Hence the existence

of art schools is legitimate.144

Embracing Hegel’s idea that the “true beautiful . . . is spirituality given shape,” Tarabukin believed that

the ultimate goal of art was to express the spiritual in material form.145 According to Tarabukin, however, beauty was, beginning with the Renaissance, increasingly equated with formal—that is, “external”—harmony. Thinkers such as Kant, Schiller, and Winckelmann saw beauty in the expression of material perfection, paving the way for a formalist and positivist theory of aesthetics, which in turn led Tarabukin to conclude that the “Renaissance epoch and subsequent centuries already carry the signs of a gradual degeneration, bringing art to a total impoverishment of both content and form. . . . Twentieth-​ century art is worthless because it is devoid of any meaningful content.”146 Tarabukin identified the exclusive equation of beauty with aesthetics as a western European concept of the Enlightenment, which he argued was in direct opposition to antiquity, where beauty was inextricably tied to morality, ethics, and religion, as evidenced in Plato’s writings. The Christian thinkers and writers of Byzantium inherited this Greek tradition, which they passed on to medieval Russia and which Tarabukin traced back to Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Vladimir Soloviev, whose theories about the theurgic properties of art and their capacity to transform society closely paralleled many of Tarabukin’s own views on art. He accordingly concluded that “the Middle Ages produced an art of unsurpassed value, in terms of both the depth of its content and its formal mastery,” and cited as examples the mosaics of San Vitale, Hagia Sophia, Kariye Camii, and the St. Sophia Cathedral in Kiev; the frescoes in the Church of Christ the Savior on the Nereditsa and those of Theophanes the Greek (1340–1410) and Dionysius (1440–1502); and finally the icons of the Virgin of Vladimir and Andrei Rublev’s Old Testament Trinity: this was “great” art produced by a powerful, religious

Byzantium Reconsidered

55

zeitgeist that had yet to be surpassed in modernity.147 However, it is important to emphasize that, despite the aforementioned examples, Tarabukin did not limit his definition of “true” art to art with only religious content. Instead, he argued that all art must contain a profound philosophical and metaphysical “ideal” that transcends the base dictum of “art for art’s sake.” As with Florensky, Tarabukin completely rejected the “primitivist” interpretation of Russo-​ Byzantine art. Instead, he went to great lengths to demonstrate the formal complexity and intricacy of iconic spatial structure and composition. Tarabukin asserted that, contrary to popular opinion, iconic space was not flat but spherical: As for the question of the “flat” style in icon painting. . . . [it] is not as straightforward as is presented by historians of ancient art. An icon painter has an approach to planarity completely different from that, for example, of an Egyptian artist or a Greek vase painter. . . . An icon painter conceptualizes the space he depicts not only three-​ dimensionally but also, so to speak, four-​dimensionally . . . his pictorial language is not at all flat like that of an Egyptian artist. The latter translates the three-​dimensional figure of a human being into two-​dimensional terms. An icon painter, thinking “four-​dimensionally,” constructs the concept of a kind of “spherical” space, relying on two-​ dimensional flatness as a substructure. The difference here is one not of form but of essence. This can be explained by referring to architectural drawings. After all, no one would argue that the architect’s concept of space is flat. Nevertheless, his constructions in architectural plans are rendered as flat planes.148

Relying on Florensky’s Imaginary Numbers in Geometry, Nikolai Lobachevsky’s non-​Euclidean

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The Icon and the Square

hyperbolic geometry, and Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, Tarabukin postulated that the most recent breakthroughs in European science—not the “restrictive-​positivist” variety of the nineteenth century but rather the “new science” of the early twentieth century—confirmed the validity of the “religious view of the structure of the universe” as simultaneously finite and infinite, a concept that was first intuitively conceived in the Middle Ages.149 As a finite microcosm that contains in itself the infinite macrocosm, the iconic image is thus more “modern” and “concrete” in its worldview than what was subsequently espoused in the Renaissance period and later centuries. Much like Florensky, Tarabukin concluded that, “in contrast to commonplace terminology, it could be said that the icon painter, as an artist and thinker, is far more realistic than all the secular art of western European culture, beginning with the Renaissance and up to the present day, typically referred to as ‘realistic’ and even naturalistic. The existence depicted in naturalistic painting— [is] phantasmagoric. . . . The world of religious consciousness, rendered by the icon painter, is real.”150 Two years after completing the Philosophy of the Icon, Tarabukin wrote another theoretical treatise on iconic art, The Genesis and Development of the Iconostasis. At the same time, he also wrote the essays “Contemporary Art: The Language of Forms” and On the Theory of Painting, which demonstrated the convergence of his interests in medieval and contemporary art and paved the way for his subsequent turn to Productivist theory, exemplified by the well-​ known essays From the Easel to the Machine (1923) and The Art of the Day (1925).151 After the Bolshevik Revolution, Tarabukin, like Punin, did not return to the topic of Russo-​Byzantine art, which can be partially explained by the antireligious climate of the

early Soviet years. Nonetheless, for both Punin and Tarabukin, the philosophical and theoretical engagement with the Russo-​Byzantine artistic tradition came to profoundly influence and structure their thinking and writing on the vanguard, nonobjective art of the late 1910s and early 1920s. Arguably, one can even postulate that it was precisely during the time of writing and thinking about Russo-​Byzantine art that the two authors formulated some of their most radical and pioneering theories on modern Soviet art. Both Punin and Tarabukin participated in the new revolutionary formations of Proletkult (Proletarian Culture), VKhUTEMAS, and INKhUK (Institute of Artistic Culture) in the early 1920s. Along with a number of other theorists, Punin and Tarabukin developed a new analytical approach to art that discarded the narrative, literary tradition of art criticism in favor of a formal, medium-​oriented one. Reconceptualizing the icon for a new, secular context, the two thinkers employed it as a discursive device for ideological, materialist, and utilitarian

ends. Moving beyond the purely formal and aesthetic, the novel Soviet avant-​garde art object was meant to educate the proletariat and forge a new Soviet cognition, recalling the ways in which the iconic image was espoused as a means of generating a new philosophical and spiritual consciousness. Just as Florensky had described the icon as a “true” Realist work of art, so the new Constructivist object was being fashioned as a “new realism”—an “honest,” proletarian artwork, which plainly revealed its material structure, instead of being deceptively illusionistic. Lastly, the notions of anonymous production and communal consumption associated with iconic and monumental religious art directly encapsulated the ethos of Productivist art, an art made by the collective for the collective. In short, the new Soviet art was functional, transpersonal, transparent, and ideological, recalling Florensky’s characterization of the icon as objective, collective, and universal. In a twist of irony, the icon became the perfect conceptual model for the new Soviet art object (a development discussed in more detail in the ensuing chapters).152

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2 FROM CONSTANTINOPLE TO MOSCOW AND ST. PETERSBURG Museums, Exhibitions, and Private Collections

Scholars of the Russian avant-​garde have often discussed the 1913 Exhibition of Ancient Russian Art as the first major presentation of medieval icon painting and works of liturgical art to the general public.1 However, as the Russian art historian Gerold Vzdornov has demonstrated, several important exhibitions had already preceded it in the nineteenth century.2 Indeed, the collecting, institutionalization, and exhibition of medieval art had begun as early as the 1840s and 1850s, culminating in the early 1910s. Private patrons such as Nikolai Rumiantsev (1754– 1826), Alexander Basilewsky, Petr Sevastianov, and Nikolai Likhachev had assembled vast collections of Byzantine and medieval Russian art before the turn of the century, which ultimately formed the bases of a number of museum departments, including those at the Hermitage, the Moscow Public and Rumian­ tsev Museum, the Russian Museum of His Imperial Majesty Alexander III, and the Imperial Russian Historical Museum. In some cases established scholars and critics like Nikodim Kondakov, Aleksei Uvarov (1825–1884), Ivan Zabelin (1820–1908), Pavel Muratov, and Nikolai Punin were directly involved

in systematizing, cataloguing, and organizing these collections, which led to a widespread reconceptualization of these artworks as aesthetic masterpieces in their own right instead of archaeological curiosities or church relics. As the early twentieth-​century art historian Nikolai Sychev has noted, for a long time the general public believed that Russian icon painting had been directly inherited from Byzantium and was “acquired by [the Russians] together with [Byzantium’s] religion and church rites, an inheritance that did not find fertile soil [in Russia] for further development, quickly succumbing to vulgarization in provincial workshops.”3 However, by the turn of the century, such opinions began to change as new museum installations emphasized the dynamic relationship between Byzantine and Russian icon painting, and the latter’s progressive evolution away from slavish imitation of Byzantine prototypes and toward new modes of artistic expression. Instead of being perceived as objects of mass production, executed by groups of anonymous craftsmen in an assembly-​line manner, individual artworks and even schools of icon painting were increasingly attributed

59

to master artists such as Andrei Rublev, Theophanes the Greek, Dionysius, and Simon Ushakov. Following Kondakov’s lead, more and more art historians and critics began to identify a “golden age” of artistic flourishing in Russia around the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and likened it to the Italian and German Renaissances of the same time period.4 The rise of nationalist sentiment during the reign of Alexander III (1881–94) meant that what were initially viewed as purely aesthetic categories were increasingly recast in ideological terms to include notions of national originality and spiritual superiority, so that the stylistic differences between the Byzantine and ancient Russian schools of icon painting took on a new set of cultural, historical, and political meanings. In fact, the very creation of new museums dedicated exclusively to national art and national history highlighted the growing desire of both government officials and private individuals alike to assemble tangible displays of material objects that seemed to advance the popular “Third Rome” doctrine, which was freshly revived in the wake of the Balkan Crisis and the Russo-​Turkish War of the 1870s.5 Originating in the early sixteenth century, the phrase was first used in a letter by the monk Filofei of Pskov, who famously wrote to the Grand Prince of Muscovy that “two Romes have fallen, the third endures, and a fourth there will not be.”6 According to this formulation, after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the leadership of the Christian Orthodox world had naturally passed to Russia, Byzantium’s true and rightful successor, the inheritor of its religion and culture, its political and social structure. However, the fact that a fourth Rome “will not be” also implied that Russia had a messianic mission to safeguard Orthodoxy for future generations and therefore could not falter in the way

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The Icon and the Square

that Byzantium had done. Russia was thus cast as a younger and more robust Orthodox nation, one that was not tainted by Byzantium’s decadence, corruption, and ultimate weakness and would therefore not fall victim to the older empire’s tragic fate, thanks to its unique spiritual, moral, and civic fiber—superior national qualities that, according to turn-​of-​the-​ century commentators, were directly reflected in the Russian art and architecture of the late medieval period. In reality, however, the cultural and artistic ties that bound Byzantium and medieval Russia were not so easy to separate.7 As Robin Cormack writes, “[F]or [several] centuries the monumental art of the Russian lands was less a response to Byzantium than an extension of the working area of Byzantine artists, who regularly came for work to Rus up to the fifteenth century.”8 The 1991 blockbuster exhibition Byzantium, Balkans, Russia: Icons of the Late Thirteenth to the First Half of the Fifteenth Century, organized at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, presented a similar narrative, where, as Olga Popova writes, “all medieval Russian art [was] seen as part of Byzantine culture. Every Russian work, regardless of its content, its quality, or even its place of origin, [was] interpreted as a reflection of Byzantine ideas. . . . As a result, the whole of Russian painting [was] simply seen as Byzantine.”9 This interpretation is supported by a number of early chronicles, which record that Byzantine workers built and decorated the St. Sophia Cathedrals in Kiev and Novgorod in the eleventh century. Byzantine painters also executed all of the interior decoration of the Church of the Mother of God in Moscow in 1344, and Isaias the Greek was commissioned by Prince Basil to paint the Church of the Entry into Jerusalem in Novgorod in 1348.10 Theophanes the Greek, a Byzantine artist

who had trained in Constantinople and moved to Novgorod in 1370, decorated a number of different churches and cathedrals, including the Church of the Nativity of the Mother of God, the Archangel Cathedral, and the Cathedral of the Annunciation in the Moscow Kremlin, as well as the Church of the Transfiguration in Novgorod. Several famous portable icons, such as The Transfiguration (1403) and the double-​sided icon showing on one side Our Lady of the Don and on other the Koimesis of the Virgin Mary (1390s), are also attributed to his hand. Perhaps even more importantly, Andrei Rublev, the preeminent exemplar of Russia’s original medieval artistic genius, studied and worked with Theophanes for several years in the early 1400s. Similarly, a vast number of portable panel icons from the pre-​ Mongol period originate from Byzantine sources, and even Russia’s most holy and revered icon, The Virgin of Vladimir, was painted in Constantinople and brought over to the city of Vladimir in the 1160s. Both in the early Kievan period (1000–1200s) and following the fall of Constantinople in 1453, numerous Byzantine artists, architects, and craftsmen had settled in Russian territories, merging their artistic techniques and predilections with local practices. Needless to say, this productive synthesis often generated novel iconographies and forms, resulting in original ornamental programs and new decorative values. However, not only does the establishment of precise categories and strict demarcations between the purely “Byzantine” and purely “Russian” modes of representation remain a contentious issue among Byzantinists and scholars of medieval Russian art to this day, but it is also not the principal objective of the present study. Instead, I am more concerned with showing how nineteenth- and early twentieth-​ century audiences understood, constructed, and

deployed these classifications in the context of their own contemporary culture and in the service of burgeoning modern-​art practices. John Lowden sums it up best: “[T]he art of Russia or of Venetian Crete [is] unimaginable without the activities of Byzantine artists. But at what point did such art and the artists who produced it become ‘Russian,’ ‘Cretan’ or ‘Venetian’ rather than ‘Byzantine’? These are questions worth pondering, but best left open.”11 Aside from the advances in modern archaeology and secular scholarship on Byzantine and medieval Russian art outlined earlier, novel curatorial practices and methods of museum display and installation played an equally significant role in the aesthetic reevaluation of this pictorial tradition. The opening decade of the twentieth century also witnessed a widespread initiative aimed at the cleaning of ancient portable panel icons in both museum and private collections, in addition to the monumental restoration projects discussed in the previous chapter. Thus, for example, in 1904–6 Andrei Rublev’s Old Testament Trinity icon (fig. 1) was cleaned for the first time. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it had been repeatedly repainted in line with the more illusionistic tastes of those epochs.12 Furthermore, as evidenced by surviving black-​and-​ white prerestoration photographs (figs. 22 and 23), the icon was covered by a gilded metallic oklad, or revetment, that had obscured its entire painted surface except for the angels’ faces, hands, and feet. Accordingly, although certainly well known, the icon was not actually seen by most viewers in all of its painterly splendor until 1906. Led by the renowned Moscow icon painter Vasilii Gurianov, a team of restorers removed centuries of overpaint and varnish to reveal Rublev’s original vibrant colors and innovative composition. Instead of the dull browns

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61

Fig. 22  Prerestoration photograph of Andrei Rublev’s Old Testament Trinity, with its oklad, or revetment, dating from the reign of Boris Godunov (1551–1601), 1904. From V. P. Gurianov, Dve mestnye ikony Sv. Troitsy v Troitskom sobore Sviato-​ Troitsko–Sergievoi lavry i ikh restavratsiia (Moscow: Pechatnia A. I. Snegirevoi, 1906).

and faded yellows of the subsequent overpainting, Rublev’s electric blue, rich coral, bright green, and vivid ochre hues were revealed to the public for the first time, creating something of a sensation. Numerous articles celebrating this sudden rediscovery of a long-​neglected master appeared in the Russian press. In 1908–10, following this exemplary conservation success, a large number of ancient icons in

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The Icon and the Square

various museum departments, as well as in the vast private collections of Ilia Ostroukhov (1858–1929), Stepan Riabushinsky (1874–1942), and Nikolai Likhachev, were also cleaned. By uncovering the earlier forms of thirteenth-, fourteenth-, and fifteenth-​century icon painting for the first time, these restoration efforts significantly contributed to the reconceptualization of iconic representation as “high” rather than “low” art. Discussing the recently cleaned icon collection of the Russian Museum of His Imperial Majesty Alexander III, Sychev observed that those viewers who “saw for the first time the wonderful brightness of ancient icons, cleaned from century-​old dirt, soot, and darkened varnish, now assert that these days ancient icons are completely repainted anew.”13 Indeed, in their pronounced degree of “abstraction” and use of flat fields of pure, vibrant color and nonillusionistic spatial structure, these previously hidden works struck many viewers as anachronistically “modern.” Furthermore, the direct involvement of modern-​art scholars and young leftist critics like Pavel Muratov and Nikolai Punin in the daily work of major museums, such as the Moscow Public and Rumiantsev Museum and the Russian Museum of His Imperial Majesty Alexander III in St. Petersburg, meant that their collections of icons were featured regularly in the popular art journals of the time, including in Apollon, Vesy, Starye gody, and Zolotoe runo.14 In these publications, Byzantine and medieval Russian art was systematically discussed in relation to the most recent currents in contemporary Russian and European painting. As a result, instead of being viewed as antiquated repositories of archaic relics from a distant and inaccessible past, the medieval art departments of these museums were increasingly understood as “temples of novel aesthetic

revelations for [contemporary] artists,” ones that had revitalized for modern viewers a long-​neglected artistic tradition.15 Accordingly, the present chapter examines the role of museums, private collections, and temporary exhibitions in the presentation of Byzantine and medieval Russian art and culture to a broader museum-​going public in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the years 1860 to 1913. More specifically, it argues that widespread awareness and appreciation of these previously reviled representational traditions, coupled with a growing understanding of their importance to the dynamic development of contemporary Russian art, were already well under way in popular consciousness at the turn of the century and before the advent of the historical avant-​garde.

Byzantium on the Neva: The Hermitage and the Russian Museum of His Imperial Majesty Alexander III The first Byzantine artifacts in the Hermitage Museum were acquired during the reign of Catherine the Great (1729–1796). The empress took a keen interest in Greco-​Roman and medieval cameos and intaglios and purchased several important collections from all over Europe, including those of Baron de Breteuil (1782), Lord Beverley (1786), the Duke of Orleans (1787), and Giovanni Battista Casanova (1792).16 By the end of Catherine II’s reign, the Hermitage owned more than ten thousand cameos, and in a letter to the French diplomat Baron Fried­ rich Melchior Grimm, the empress boasted that “all the collections of Europe, compared to ours, are mere childish amusements.”17 A large portion of this collection comprised Byzantine cameos dating

Fig. 23  Photograph of Andrei Rublev’s Old Testament Trinity, without its revetment, before removal of layers of later overpainting. From V. P. Gurianov, Dve mestnye ikony Sv. Troitsy v Troitskom sobore Sviato-​Troitsko–Sergievoi lavry i ikh restavratsiia (Moscow: Pechatnia A. I. Snegirevoi, 1906).

from the sixth to the thirteenth centuries, including such notable works as a sixth-​century Annunciation and a bust representation of Christ Emmanuel, the tenth-​century depictions of Saint Basil the Great and Saints George and Demetrios, the eleventh-​century Christ the Merciful and Virgin Orans cameos, and the thirteenth-​century rendition of Daniel in the Lion’s Den.18 Many of these works were already carefully

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catalogued during Catherine’s lifetime by her imperial librarian, Alexander Luzhkov, and the collection continued to be augmented throughout the first half of the nineteenth century.19 A large number of rare and valuable artifacts came to the Hermitage from archaeological finds in Siberia and the Crimea, and especially from the legendary town of Chersonesus, where state-​sponsored excavations began as early as the 1820s. The objects that were unearthed included weaponry, jewelry, silver plates and chalices, liturgical crosses and reliquaries, icons, precious coins, ancient ceramics, architectural fragments, reliefs, and the remains of ancient murals. For instance, in 1853 Count Aleksei Uvarov (1825–1884) discovered the remains of a sixth-​century Byzantine basilica that retained some of its original floor mosaic in the central nave. Uvarov had the entire mosaic removed and transported to St. Petersburg, where it was placed in the Hermitage and remains to this day. Another noteworthy piece of monumental Byzantine art that entered the Hermitage collection around this time was a fragment of a sixth-​century Ravenna mosaic depicting Saint Peter the Apostle, which was given to Tsar Nicholas I as a gift. In 1854 the museum also received from Chersonesus a large collection of silver brooches and buckles dating from the fourth to the seventh centuries, as well as various sixth- and seventh-​century silver plates and chalices from Count Sergei Stroganov.20 Lastly, the Imperial Russian Archaeological Society donated a significant number of Byzantine and medieval Russian artifacts from the different excavations it conducted throughout the 1850s and 1860s in southern Russia and western Siberia, including in the Kerch, Perm, and Viatka provinces.

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However, the most important acquisition, which entirely transformed the Hermitage’s holdings in medieval art, was the purchase of Alexander Basilewsky’s extraordinary collection in December of 1884. A Russian diplomat to Vienna and then to Paris, Basilewsky began to collect medieval artifacts from all over Europe as early as the 1850s. Between 1860 and 1875 he acquired the collections of Albert Germeau, Achille Fould, Alessandro Castellani, Petr Saltykov, and Count James-​Alexandre de Pourtalès, among others, and by 1878 his collection contained an impressive 550 objects of medieval and Renaissance art.21 Indeed, an 1870 watercolor depicting Basilewsky’s Parisian residence (fig. 24), executed by the well-​known artist Vasilii Vereshchagin, shows an elaborate repository of medieval caskets, crucifixes, reliquaries, chalices, goblets, gilded and silver plates, wooden sculptures, carved ivory diptychs, enameled icons, Renaissance majolicas, and Venetian glassware. Objects in this collection spanned several centuries of Christian artistic production, ranging from antiquity to the late Renaissance, and represented a broad range of different geographies. Of particular value was Basilewsky’s vast collection of Byzantine ivories, dating from the sixth to the fourteenth centuries; a number of early mosaic fragments, like the sixth-​century angel from the San Michele Church in Ravenna; as well as several rare enamel and mosaic icons from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, such as Saint Theodore the Dragon Slayer (fig. 25) and Saint Theodore Stratelates.22 Aside from the various early Christian and Byzantine artifacts, Basilewsky’s collection contained exceptional examples of Romanesque, Gothic, Venetian, Coptic, and Syrian art. The collection was bought in its entirety by the Russian government and promptly transported to

Fig. 24  Vasilii Vereshchagin, A Room in Alexander Basilewsky’s Residence in Paris, 1870. Watercolor on paper. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

St. Petersburg, where it officially opened to the public on January 14, 1885.23 At first it was temporarily displayed on the second floor of the Old Hermitage building, but in 1888 it was moved to the first floor and reinstalled in twenty newly renovated exhibition halls under the direction of Nikodim Kondakov, who was appointed the head curator of the Department of Medieval and Renaissance Art earlier that year. Kondakov entirely rearranged both the visual and chronological narrative of the display, adhering to a geographical and historical logic, rather than a

purely “decorative” one. In a letter to Count Sergei Trubetskoi, Kondakov explained that he was dissatisfied with the original design of the exhibition because there were omissions, gaps, and the mixing of objects for decorative purposes. Next to the early Christian monuments of the first centuries of our era, without any transition, was a display of antiquities from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries under the name “Byzantium in Russia”; these were directly followed by Russian and Polish artworks from the

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Fig. 25  Saint Theodore the Dragon Slayer, thirteenth century. Cloisonné and champlevé enamel on copper and silver, 9 1/2 × 8 1/2 in. (24.3 × 21.5 cm). The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

preceding and current centuries. But even more importantly: in the rooms were assembled objects that were anachronistic, quite disparate in character, and incompatible with each other. On account of this . . . the dignity of the Imperial Hermitage required the systemization of objects into historical and stylistic groupings.24

Kondakov organized the installation to show the full complexity and range of the evolution of Christian art from antiquity to the early Renaissance across a number of different regions, including Russia,

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Europe, and the Middle East. The exposition began with a room of “Christian antiquities from the first eight centuries of our era,” predominantly composed of Byzantine artworks, including liturgical silverware, mosaic fragments, and icons. Basilewsky’s collection of carved ivories was exhibited in a separate room, followed by a display of early Limoges enamels. These, in turn, were succeeded by rooms with “Byzantine monuments of the Latin West,” “the art of Byzantine and post-​Byzantine Italy,” and “Russian antiquities before the Mongol conquest.”25 Such an arrangement of objects reflected Kondakov’s own belief in the centrality of Byzantine art to the subsequent development of both the Russian and the western European representational traditions. Kondakov clearly articulated this idea in his seminal 1886 study The Byzantine Churches and Monuments of Constantinople: “We are certain that the study of the ancient Byzantine capital will eventually be commensurate with scholarship on pagan and early Christian Rome and in the fecundity of its results will occupy one of the most important places in the study of the medieval past in general and the Christian East in particular.”26 He elaborated this idea in his 1891 catalogue for the collection of the Department of Medieval and Renaissance Art, explaining that within the larger layout of the Hermitage Museum the halls with medieval and Renaissance art were purposely set up to follow the rooms of Eastern Art and to precede those of subsequent western European painting. This organizational logic was meant to illustrate the greater flow of ideas and influence from East to West and the corollary importance of medieval Byzantium and the Middle East as the conduits of Hellenistic thought and culture to western Europe: “Such an arrangement of the displays corresponds to the historical role

of the East, beginning with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and ending with [the onset of] the Crusades. The era of the great migration of peoples entailed the movement of peoples and culture from East to West. . . . Recent studies of the Middle Ages increasingly lead us to Eastern sources.”27 The wealth, diversity, and geographical and chronological range of Basilewsky’s collection allowed Kondakov to fully materialize some of these concepts in the museum’s displays, presenting the general public with novel and original ways of seeing and thinking about medieval and Renaissance art in general, and Byzantine art in particular. In the Hermitage catalogue, Kondakov concluded that Basilewsky’s exceptional collection allowed the Department of Medieval and Renaissance Art finally to attain equal standing with the corresponding departments of the Louvre, the Kensington, and the Berlin Museums.28 Between 1888 and 1913 the Hermitage holdings of Byzantine and medieval Russian art continued to expand thanks to both private and institutional donations. Vladimir Bok, Countess Maria Sherbatova, and the Stroganov family, as well as the Imperial Archaeological Commission and the Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople, bequeathed a number of rare and valuable art objects to the Hermitage, such as two sixth-​century plates depicting the Feeding of a Snake and Two Angels Flanking a Cross; a large collection of sixth and seventh-​century jewelry from Mersin; a seventh-​century censer with Christ, the Virgin, Angels, and Apostles; an eleventh-​century enamel icon reliquary portraying the Crucifixion, Saints, and Feast Scenes; a twelfth-​century bowl with repoussé scenes of an empress’s banquet; twelfth-​ century marble reliefs depicting Apostles Peter and Paul; and two bronze icons of the Anastasis and the Mother of God and Child; among other notable

objects.29 Consequently, by the opening decade of the twentieth century, St. Petersburg was home to one of the world’s most diverse and comprehensive collections of Byzantine and medieval Latin and Russian art, one that was carefully and thoughtfully curated by a leading expert in the discipline to reflect some of the most up-​to-​date and groundbreaking thinking in the field of medieval and Byzantine studies. This unique collection was complemented by the opening of the Russian Museum of His Imperial Majesty Alexander III in 1898 (henceforth referred to as the Russian Museum). The idea for the creation of a museum in the imperial capital dedicated exclusively to Russian art originated with Tsar Alexander III (1845–1894). A Slavophile and an ardent supporter of the Russo-​ Byzantine revival, Alexander III, much like Nicholas I before him, believed in the importance of establishing and maintaining a strong national and religious identity throughout the Russian Empire. To this end, he actively encouraged and funded the construction of new ecclesiastical buildings in the Russo-​Byzantine style and gave preference to indigenous rather than western European art. In fact, during his reign Alexander III managed to accumulate a sizeable collection of Russian paintings, sculptures, and iconic and applied art, which ultimately formed the basis of the Russian Museum. Although the tsar had articulated the idea for the establishment of a museum of national art as early as 1889, he died before he was able to realize his lifelong dream, and the founding of the Russian Museum fell to his eldest son, Tsar Nicholas II (1868–1918), who issued a royal decree on April 13, 1895: Our Revered Parent, in his wise solicitude for the development and prosperity of indigenous art, determined the

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need for the establishment of an extensive St. Petersburg museum in which would be concentrated exceptional works of Russian painting and sculpture. This highly worthy intention of the late monarch, however, was not destined to be realized during his lifetime. Now, responding to the urgent spiritual need to fulfill the stated will of the deceased monarch, We recognize the necessity of establishing an institution under the name of the Russian Museum of His Imperial Majesty Alexander III.30

The royal decree also specified that the new museum was to be housed in the Mikhailovskii Palace (1819– 25), located on the Arts Square in central St. Petersburg, between Inzhenernaia and Italianskaia Streets. The collection was meant to reflect the formation and evolution of Russia’s artistic culture from the early Middle Ages to the late nineteenth century and was assembled from a variety of different sources, including the Imperial Academy of Arts, the Hermitage, and the Alexander and Anichkov Palaces. Together with a large number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-​century paintings, the academy donated the complete contents of its Museum of Christian Antiquities, which were transferred to the Russian Museum in 1897. Other prominent gifts came from private donors such as Vasilii Prokhorov, Count Aleksei Lobanov-​Rostovskii, and Countess Maria Tenesheva, so that by the time the museum officially opened to the public, on March 7, 1898, it contained 445 paintings, 111 sculptures, 981 works on paper, and more than 5,000 artifacts of Byzantine and medieval Russian art, including icons, church relics, and decorative-​art objects.31 The museum’s collection was displayed in thirty-​seven spacious halls, with the Museum of Christian Antiquities occupying four large rooms on the first floor of the palace (fig. 26). Immediately

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adjoining them was a hall containing religious revivalist works by Mikhail Nesterov and Viktor Vasnetsov, including the latter’s large-​scale Lamentation mural (1896), which was originally designed for the St. Vladimir Cathedral in Kiev.32 To a turn-​ of-​the-​century audience, such a “juxtaposition of authentic antiquity with the most novel revival of Byzantine traditions on the basis of new techniques” highlighted the important role of the museum not simply as a static repository of the art of the past but as a dynamic catalyst for contemporary artistic production.33 Various commentators expressed their hopes that exposure to several centuries of Russo-​ Byzantine visual culture would encourage the next generation of artists to pursue new and unconventional directions in their works instead of passively imitating the latest trends of western European painting. For example, one reviewer enthusiastically observed that the new museum would become that place where we will finally grow to love our antiquity, where we will not cease to discover new enchantments in our native [heritage], where our artists will draw inspiration and, leaning on the old, produce new creations, without departing from popular, national origins but only advancing their evolution further in adapting them to new conditions. Finally, we are left to hope that the present museum will become the first place for the dissemination of the love of art . . . into those broad circles where this love, together with the awareness of one’s connection to our native antiquity, has yet to penetrate.34

As such comments clearly manifest, the Russian Museum, from the moment of its inauguration, garnered considerable attention from both the press and the general public alike, with one critic writing that the institution “would have the same

Fig. 26  Installation view of Christian antiquities in the Russian Museum of His Imperial Majesty Alexander III, 1898.

high-​cultural significance for Russia, as the National Museum in Paris and the British Museum in London have for France and England.”35 Indeed, within the first year of its opening, the museum was visited by over one hundred thousand people, and by 1915 that figure had more than doubled.36 During this time the museum also managed to increase its holdings nearly twofold, especially in medieval art, leading Nikodim Kondakov to observe that the latter collection had evolved into “an extensive Christian museum,” the likes of which were “neither known nor owned by virtually any other

European nation.”37 Spanning several centuries of artistic production in a variety of different media, it contained a number of famous Byzantine and medieval Russian masterpieces. Among the most valuable Byzantine works were the twelfth-​century icons depicting the Pentecost, the Anastasis, Saint Gregory the Miracle Worker, the military saints George, Theodore, and Demetrios; the thirteenth-​ century icons of Saint Mamas and the archangel Michael; and finally the majestic Christ Pantocrator icon (1363) (fig. 27), as well as fourteenth-​century fresco fragments from the Pantocrator Monastery in

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Fig. 27  Christ Pantocrator, 1363. Tempera on wood, 42 × 31 × 1 3/4 in. (106 × 79 × 2.8 cm). The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Fig. 28  Andrei Rublev, Virgin of Vladimir, fifteenth century. Tempera on wood, 11 1/2 × 6 3/4 in. (29 × 17.5 cm). State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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Mount Athos.38 The museum’s holdings in medieval Russian art were even more diverse and represented a broad range of different regions, materials, and artistic schools. By 1910 the museum owned such rare works as the fourteenth-​century Miracle of Saint George icon and the fifteenth-​century Virgin of Vladimir icon attributed to Andrei Rublev (fig. 28); a number of carved and painted wooden icons such as the Appearance of the Virgin to Saint Sergius of Radonezh and Saint George and the Dragon with Saints (1500s); various large-​scale vita icons and sets of royal doors from Novgorod, Pskov, and Iaroslavl; and finally masterpieces of applied art such as the embroidered icon Saint Nicholas the Miracle Worker (1400s), the Korsun Panikadilo (1400s), and the Arkhangelsk “Emaciated” Chandelier (1600s).39 One of the most significant acquisitions of Byzantine and medieval Russian art entered the museum in 1913 from the renowned collection of Nikolai Likhachev, which comprised 1,431 icons and 34 works of applied art.40 Along with major masterpieces of Russian icon painting from Novgorod, Vladimir, Suzdal, and Muscovy, such as the fourteenth-​century Boris and Gleb (fig. 30) and Anastasis and Deesis icons, Likhachev’s collection contained a large number of important Byzantine and Greco-​Italian icons, including the eleventh-​century Archdeacon Stephen icon, the thirteenth-​century Saint Theodore Stratelates and Christ Pantocrator icons, the fourteenth-​century Saint John the Baptist icon, and the fifteenth-​century Old Testament Trinity icon, as well as Andreas Ritzos’s Virgin of the Passion (1450s), Angelo Bizamano’s Holy Family (1532), Emmanuel Lampardos’s Crucifixion (1600s), and Emmanuel Tzanes’s Virgin from a Deesis (1681).41 The addition of this extensive collection led to a complete reconceptualization of the museum’s

medieval-​art sections, under the direction of Petr Neradovskii (1875–1962), who was appointed head curator in 1909.42 As a result, between 1913 and 1914 the rooms of medieval art were rearranged to reflect the gradual historical evolution of Russian visual representation from predominantly Byzantine styles and techniques to specifically Russian modes of artistic expression, with special attention paid to the stylistic and iconographic variations among the different regional schools of Muscovy, Novgorod, Pskov, Vladimir, Suzdal, Staraia Ladoga, Vologda, and Iaroslavl, among others. To this end, the exposition began with some of the oldest examples of Byzantine art from Sevastianov’s and Likhachev’s collections and continued chronologically with displays of early Russo-​ Byzantine works from the age of Kievan Rus (988– 1240), the various icon-​painting traditions of the Mongolian and post-​Mongolian duchy period (1240– 1547), and finally the sixteenth- and seventeenth-​ century Stroganov School of icon painting.43 One of the hallmarks of the new installation was the so called Novgorod Icon Chamber (fig. 29), which meticulously re-​created the interior of a medieval Orthodox church, complete with an iconostasis placed along the eastern wall, an analogion, a suspended chandelier, and tall vitrines containing multiple large and small icons, including Saints Boris and Gleb (fig. 30), the Mandylion, and the Virgin Hodegetria. According to Nikolai Sychev, in this room the viewer “entered another world . . . [one that was] rich with the diversity and beauty of the monuments of ancient icon painting.”44As a curator, Neradovskii strongly believed in creating a sense of organic continuity between the exhibited artworks and their immediate surroundings and attempted to integrate both fine- and applied-​art objects into unified, holistic displays. He invited leading medievalists, such as Nikodim Kondakov, Aleksei

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Fig. 29  Installation view of the Novgorod Icon Chamber in the Russian Museum of His Imperial Majesty Alexander III, 1914.

Sobolevskii, and the revivalist architect Aleksei Shchusev to advise him on the classification and reinstallation of the medieval works in order to maintain the highest scholarly standards.45 At this time the newly renamed Department of Monuments of Russian Icon Painting and Church Relics also created a special research group, headed by Nikolai Sychev and Nikolai Punin, that was tasked with the cataloguing of Likhachev’s collection.

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Sychev was a medieval-​art specialist who had studied under Dmitrii Ainalov and Nikodim Kondakov at the St. Petersburg University and had accompanied Kondakov on several research expeditions.46 Punin had also recently graduated from St. Petersburg University, and by 1915 he had already managed to establish a serious scholarly reputation for himself thanks to his numerous publications of the early 1910s. These included a number of articles on Byzantine and medieval Russian art, a substantive monograph on Andrei Rublev, multiple essays on modern and contemporary art, and lengthy overviews of the icon collections of Nikolai Likhachev, Ilia Ostroukhov, and Stepan Riabushinsky. He was also an active member of the editorial board of the journal Russkaia ikona, or Russian Icon, the secretary of the Society for the Research of Medieval Russian Art, and a regular contributor to the popular cultural journals Apollon and Severnye zapiski. His involvement with the latter two publications meant that artworks from the museum’s collections could reach a larger audience by being featured regularly in these journals. As discussed in the first chapter, most of Punin’s theories on art were shaped by his interest in the Russo-​Byzantine representational tradition, the rising avant-​garde movements of the early twentieth century, and his museum and research work. It is therefore hardly a coincidence that in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, after being closed for more than a year, the Russian Museum initially reopened only two of its sections in 1918: the rooms with medieval art and the newly constituted halls of contemporary painting, which included works by Vasily Kandinsky, Vladimir Tatlin, Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, and Marc Chagall, among others.47 Punin was directly responsible for the organization of this new installation,

having been appointed the head commissar of the Russian Museum in February of 1918.48 Instead of the nineteenth-​century revivalist works of Vasnetsov and Nesterov, which were originally placed next to the medieval-​art sections in the first decade of the museum’s existence, by 1920 it was the radical experiments of the most cutting-​edge avant-​garde that were considered to be in direct dialogue with the aesthetic and conceptual traditions of medieval icon painting. Unlike the Hermitage Museum, which still largely privileged the art of western Europe, or the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, which was dominated by the Realist paintings of the Peredvizhniki from the 1860s and 1870s, the Russian Museum attempted to construct a rich and complex narrative of the trajectory of Russia’s artistic development, one in which medieval art was granted an important and formative role. As a result, by the end of the tsarist regime, the Russian Museum contained 6,100 works of applied ecclesiastical art and 3,141 icons, of which 1,841 were permanently on display at any given time.49 This became, by and large, one of the most comprehensive and important collections of Byzantine and medieval Russian art in the entire country and one that was readily accessible to a broad public.

From “Second Rome” to “Third Rome”: The Moscow Public and Rumiantsev Museum and the Imperial Russian Historical Museum

Fig. 30  Saints Boris and Gleb, fourteenth century. Tempera on wood, 56 × 37 in. (142.5 × 94.5 cm). State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

Akin to St. Petersburg, Moscow in the second half of the nineteenth century also witnessed the establishment of several influential public museums and galleries, such as the Rumiantsev Museum (1862), the Imperial Russian Historical Museum (1883), and

the Tretyakov Gallery (1893). The former, in particular, warrants special attention as one of the first public museums in the city, becoming an important repository of Byzantine and medieval Russian art.

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Fig. 31  Saint John the Evangelist and Prochorus, from the Zaraisk Gospel, 1401, fol. 157v. Ink and tempera on parchment, 6 ½ × 5 in. (17 × 12.5 cm). Russian State Library, Moscow.

It evolved from the personal library and art collection of Count Nikolai Rumiantsev, who was a prominent statesman and Russia’s foreign minister and imperial chancellor from 1808 to 1812. At the time of his death, in 1826, Rumiantsev’s library contained more than twenty-​nine thousand volumes.50 Among these were seventy-​six medieval manuscripts dating from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, which included such well-​known works as the illuminated Dobrila Gospel (1164) and Zaraisk Gospel (1401) (fig. 31), as well as 190 facsimiles.51 In addition, Rumiantsev had assembled a large number of sixteenth- and seventeenth-​century incunabula and ancient maps from all over Europe and the Russian

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Empire and a sizeable collection of rare coins, ethnographic artifacts, and a mineralogical cabinet.52 Rumiantsev bequeathed this entire collection to the state, and on March 22, 1828, Tsar Nicholas I signed a ruling for the establishment of the Rumiantsev Museum in St. Petersburg. In 1831 the Rumiantsev collection was officially opened to the general public. It was housed in the Rumiantsev Mansion on the English Embankment and was formally affiliated with the Imperial Public Library. However, due to an acute lack of funds, the museum was by 1860 in a state of considerable decline and disrepair. Accordingly, on the initiative of the prominent statesman and head of the Moscow Education Division, Nikolai Isakov (1821–1891), a government decision was made to transfer the museum from St. Petersburg to Moscow. It was to be housed in the elaborate eighteenth-​century Pashkov House on Mohovaia Street, not far from the Moscow Kremlin (fig. 32). Various state organizations and private individuals pledged to support the institution financially. For instance, in January 1861 the Moscow governor general Pavel Tuchkov promised to allocate to the museum an annual sum of 3,000 rubles from the city’s municipal funds.53 The wealthy aristocrat Alexander Koshelev likewise agreed to donate 25,000 rubles over the course of ten years; the entrepreneur and collector Kozma Soldatenkov pledged another 3,000 rubles for the initial establishment of the museum and an additional 1,000 rubles annually until his death; the merchant N. N. Kharichkov assumed all the costs of transferring the museum collections from St. Petersburg to Moscow.54 With the help of these generous bequests, the newly renamed Moscow Public and Rumiantsev Museum (henceforth referred to as the Rumiantsev Museum) officially opened to the public on May 6, 1862.

Fig. 32  The Pashkov House, Moscow, 1784–86. Photograph from Piatidesiateletie Rumiantsevskogo muzeia v Moskve 1862– 1912: Istoricheskii ocherk (Moscow: Skoropech. A. A. Levenson, 1913).

Shortly after its opening, the museum collection was augmented by several important donations from the Imperial Academy of Arts, the Moscow University, the Hermitage Museum, the royal family, and a number of private patrons. As a result, although the museum had only 54,160 objects in its holdings at the moment of its inauguration in Moscow, it received an additional 116,617 art objects and artifacts as permanent gifts and another 109,225 objects on long-​term loan within a year and a half of its opening.55 Consequently, by 1864 the Rumiantsev Museum contained an impressive 280,000 items, arranged across seven

departments: Rare Books and Manuscripts, Fine Arts and Classical Antiquities, Christian and Russian Antiquities, the Ethnographic Department, the Mineralogical and Zoological Cabinets, and the Public Library.56 Thanks to a continued flow of donations, gifts, and acquisitions over the ensuing decades, the museum managed to increase its collection almost fourfold by the time of its fiftieth anniversary, in 1913. In particular, it acquired a large amount of Byzantine and medieval Russian artworks. The Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts increased its holdings from 2,295 objects in

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1864 to 9,723 in 1913 by obtaining the collections of Vukol Undolskii and Avram Norov, which contained several exceptional Byzantine and medieval Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Moldovan illuminated manuscripts, ranging from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries.57 Accordingly, by the early twentieth century the museum possessed such valuable works as the eleventh-​century Codex Marianus and Arkhangelsk Gospel, the fourteenth-​century Norov Psalter, the Moscow Apostol (1564), and the Ostrog Bible (1581).58 Meanwhile, by 1872 the Department of Christian and Russian Antiquities managed to assemble an impressive 22,150 objects, which included mosaic and fresco fragments, Byzantine and medieval Russian icons, works of applied and folk art, devotional objects and liturgical vestments.59 In 1862 Petr Sevastianov gave to the museum one of the largest and most important donations, largely composed of the Byzantine works he had brought back to Russia from his expeditions to Mount Athos in 1858–60. On his initiative, these works were first displayed as part of a temporary exhibition that included both original works of art and a large number of color copies, tracings, casts, and photographic reproductions. Sevastianov delivered several public lectures and tours of the exhibition, which was generally viewed as a big success and garnered considerable attention both from the press and the general public.60 Three years later Sevastianov permanently bequeathed to the museum his entire collection, which, in addition to the Mount Athos works, contained notable examples of medieval Russian, Greco-​Italian, and Middle Eastern art. Museum records indicate that it received from Sevastianov a total of “fifty-​five Byzantine icons from Mount Athos, fifteen Greco-​Italian icons, thirty medieval Russian icons, ten Bulgarian-​Moldovan

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icons, five Arabic icons, and five works of religious art executed on marble, copper, and wood.”61 The museum also acquired almost eighteen thousand of Sevastianov’s reproductions and facsimiles of frescoes, mosaics, and illuminated manuscripts, as well as architectural drawings and moldings.62 Among the most valuable masterpieces in this collection were three mosaic fragments from St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, dating from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries, and the thirteenth-​ century icons of Christ Emmanuel and the Virgin of Sorrows. Other major works included fourteenth-​ century icons of the Koimesis, Virgin and Child, and Saint John the Baptist and a thirteenth-​century Italianate vita icon of the Virgin and Child Enthroned, attributed to the workshop of Coppo di Marcovaldo.63 Apart from Sevastianov’s gift, important donations of Byzantine and medieval Russian artifacts came from the collections of Anna Raevskaia, Elpidifor Barsov, Iurii Filimonov, Lev Dal’, Mikhail Pogodin, Andrei Muraviev, the Moscow Synod, and the Kremlin Armory Chamber. The Department of Christian and Russian Antiquities systematized all of its holdings into three discrete categories: prehistoric antiquities, Christian antiquities, and Russian antiquities, and the objects on display were arranged according to a chronological and geographical logic, by century, region, and excavation site. Along with Byzantine and medieval Russian artworks, the Department of Christian and Russian Antiquities contained a number of Gothic, Romanesque, and other medieval European artifacts, reflecting the same overarching organizational logic as the one employed in the Hermitage. However, despite being housed in the same department, the medieval art of the Latin West was nonetheless presented as distinctly different from that of

Byzantium and Russia, which were understood to be on a cultural and historical continuum and part of a single representational tradition. Consequently, Byzantine and medieval Russian artifacts were arranged in such a way as to demonstrate their conceptual, stylistic, and iconographic similarities. According to the 1913 publication The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Rumiantsev Museum in Moscow, one of the museum’s principle goals from the first year of its existence was to promote the “history of Byzantine art and the corollary history of Russian icon painting that was inextricably tied to it.”64 To this end, the Department of Christian and Russian Antiquities launched several important publication projects that were intended to document, systematize, and popularize the Byzantine and medieval Russian artworks in the museum’s collections. The first of these was overseen by the paleography specialist Aleksei Viktorov (1827–1883) and involved the photographic reproduction of miniatures in illuminated Byzantine manuscripts from a number of different Moscow collections. As a result, between 1862 and 1865 more than 150 reproductions were published in three consecutive volumes.65 The museum also published several scholarly studies on the illuminated-​manuscript collections of Vukol Undolskii, Dementii Piskarev, Viktor Grigorovich, Fedor Beliaev, and Petr Sevastianov between 1871 and 1881.66 Lastly, from 1901 to 1906 the Department of Christian and Russian Antiquities published four comprehensive scholarly catalogues documenting all of the Russo-​Byzantine artworks in its possession.67 The Society of Ancient Russian Art, which was founded under the auspices of the Rumian­ tsev Museum in 1864, directly oversaw many of these publications and facilitated the department’s research initiatives and collecting activities.

Members of the society included prominent scholars of Byzantine and medieval Russian history, art, and culture, such as Fedor Buslaev, Nikodim Kondakov, Aleksei Viktorov, Ivan Zabelin, Dmitrii Rovinskii, Petr Sevastianov, and Kozma Soldantenkov.68 In its founding charter the society outlined three main goals: the first was “the assembling and scientific elaboration of monuments of Russian antiquity and ancient Russian church and folk art in all of their manifestations”; the second was the advancement of “archaeology, especially of the Byzantine Empire, insofar as it can contribute to the development of a native archaeology”; and the third was “the dissemination of both scholarly and practical information about ancient Russian art.”69 The Society of Ancient Russian Art thus functioned as an independent cultural research institute within the museum, one that promoted its collections, sought donations on its behalf, and advanced its scholarly output. For example, the society featured many of the museum’s objects in its own publications, namely the Sbornik drevnerusskogo iskusstva and the Vestnik Obshchestva drevnerusskogo iskusstva, as well as essays and articles written by members of the museum staff, such as Georgii Filimonov’s exhaustive study of Simon Ushakov and the icon-​painting practices of seventeenth-​ century Russia.70 Along with the popularizing endeavors of the Society of Ancient Russian Art, popular art journals like Sofia, Apollon, Vesy, Starye gody, and Zolotoe runo also frequently mentioned the Rumiantsev Museum’s medieval art collection, thanks to the efforts of one of its employees, the young art historian and critic Pavel Muratov. Muratov joined the museum as a curatorial assistant in 1910 and worked there for three consecutive years.71 During this time he became intensely interested in Byzantine and medieval

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Russian art, and in 1912 he made an extensive trip to Novgorod, Pskov, Iaroslavl, Vologda, and the Kirillo-​ Belozerskii and Ferapontov Monasteries, where he studied and documented various medieval frescoes and icons. Upon his return to Moscow, he collaborated with the artist and art historian Igor Grabar on the latter’s multivolume History of Russian Art. Muratov authored the entire sixth volume of the publication, entitled The History of Painting: The Pre-​Petrine Epoch, in which he discussed a number of medieval artworks from the Rumiantsev Museum, such as the fourteenth-​century icon of the Twelve Apostles and the Zaraisk Gospel, as well as a variety of artworks from the private collections of Ilia Ostroukhov, Stepan Riabushinsky, and Nikolai Likhachev.72 In 1914, together with his friend Konstantin Nekrasov, Muratov founded the artistic and literary journal Sofia, which was primarily dedicated to the rediscovery of medieval Russian art and culture and also featured objects from the museum’s collections. Much like Punin, Muratov was a keen follower of the latest trends in Russian and European modern art and wrote reviews of contemporary-​art shows in Paris, London, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, including those at the Salon des indépendants, the New Gallery, and the New English Art Club, and the Venok-​Stefanos, Soiuz, and Zolotoe runo exhibitions.73 He also authored a monograph on Paul Cézanne, as well as a plethora of articles on the works of Mikhail Vrubel, Valentin Serov, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Edouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso, among others. Given his sustained interest in modernist painting, it is not surprising that Muratov was one of the first Russian critics to discuss the purely formal qualities and aesthetic achievements of iconic representation and to draw

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attention to what he considered striking pictorial parallels between Russo-​Byzantine art and French and Russian modernism. Having participated in the organization of both the 1913 Exhibition of Ancient Russian Art and The Exhibition in Commemoration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Rumiantsev Museum, Muratov was able to convey some of these ideas to a broader public through his curatorial work as well as in his numerous publications. However, even before Muratov’s publicizing efforts in the 1910s, the Rumiantsev Museum had already developed a robust educational mission and public outreach program in the preceding decades. According to museum records, in 1862 it was visited by 50,355 people, and by 1912 that number had almost doubled, reaching 98,819.74 One visitor observed that “whole families would stroll through the spacious halls of the museum. Here one could see government officials, officers and merchants, simple folk, women, children—in short, people of every rank, age, and gender.”75 In order to facilitate public understanding of the artworks and artifacts on display, the museum conducted daily tours through its various collections, which were free and open to all. In the space of only five years, between 1907 and 1912, it organized 2,478 guided tours for 70,442 visitors.76 The museum also held regular classes both for university students and for school groups, many of whom came from all over the Russian Empire beyond the precincts of Moscow. For example, along with groups from secondary and tertiary institutions in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the Rumiantsev Museum hosted groups from Kazan, Kursk, Vologodsk, Kharkov, Sebastopol, Tashkent, Warsaw, Vilnius, Baku, and Tiflis.77 Furthermore, it encouraged students from the various Moscow art schools, including the Moscow

School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture and the Stroganov School for Technical Drawing, to make studies and copies of the different masterpieces in the museum’s holdings. This policy was a radical departure from the practices of other Moscow museums, like the Tretyakov Gallery, where copying of artworks was strictly prohibited.78 According to a report from 1901, as many as 977 visitors had engaged in copying activities in the Rumiantsev Museum that year.79 Even established artists such as Vasilii Surikov, Victor Borisov-​ Musatov, and Valentin Serov frequently copied museum objects for use in their own works.80 The art historian and head curator of the Department of Christian and Russian Antiquities, Giorgii Filimonov, went so far as to claim that “not a single serious project of restoration in the ancient Russian style nor a single serious painting on the subject of ancient Russian life could be executed without the more or less strong assistance of the Department of Christian and Russian Antiquities of the Moscow Public and Rumiantsev Museum.”81 Indeed, over the course of several decades, artists, icon painters, restorers, and architects from all across the Russian Empire made regular use of the museum’s collections and library holdings. As such, the role of the Rumiantsev Museum as a major public repository of Russo-​Byzantine art was especially critical in the decades leading up to the establishment of the Tretyakov Gallery, the Russian Museum, and the Russian Historical Museum. First conceived in 1872, the latter institution was perhaps as important as the Rumiantsev Museum, if not more so, in acquainting the broader public with the architectural and pictorial traditions of Byzantium and medieval Russia. According to the museum’s founding charter, which was drafted in 1873

by Count Aleksei Uvarov, its principle goal was to “serve as a visual history of major epochs of the Russian state and to advance distribution of information about facts of national history.” More specifically, it aimed to collect all memorabilia of notable events in national history. Those objects—in originals, copies, or replicas—arranged in chronological order [had to] represent, as fully as possible, a comprehensive picture of each epoch: with its monuments of religion, law, science, and literature; with objects of arts, crafts, and trades; and, in general, with all objects of everyday Russian life, as well as with military and naval items. Outstanding events and major figures of every epoch [would] be shown in painting and sculpture.82

The charter received royal approval on August 2, 1874, and the museum was allocated a plot of land on the northern side of Red Square. In the spring of the following year, Vladimir Sherwood and Anatolii Semenov’s revivalist architectural design (fig. 33) was selected from a number of other proposals, and construction of the museum began on July 8, 1875. Once completed, the 200,000-square-meter building consisted of a large basement, a ground floor with an additional story above it, two floors of exhibition rooms, a large library, and an auditorium that could accommodate up to five hundred people.83 The latter was meant to host regular lectures and public readings “on the subjects of national history and antiquities.”84 Akin to the Russian Museum and the Rumiantsev Museum, the sequencing and design of the exhibition rooms in the Historical Museum, as well as the objects on display, were arranged in such a way as to show Russia’s initial reliance on and imitation of Byzantine representational techniques,

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Fig. 33  Vladimir Sherwood and Anatolii Semenov, Approved Design of the Historical Museum Building, 1875. Watercolor and India ink on paper. State Historical Museum, Moscow.

followed by what were presented as novel and purely Russian pictorial and architectural idioms. The museum thus constructed a manifestly nationalistic narrative, wherein Russia was presented as Byzantium’s immediate heir and successor, on the one hand, and a mighty civilization in its own right, on the other—a veritable “Third Rome.” Almost half of the museum exhibition spaces were dedicated to Russia’s early Christian and medieval history, and out of the seven museum departments, five oversaw the artifacts and installations of the pre-​Petrine period, which meant that the Middle Ages were given prominence above all other historical epochs. This setup can be partially explained

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by the fact that the two principle founders and subsequent directors of the museum, Aleksei Uvarov and Ivan Zabelin, were both specialists of medieval Russian history, culture, and archaeology and were accordingly invested in representing Russia’s Byzantine and post-​Byzantine past as comprehensively as possible. To this end, the interior decoration of the museum was conceived as a visual continuation of the objects and artifacts on display, and each exhibition room was designed in the architectural style of the epoch whose monuments it contained. Consequently, in addition to leading historians and archaeologists, including Ivan Mansvetov, Dmitrii Anuchin, and Vladimir Sizov, prominent revivalist

Fig. 34  Emperor Leo VI Prostrated Before Christ Pantocrator, 1880s, restored 1986–2002. Mosaic, Byzantine Room, State Historical Museum, Moscow.

architects and academy artists such as Nikolai Sultanov, Alexander Popov, Viktor Vasnetsov, Ivan Aivazovsky, Henryk Siemiradzki, Valentin Serov, Ilia Repin, and icon painters from Nikolai Safonov’s renowned Palekh workshops participated in the design and decoration of the exhibition halls.85 As a result, the final displays were both original and unprecedented in their visual splendor and curatorial ambition. For example, the stucco cornices and mosaic decorations in the Stone Age Room were modeled after the ornamental patterns on the Neolithic pottery found near the Volosovo village on the Oka River, and Viktor Vasnetsov between 1882 and 1885 painted the monumental frieze with scenes depicting the various daily activities of prehistoric man.86 Similarly, the Byzantine Room was modeled after the central nave of the Hagia Sophia Church

in Constantinople, while its floor was decorated with replicas of extant mosaics from the Roman catacombs and the St. Costanza Mausoleum.87 The walls and ceiling were adorned with mosaics from famous early Christian and Byzantine monuments, like the fifth-​century Christ as the Good Shepherd mosaic from the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia and the tenth-​century mosaic over the imperial door of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, representing most likely the emperor Leo VI prostrated before an enthroned Christ (fig. 34). Ironically, the reproduction of the Hagia Sophia mosaic was based on an 1848 chromolithograph by the German civil servant Wilhelm Salzenberg rather than on the Byzantine original, which Salzenberg had seen and reproduced during its restoration by the Fossati brothers in 1847–49, before it was covered up again by Ottoman authorities.88

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Fig. 35  Saint George, eleventh century. Paint on ceramic tile. From Chersonesus, Crimea, now in the State Historical Museum, Moscow.

In fact, the museum relied quite extensively on high-​quality copies and facsimiles of medieval artifacts and molded replicas of architectural details, which supplemented its collection of original artworks. As discussed in the first chapter, excavations and restoration works were well under way throughout the 1880s and 1890s in Chersonesus, Kiev, Novgorod, Suzdal, Pskov, Vladimir, and Iaroslavl, and many of the copies and replicas that were made of the newly uncovered frescoes, mosaics, and decorative-​art objects were donated to the Historical Museum. For instance, the two rooms dedicated to Kievan Rus were adorned with copies of mosaics and frescoes from the Monastery of St. Michael of

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the Golden Domes and the St. Sophia Cathedral in Kiev, which included the Eucharist mosaic from the latter building’s main altar—a mosaic whose copy was personally executed by Adrian Prakhov— and copies of frescoes of dancers and musicians from its western tower.89 Display cases containing early Byzantine works of art, such as the eleventh-​ century ceramic icons of Saint George (fig. 35), Saint Elizabeth, and the archangel Michael, as well as twelfth-​century gold and bronze encolpia, liturgical crosses, and enameled jewelry, were arranged alongside reproductions of illuminations from the Ostromir Gospel (1056), the Izbornik of Prince Sviatoslav (1073), and the thirteenth-​century Radziwill Chronicle, which portrayed important scenes from the history of Kievan Rus.90 Similarly, in addition to display cases containing icons, illuminated manuscripts, and precious works of applied art, the Novgorod Room was decorated with life-​size copies of the twelfth-​century frescoes from the Church of Christ the Savior on the Nere­ ditsa. These included the large Ascension mural from the central vault of the church, depicting Christ in Majesty surrounded by angels; the Archangel Selaphiel from the central lunette on the western wall; Prince Iaroslav Vsevolodovich Presenting a Model of the Church to Christ; and medallion images of Saints Catherine, Cyril, Barbara, Theodore, Domentian, and Euphrosyne of Polotsk. The room also contained casts of the cornices and porticos from the eleventh-​century St. Sophia Cathedral in Novgorod, an enlarged landscape of Novgorod from a seventeenth-​century icon, and a monumental version of the famous fifteenth-​century icon The Battle of Novgorod with Suzdal (fig. 36), which portrays the siege of Novgorod in 1169 by the army of the Grand Prince of Vladimir-​Suzdal, Andrei Bogoliubskii

Fig. 36  The Battle of Novgorod with Suzdal, 1880s, restored 1986–2002. Ceiling of the Novgorod Room, State Historical Museum, Moscow.

(1111–1174). According to legend, the inhabitants of Novgorod were miraculously rescued by an icon of the Virgin of the Sign, which is shown in the center of the image. One of the principle centerpieces of the Novgorod Room was a life-​size replica of the bronze gates from the western portal of Novgorod’s St. Sophia Cathedral. Depicting in relief stories from the Old and New Testaments, allegorical scenes and portraits of the bishops of Magdeburg and Plock, this door is believed to have been fabricated originally in western Europe in the twelfth century, then brought over to Russia and further embellished in the fourteenth century by local Novgorod craftsmen. The replica was made specifically for the Historical

Museum in the early 1880s under the direction of Adrian Prakhov, who was involved in restoration works in Novgorod at the time.91 The Vladimir and Suzdal Rooms were analogously adorned with copies of frescoes and molded replicas of architectural details from the Assumption (1189) and St. Dimitrii (1197) Cathedrals in Vladimir and the St. George Cathedral (1234) in Iuriev-​Polskii. The ornamental patterns on the floor and ceiling of the Vladimir and Suzdal Rooms were based on the recently discovered twelfth- and fifteenth-​century frescoes in the Assumption Cathedral, which were copied in May of 1882 by Nikolai Safonov and a team of craftsmen from his Palekh

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Fig. 37  Alabaster figures of prophets and peacocks, 1880s, restored 1986–2002. Vladimir Room, State Historical Museum, Moscow.

studios and used in the interior decoration of the museum.92 Meanwhile, the blind arches decorating the façade of the St. Dimitrii Cathedral, with relief figures of prophets and peacocks, were re-​created as alabaster copies along the entire perimeter of the Vladimir Room (fig. 37).93 Above the two entrances to the room were relief replicas of the narrative scenes depicting King David on his throne and the ascension of Alexander the Great from the western and southern porticos of the St. Dimitrii Cathedral. The Suzdal Room, in turn, was decorated with a

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nearly life-​size copy of the carved southern portal from the St. George Cathedral and with relief images of saints, warriors, animals, birds, and monsters from its façade.94 It also contained twelfth-​century fresco fragments, a monumental embroidered icon of the Eucharist with scenes from the lives of the Virgin and Saints Joachim and Anne (1410–1416), and a life-​size replica of the famous Golden Gates from the Suzdal Cathedral of the Nativity of the Virgin (1222). Although the nineteenth-​century practice of combining authentic artworks with copies may

seem peculiarly antiquated now, at the turn of the century it was considered to be state of the art museology and was adopted by some of the world’s leading institutions, such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Musée des monuments français in Paris, which contained copies of medieval church sculpture from all over France. In Russia these display strategies were crucial in acquainting a broader public with the visual traditions of Russo-​Byzantine art, which were otherwise inaccessible due to the remote locations and often poor state of preservation of the original medieval monuments. In a letter to Adrian Prakhov, the well-​known art historian and Byzantinist Fedor Schmidt wrote that he was “amazed” by many aspects of the museum, including “its interior decoration, the wealth of its collection, and the insightful principle by which copies are incorporated”: This is the first time I have seen exhibition rooms themselves decorated in the styles of their [respective] eras, which their artifacts represent. . . . Only in this way can one create a complete picture of the evolution of Russian art and, more importantly, make it accessible for further study. After all, such works of art as miniatures, borders, historiated initials, and marginalia from illuminated manuscripts cannot be made publicly available, given their susceptibility to deterioration. Here [in the Historical Museum] the collection of copies in the display cases can be studied by anyone who wishes to do so.95

In addition to the high-​quality copies and replicas described above, the Historical Museum possessed an impressive collection of authentic medieval artifacts. The royal family and Aleksei Uvarov made some of the first bequests, which included a large collection of bronze items from Ossetia, a number of

illuminated manuscripts, and almost three hundred icons dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Other important donations were made by Ivan Zabelin, who left to the museum his entire library of medieval manuscripts, maps, and prints, as well as a sizeable collection of icons, and by Petr Shchukin, who in 1905 bequeathed to the museum around three hundred thousand items, including jewelry, embroidery, manuscripts, and more than one hundred icons. Significant gifts also came from various aristocratic Russian households, including from the Golitsin, Bobrinskii, Kropotkin, Obolenskii, Olsufiev and Shcherbatov families.96 In the first decade of its existence, the museum likewise received a large variety of precious objects from monasteries, convents, spiritual academies, and archaeological societies, including the St. Panteleimon Monastery in Mount Athos, the Florishchev Dormition Monastery, the Archangel Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin, the Imperial Archaeological Commission, and the Moscow Archaeological Society. Between 1881 and 1883, at Uvarov’s request, the latter donated a number of rare artifacts to the museum, such as tenth-​century drinking horns from the Black Grave burial mound in Chernigov, twelfth-​ century arches from the Vzhishch Church, and fresco fragments from the twelfth-​century Transfiguration Cathedral in Pereslavl’-Zalesskii .97 Lastly, thanks to Zabelin’s successful efforts in securing an annual sum of 10,000 rubles from the state treasury in 1887, the museum was able to develop a robust acquisition program that enabled it to purchase both individual works of art and entire collections from specialized sellers, antique auctions, and private owners.98 As a result, between 1881 and 1917 the Historical Museum managed to expand its holdings from 2,443 to more than 300,000 objects, which included

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more than 1,200 icons dating from the early Middle Ages to the nineteenth century.99 Among these were such unique artistic masterpieces as the tenth-​ century Byzantine ivory plaque of Christ crowning Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos emperor, the fourteenth-​century Virgin of Tenderness and Nativity of the Virgin with Saints icons, the sixteenth-​century Novgorod icon of Saints Basil the Great, Nicholas the Wonder-​Worker, John the Baptist, and Leo the Pope, and the icon-​parsuna portraits Saint Basil the Great and the Grand Duke Vasilii III and Tsar Fedor Alekseevich.100 In addition, the museum accumulated a large collection of Byzantine, Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Georgian illuminated manuscripts dating from the sixth to the eighteenth centuries, including the renowned ninth-​century Chludov Psalter, the twelfth-​century Mstislav Gospel, and the fourteenth-​century Tomich Psalter.101 Lastly, the museum amassed a vast collection of applied-​art objects, comprising more than one thousand pieces of religious and secular jewelry, embroidery, and wooden carvings, as well as several thousand articles of precious metalwork, including liturgical vessels, reliquaries, altar crosses, censers, tabernacles, and ornate icon cases. Among its most important pieces were such rare objects as an eleventh-​century Byzantine pendant cross with the four Evangelists, a monumental embroidered icon of the Mandylion with the Virgin, angels, and saints (1389), and a carved fifteenth-​century double-​sided wooden icon of the synaxis of the Mother of God.102 The Imperial Russian Historical Museum officially opened to the public on June 2, 1883, and was visited annually by as many as forty thousand people. On November 2, 1889, the auditorium was also officially opened for public use and over the ensuing decades hosted up to 120 meetings per year,

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which included lectures, readings, concerts, conventions, and assemblies of various scholarly societies.103 Much like the Rumiantsev Museum, the Historical Museum encouraged architects, artists, and designers to study and copy the artworks in its collections, and museum records from 1910 to 1915 mention a number of well-​known individuals who regularly frequented its exhibition spaces. For example, Vasilii Surikov sketched a variety of household items, weapons, costumes, icons, and liturgical objects from the seventeenth century while working on his paintings Stepan Razin (1906) and The Tsarevna’s Visit to the Convent (1912). Viktor Vasnetsov copied the miniatures and border decorations of several illuminated manuscripts in 1907 and collected information on the life and iconography of Prince Oleg Romanovich of Briansk in 1915; Natalia Goncharova studied the museum’s vast holdings of folk prints and made sketches of various icons, objects of ancient embroidery, and Scythian stone statues between 1910 and 1915.104 Although not explicitly mentioned in museum records, it is not hard to imagine that in the early 1900s a young Vasily Kandinsky would also have consulted the museum’s collection of Byzantine and ancient Russian art, given his long-​standing interest in Russia’s pre-​Petrine past and medieval mythology, as reflected in his Arrival of the Merchants (1903), Sunday (Old Russia) (1904), and Colorful Life (Motley Life) (1907) (see fig. 72) paintings. Aside from fine artists, the Historical Museum became a valuable source of raw material for architects, stage and costume designers, and furniture and jewelry makers. Revivalist architects such as Aleksei Shchusev, Vladimir Adamovich, and Vladimir Maiat mined the museum’s collections of manuscripts, rare books, and archival materials for plans and drawings

of pre-​Petrine architecture. They likewise studied its rich ensemble of replicas of medieval architectural patterns and motifs in developing novel design solutions for their own construction projects, such as the Trinity Cathedral in the Pochaev Monastery (1905–12) in Ukraine and the Church of the Intercession of the Mother of God (1908–10) in Moscow. Leading designers from Karl Fabergé’s firm, as well as the celebrated court jewelers Gustaf and Edward Bolin and Mikhail Ovchinnikov, also frequented the museum on a regular basis in order to study its holdings of church antiques, jewelry, and applied-​art objects, whose intricate ornamentation and decoration techniques they would often incorporate into their own designs. Lastly, various stage and costume designers would habitually use the museum’s collections in preparation for different theater, ballet, and opera productions, including Alexander Ostrovsky’s False Dmitrii and Vasilii Shuiskii, Mikhail Saltykov-​ Shchedrin’s Death of Pazukhin, Anton Rubinstein’s Demon, and Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina operas.105 As a result, by the mid1910s not only did the Historical Museum serve as a rich repository of precious objects through which national history was powerfully visualized, but it also became a vibrant cultural and artistic center that inspired and sustained a number of revivalist and modernist projects across a diverse range of media. Moreover, at the turn of the century, since not all of the museum’s exhibition halls were used to display its permanent collection, several empty rooms on the first and second floors were made available for temporary exhibitions of both historical artifacts and contemporary art. For example, in 1890 the museum hosted the Eighth Archaeological Convention with its accompanying exhibition of medieval art (discussed in more detail in the next section).

Additionally, exhibitions of important private collections, such as those of Dmitrii Postnikov and Natalia Shabelskaia, were held at the museum throughout the late 1880s and 1890s.106 Meanwhile, exhibitions of contemporary art included both group shows organized by artists’ societies, such as the Peredvizhniki Association, the St. Petersburg Artists’ Society, the Moscow Artists’ Association, the Moscow Society of Art Lovers, and the Imperial Watercolor Society, and solo exhibitions of works by artists like Ilia Repin (1892) and Viktor Vasnetsov (1904).107 It was here that Kazimir Malevich first made his Moscow debut in 1906, displaying some of his early works as part of the 25th Periodical Exhibition of the Moscow Society of Art Lovers.108 Furthermore, certain rooms in the museum were turned over to a number of artists to be used as temporary studio and storage spaces for their artworks. Thus, for example, Vasilii Vereshchagin and Mikhail Nesterov kept their large-​scale canvases there between 1906 and 1909, while Vasilii Surikov, Valentin Serov, and Sergei Korovin used some of the empty museum rooms as makeshift studios.109 Accordingly, by the opening decade of the twentieth century, the Historical Museum had become a dynamic and interactive cultural space, where contemporary art continually interfaced with medieval representational traditions in a way that made a significant and lasting impact on the Russian art world.

Presenting the “Icon Pompei”: Art, Archaeology, and the Politics of Display Within the Context of Temporary Exhibitions Besides the major museums discussed above in the metropolitan centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg,

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it is important to note that between 1870 and 1890 a total of about eighty museums appeared in different provincial and regional districts across the Russian Empire.110 For instance, on the initiative of the governor of Tver, Count Petr Bagration, a small archaeological museum opened there on August 9, 1866; by 1872 it had managed to accumulate up to fifteen thousand rare objects of ecclesiastical art, including various liturgical items, icons, and illuminated manuscripts.111 Similarly, on October 28, 1883, a museum of church antiquities opened in the city of Rostov, in the Iaroslavl district, which also accrued a sizeable collection of medieval art and contained such famous masterpieces as the fifteenth-​century icons of the archangel Michael and Saints Boris and Gleb, now in the Tretyakov Gallery collection.112 Other notable regional museums that were opened at this time include the Novgorod Museum (1865), the Pskov Museum (1876), the Trinity Lavra Museum in Sergiev Posad (1880), the Tula Museum of Church Antiquities (1885), the Vologda Museum of Church Antiquities (1886), the Vladimir Museum of Church Antiquities (1886), the Arkhangelsk Museum of Church Antiquities (1886), the Iaroslavl Museum of Church Antiquities (1895), and the Kiev Museum of Antiques and Art (1899). In addition to the proliferation of provincial museums, temporary exhibitions of Russo-​ Byzantine art often accompanied large archaeological conventions that were held once every two to three years in different cities across the Russian Empire throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. First initiated in 1869 by the Moscow Archaeological Society, these conventions brought together a large number of archaeologists, historians, and Russo-​Byzantine specialists from across the country and served as important forums for

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scholarly debate and discussion. Over the course of four decades their proceedings were published in the form of forty-​five scholarly volumes, many of which contained groundbreaking research on Byzantine and medieval Russian art and architecture. Before the outbreak of World War I, a total of fifteen archaeological conventions took place in Moscow (1869, 1890), St. Petersburg (1876), Kiev (1874, 1899), Kazan (1877), Tiflis (1881), Odessa (1884), Iaroslavl (1887), Vilnius (1893), Riga (1896), Kharkov (1902), Ekaterinoslav (1905), Chernigov (1908), and Novgorod (1911).113 This constant geographical variation ensured that the exhibitions of medieval art accompanying the conventions reached a broad audience beyond the capital cities of St. Petersburg and Moscow, especially since the exhibitions were open not only to specialists but to the general public. The objects on display were typically drawn from the host cities or provinces and were either recent discoveries of the respective regional archaeological societies or special loans from local ecclesiastical institutions and private collectors. For example, the exhibition held during the Fifteenth All-​Russian Archaeological Convention in Novgorod consisted of 1,640 objects, which included a large number of ecclesiastical antiquities and icons from the Novgorod St. Sophia Cathedral (1050), the Tikhvin Assumption Monastery (1560), and the Ustiug Cathedral of the Nativity of the Virgin (1690), as well as rare books, documents, and church artifacts from the Solovetskii Monastery (1436) and several illuminated manuscripts dating from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries that were sent over by the St. Petersburg Theological Academy.114 Among the most valuable pieces in the exhibition were a tenth-​century carved ivory casket, an eleventh-​century staff that belonged to Bishop

Nicetas of Novgorod, the famous fifteenth-​century icon of the Battle of Novgorod with Suzdal, a large sixteenth-​century vita icon of Saint Barlaam, the abbot of Khoutyn, and a rare icon commissioned by the house of Tsar Boris Godunov depicting Mary Magdalene, Saint Boris, Saint Xenia the Righteous of Rome, and Saint Theodotos, the bishop of Kyrenia (1590s).115 To supplement the exhibition, the convention organizers also arranged a series of lectures on the cultural and artistic history of Novgorod, as well as guided tours to important medieval sites, such as the St. Sophia Cathedral (1050), the St. Nicholas Cathedral (1113), the Iuriev Monastery (1119), the Antoniev Monastery (1117–27), the Church of Christ the Savior on the Nereditsa (1198), St. Theodore’s Church (1361), the Church of the Transfiguration of the Savior (1374), which contained frescoes by Theophanes the Greek, and the Novgorod Kremlin (1484). The convention was extensively discussed in the local press over the course of several months, and the exhibition in particular was repeatedly singled out for special praise.116 Although smaller in scope and scale than the Novgorod exhibition, other noteworthy regional exhibitions took place in Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa, and Chernigov, where local antiquities, artworks, and precious artifacts were displayed alongside large-​ scale copies and reproductions of recently restored monumental art. For instance, at the Eleventh All-​ Russian Archaeological Convention in Kiev (1899), segments of iconostases, liturgical embroideries, and icons from the Kamenets-​Podolsk Museum, as well as 190 illuminated manuscripts, rare books, and maps dating from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, were displayed alongside Vasilii Georgievskii’s series of photographs of the Cathedral of

the Nativity of the Virgin (1222), the Deposition Monastery (1207), and the Intercession Convent (1364) in Suzdal.117 Similarly, at the exhibition of the Twelfth All-​Russian Archaeological Convention in Kharkov (1902), organized by Nikodim Kondakov’s student Egor Redin, major works of medieval art were presented in conjunction with photographs, drawings, and color reproductions both of architectural monuments and of individual artifacts from the region, which together produced a comprehensive narrative of the artistic evolution of Ukrainian art from the early Middle Ages to the eighteenth century.118 In total, the exhibition contained 604 objects of ecclesiastical art in various media and was accompanied by a colossal nine-​hundred-​page scholarly catalogue and a separate album with illustrations.119 According to contemporary reports, the exhibition was extremely popular with local audiences and attracted as many as eight thousand visitors per day, who would queue patiently for hours outside of the exhibition venue.120 The largest and perhaps most significant of these temporary convention exhibitions took place in Moscow, in the Historical Museum. Organized by the Moscow Archaeological Society as part of the Eighth All-​Russian Archaeological Convention, it opened with great fanfare in January of 1890. The exhibition occupied eleven large halls and consisted of a rich variety of medieval artworks that included recent archaeological discoveries, rare illuminated manuscripts, embroideries, metalwork, carved ivory and wood, and a large number of important icons drawn from several monasteries, the Tver and Ryazan Museums, the Historical Museum, and the private collections of Aleksei Uvarov, Ivan Silin, Tihon Bolshakov, Ivan Zaitsevskii, and Nikolai Postinkov.121 The Kiev Theological Academy sent several

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early Byzantine icons in its possession, including the sixth-​century encaustic Two Martyrs (Saints Plato and Glykeria) icon from the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai. Other well-​known masterpieces included the twelfth-​century Byzantine mosaic icon of Saint Nicholas the Miracle Worker, the thirteenth-​century Georgian icon of Saint George, the monumental embroidered icon of the Assumption of the Virgin (1560) from the workshop of Countess Efrosinia Staritskaia, the sixteenth-​century illuminated manuscript of the life of John the Apostle from Tihon Bolshakov’s collection, and a number of signed icons by Simon Ushakov, including his famous version of the Virgin of Vladimir (1652).122 The exhibition was accompanied by an extensive seven-​hundred-​page catalogue that meticulously chronicled all the pieces on display. Moreover, convention delegates and leading experts in the fields of archaeology and medieval history and art delivered a series of public lectures that focused on the various objects on display and discussed them in relation to the broader development of Byzantine and medieval Russian visual culture. Although not directly related to the archaeological conventions discussed above, another noteworthy temporary exhibition of Russo-​Byzantine art took place in St. Petersburg in December of 1898, organized by the Imperial Archaeological Institute.123 In contrast to the Moscow show, where all kinds of medieval artifacts were mixed together, including metalware, woodwork, textiles, and icons, the St. Petersburg exhibition primarily focused on icon painting and was accordingly named an “artistic-​archaeological” exhibition.124 The works on display were meant to highlight “the transition from ancient icon painting to the new art in the academic sense” and were therefore arranged chronologically

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in order to show the iconographic and stylistic variation across three major periods of Russian icon painting, namely the Novgorod, Muscovy, and Stroganov Schools.125 More specifically, the exhibition organizers aimed to demonstrate the striking formal evolution of iconic representation from the fourteenth century to the nineteenth so as to challenge the long-​standing public misconception of icon painting as timeless and unchanging. Containing a total of 532 objects, the exhibition also included early Byzantine enamel icons from Ivan Balashev’s collection and several late Byzantine icons of the so-​called Cretan School from Nikolai Likhachev’s collection, which were meant to illustrate both the similarities and differences between the Byzantine and Russian representational traditions.126 Finally, the exhibition incorporated some examples of contemporary church art in the form of sketches and studies for the newly constructed Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood (1883–1907) by revivalist artists such as Viktor Vasnetsov, Mikhail Nesterov, Nikolai Kharlamov, Valerian Otmar, Andrei Riabushkin, and Vasilii Beliaev. Consequently, unlike the exhibitions accompanying the archaeological conventions, this show followed a purely art-​historical organizational logic and signified the beginning of an important shift in the presentation of icon painting: away from an archaeological perspective and toward a primarily aesthetic one. In fact, several other exhibitions of Russo-​ Byzantine art held at this time adopted a similar art-​ historical approach. For instance, in 1896 and 1897 the Moscow Society of Art Lovers organized two shows, whose purported goal was to demonstrate the iconographic evolution of representations of Christ and the Virgin Mary respectively over the course of multiple centuries. In addition to borrowing

medieval icons from the Imperial Russian Archaeological Society and the Historical Museum, the society requested later paintings from the Imperial Academy of Arts.127 Furthermore, both of these shows contained facsimiles, casts, and watercolor reproductions of famous works of Byzantine, Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque art, including copies of monumental mosaics, frescoes, reliefs, and sculptures.128 As a result, instead of being labeled “ecclesiastical” or “church” antiquities and being grouped together with liturgical objects, the icons in these exhibitions were treated as examples of fine art aesthetically and conceptually comparable to the major masterpieces of western European painting by celebrated artists such as Giotto, Masaccio, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Dürer, Rubens, and Rembrandt.129 Moreover, university professors Dmitrii Ainalov and Alexander Kirpichnikov were invited to speak, throughout the duration of both exhibitions, about the numerous stylistic and iconographic variations in the portrayals of Christ and the Virgin Mary in early Christian, Byzantine, medieval Russian, and subsequent western European art. These lectures were so popular with the general public that, according to the society’s records, large numbers of people had to be turned away due to a lack of space in the auditorium.130 Consequently, although rarely discussed in scholarship on the iconic revival, such nineteenth-​ century shows not only set an important precedent for the ensuing twentieth-​century exhibitions of icons but also clearly demonstrate that the aesthetic reappraisal of Russo-​Byzantine art was already well under way before the turn of the century. Indeed, despite the later claims of the next generation of artists and critics, both the conceptual and material foundations for the 1913 Exhibition of Ancient Russian Art—and the avant-​garde polemics that surrounded

it—were already laid in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.

“A Russian Renaissance”: The 1913 Exhibition of Ancient Russian Art Described as “an aesthetic revelation,” “the beginning of a new artistic consciousness in Russia,” the unveiling of a Russian “Quattrocento,” the 1913 Exhibition of Ancient Russian Art became a major cultural event in the Russian art world.131 Organized by the Moscow Archaeological Institute in honor of the three-hundredth anniversary of Romanov rule, the exhibition opened on February 13, 1913, in the Moscow Business Court complex Delovoi Dvor on Varvarskaia Square and stayed open for four months. Although it consisted of four sections: Icons, Illuminated Manuscripts, Metalwork, and Embroidery, the icon section was by far the largest, comprising 147 icons, which spanned the thirteenth through seventeenth centuries. The vast majority of the icons came from the extensive private collections of Stepan Riabushinsky, Nikolai Likhachev, Ilia Ostroukhov, and Dmitrii Silin, among others, and had recently been cleansed of multiple layers of dirt, soot, and overpainting to reveal some of the most ancient Russian icon painting ever to be seen by the general public.132 The most notable masterpieces in the exhibition belonged to the Novgorod School and included such famous works as the thirteenth-​ century Virgin of Smolensk icon, the fourteenth-​ century John Chrysostom, Archangel Michael, Saints Boris and Gleb (fig. 30), and Nativity icons, as well as several important fifteenth-​century icons portraying the Presentation of Christ at the Temple, the Miracle of Saint George, Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem,

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the Virgin’s Assumption, and the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste.133 The exhibition likewise contained a considerable number of sixteenth- and seventeenth-​ century icons executed by master icon painters from the Stroganov School, such as Procopius Chirin (1570s–1620s) and Nikephoros Savin (1590s–1650s). Installed in the large, spacious halls of the newly built Delovoi Dvor (1911–13), the exhibition attracted vast audiences and received widespread coverage in the Russian press. A comprehensive scholarly catalogue was written specifically for the exhibition and contained multiple illustrations and detailed descriptions of each artwork, as well as a short introductory essay by Pavel Muratov, in which the author praised the aesthetic achievements of icon painting in general and identified the Novgorod School in particular as a highly sophisticated and elaborate form of visual representation: “Nobody can call Russian icon painting—as they had often done in the past—dark, monotonous, and unskilled in comparison to its Western counterparts. On the contrary, in front of us is an art that possesses great strength of color, refinement in its compositions, and has attained the highest level of mastery in its execution.”134 Although many of the objects on display at the 1913 exhibition were presented to the public for the first time, a significant number of icons from Likhachev’s and Riabushinsky’s collections had already been exhibited in St. Petersburg the previous year at the Exhibition of Icon Painting and Artistic Antiquities, which accompanied the Second All-​Russian Congress of Artists.135 The congress was held in the Imperial Academy of Arts from December 27, 1911, to January 15, 1912, and aimed, on the one hand, to address questions about conservation of Russia’s medieval artistic heritage and, on the other, to provide a detailed overview of all aspects

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of Russian contemporary visual culture. To this end, it was divided into eight sections, each of which involved prepared lectures, reports, and discussions: (1) Problems of Aesthetics and Art History, (2) Art Education in the Family and at School and the Teaching of the Graphic Arts, (3) Painting and Its Technique, (4) Architecture and the Artistic Aspect of Cities, (5) Russian Antiquity and Its Preservation, (6) Industrial Art and Handicrafts, (7) Art in the Theater, (8) General Meetings.136 One of the most striking features of the congress was the continuous interface between the old and the new. Reports on archaeological excavations and restoration initiatives by distinguished scholars of Russo-​Byzantine art such as Nikodim Kondakov, Dmitrii Ainalov, and Alexander Anisimov were delivered alongside manifestos and pronouncements on contemporary painting practices by the likes of Ilia Repin, Vasily Kandinsky, Ivan Kulbin, and Sergei Bobrov. The latter presented the aesthetic views of the Donkey’s Tail group and especially those of Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova. As part of his opening speech at the congress, Dmitrii Ainalov identified two major trends he believed characterized the Russian art world of those years: Let us glance around . . . that which until recently has been the subject of specialized study in the chambers of the rare archaeologist and scholar now suddenly interests society [at large], which lovingly turns its attention to this antiquity and, so to speak, absorbs the beauty of native, previously familiar forms and styles. . . . Never before have the interests of the broader sectors of society been turned with greater love toward our artistic antiquity and our recent artistic past. This is a marker of our times.

At [contemporary] art exhibitions society witnesses

the still more vivid features of modern art. This art is new,

previously unseen, unknown. . . . The passionate presentation of novel forms confronts both art criticism and society with the new objectives of contemporary artistic creativity; it demands a new ideology, a new understanding, which is being sought out with equal passion in the various currents of contemporary thought.137

Drawing a direct link between these two cultural developments, Ainalov concluded that contemporary Russian art was in a state of transition and that artists’ and critics’ understanding of medieval representation was shifting away from a purely “formal idea of native art” and toward a much deeper appreciation of “its essence.”138 Here Ainalov was undoubtedly referring to the gradual reconceptualization of the icon as a unique philosophical and ontological entity whose aesthetic qualities were inseparable from its religious, social, and historical functions. It was precisely this evolving understanding of iconic representation that ultimately led to the development of novel theories of the image by the likes of Florensky, Punin, and Tarabukin a few years later. Given the discursive framework of the congress, the accompanying Exhibition of Icon Painting and Artistic Antiquities aimed to present Russian icon painting as a sophisticated “form of high art with its own history, evolution, and periods of flowering and decline.”139 In order to achieve this goal, the exhibition was composed exclusively of newly restored icons, which included several major masterpieces, such as the fourteenth-​century icon of Boris and Gleb (fig. 30) and the seventeenth-​century icon of John the Warrior by Procopius Chirin from Likhachev’s collection, the fifteenth-​century icons of the Ascension and the Virgin of Georgia from Riabushinsky’s collection, a sixteenth-​century

version of The Battle of Novgorod with Suzdal from Viktor Vasnetsov’s collection, and a number of reproductions of frescoes from the Church of Christ the Savior on the Nereditsa, the Church of St. Theo­ dore Stratelates on the Stream (1360), and the Ferapontov Convent (1398).140 In his overview of the exhibition, Vasilii Georgievskii dwelt extensively on the stylistic features of the individual icons, praising their “brilliant colorfulness,” “refinement,” and “high aesthetic achievement.”141 Consequently, both the content of the Exhibition of Icon Painting and Artistic Antiquities and the theoretical debates that prevailed at the Second All-​Russian Congress of Artists anticipated and set the tone for the 1913 Exhibition of Ancient Russian Art and the critical response it engendered. Although many critics claimed that the 1913 exhibition marked the “beginning,” “birth,” or “dawn” of public awareness and appreciation of the iconic pictorial tradition, it ought to be viewed as more of a culmination of a decadelong process that originated in the nineteenth century. Indeed, some commentators grudgingly conceded that “thanks are due to the scientists . . . their painstaking efforts [formed] the foundation on which we can now build.”142 After all, it was the scientific, positivist ethos of the second half of the nineteenth century that first enabled scholars to examine iconic artworks in purely secular terms as important historical and archaeological artifacts—and not merely religious or cult objects—leading to their initial liberation from indefinite neglect in moldy church attics and basements. Moreover, the progressive political reforms that were undertaken at the turn of the century, such as the 1905 Act of Toleration, not only led to greater religious freedom throughout the Russian Empire but resulted in the reopening of

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hundreds of Old Believer churches, which in turn was accompanied by the cleaning and restoration of earlier icons that predated Patriarch Nikon’s ecclesiastical reforms.143 The latter were enacted between 1654 and 1666 and entailed a series of new requirements for liturgical rituals, service books, and religious representations, the most famous of which was the modification of the two-​fingered blessing to a three-​fingered one. Since the Old Believers refused to accept these new regulations, they were formally excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church, and hundreds of their icons were either destroyed or entirely repainted to reflect the new church doctrine. The triumphant reinstatement of Old Believer practices in the early 1900s after centuries of repression and persecution meant that for many viewers and thinkers the rediscovery of the iconic tradition was necessarily aligned with secularism, progress, and modernity rather than with “medieval” barbarism, religious dogmatism, and extremism. For example, Iakov Tugenkhold wrote that Nikon’s reforms, having ripped an abyss between Russian national piety and the state church, delivered a blow to

icon was perceived by some as the ultimate restorative elixir to the horrors and excesses of ruthless capitalist modernity. For instance, Makovksy argued as follows: Here, centuries ago, anonymous masters brought about that which we have dreamed of from the moment when the rationalist art of the nineteenth century stopped pleasing us—that which has been missing for us faithless, crippled contemporaries of Edison: the symphony of color combinations, the wise convention of contours, the painterly rhythm of composition, and—most of all—the magnificent spirituality of art, its depth of meaning, its serene eloquence, in an inseparable unification with the perfection of hieratic form. . . . It fills us with hope for the future of Russian painting.145

In his review of the exhibition, Punin went even further and claimed that the icon’s status as an indexical trace of the divine was fundamental to its aesthetic impact and metaphysical presence and that purely stylistic comparisons between iconic representation and modern French art were both superficial and limited:

ancient icon painting. . . . The reigning church did not consider herself at all responsible to our people for the preser-

It seems dangerous to embark on a path of risky com-

vation of icons. Several rotted in church storages; others,

parisons, a path that is, in our view, almost sacrilegious

having stood on ancient iconostases for entire centuries,

in its parallelisms, as one undoubtedly cannot point to

were covered with new layers of varnish or mercilessly

the hand of the Mother of God and talk about Gauguin

worked anew in crude painting to achieve superficial gran-

[or] contemplate the green tones of her tunic [and]

deur and please changing taste.

invoke Cézanne. . . . Even though, in their sustained

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exploration of painterly problems, nineteenth-​century

By contrast, other commentators saw the iconic tradition in more quixotic terms as the mystical antidote to arid Western rationalism and materialism. Viewed as a kernel of living spirituality that had persisted throughout the centuries to modern times, the

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artists approached Russian icon painting very closely, the spiritual impulses underpinning their works are so dissimilar that we Russians, who to this day still experience the powerful religious impact of our enduring culture, cannot allow such a frivolous attitude toward our ancient

traditions . . . the cause of artists (future or contemporary . . .) is to find the means to inspire in us a similarly affecting experience.146

Ironically, Punin’s argument echoes both Ainalov’s earlier statement and Kondakov’s idea that an exclusively aesthetic or formalist response to icons was “absolutely wanting in any scientific consistency or philosophical content.”147 This unexpected resonance between the seemingly outdated views of a nineteenth-​century scholar and one of the most radical leftist critics of the twentieth century demonstrates that the reappraisal of iconic representation remained contested and open-​ended for many turn-​of-​the-​century thinkers. While icons were universally seen to open novel aesthetic and conceptual possibilities to contemporary artists, many commentators considered negation of the icon’s metaphysical reality a limitation on its potentiality as a system of thought and representation alternative to western European painting. Accordingly, any discussion of the Russo-​Byzantine revival must go beyond a mere consideration of stylistic influence or art-​historical affinity to consider the complex philosophy set forth by Orthodox theologians with regard to presence, representation, and signification of the iconic image. Writing from the vantage point of 1923, Pavel Muratov claimed that “interest [in the icon] had reached its apogee by the spring of 1914” and that “among the artists . . . the 1913 Exhibition of Ancient Russian Art had had the most success.”148 Indeed, many promising young talents, as well as established masters from the Imperial Academy of Arts, were enlisted both in the restoration initiatives and in the interior decoration of the new revivalist churches

and public museums. Viktor Vasnetsov, Mikhail Nesterov, Mikhail Vrubel, Kuzma Petrov-​Vodkin, Pavel Kuznetsov, and Nikolai Roerich, to name but a few, all worked on various projects throughout Russia. Even artists who were not directly involved in restoration and revivalist projects began to make tours of rural Russia in order to discover the country’s rich Russo-​Byzantine artistic legacy. Vasily Kandinsky, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Olga Popova, and Vladimir Tatlin, among others, toured the Golden Ring, making numerous sketches and studies of the frescoes, icons, and decorative objects they encountered on their trips. Last but not least, as the present chapter demonstrates, both the temporary exhibitions and the permanent collections of the Hermitage, Rumiantsev, Russian, and Historical Museums all provided valuable public access to major masterpieces of Byzantine and medieval Russian art from the 1860s onward. As a result, in the period spanning 1870 to 1920, few Russian artists managed to escape the pervasive influence of the Russo-​Byzantine artistic tradition, whose lasting impact on avant-​garde practice ranged from thematic borrowings and crude adaptations of iconic forms to a profound reconceptualization of the appearance and function of art in modernity. Although the vast range of extant material makes it possible to consider a great multiplicity of iconic iterations and reiterations, in the subsequent chapters I focus my inquiry on the theories and artworks of Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin, who adopted the “Russo-​ Byzantine” both as form and as methodology and whose respective artistic projects altered the course of modern art both in Russia and abroad.

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3 ANGELS BECOMING DEMONS Mikhail Vrubel’s Modernist Beginnings

In his 1911 biography of Mikhail Vrubel (1856–1910), the artist Stepan Iaremich (1869–1939) recounts a telling episode. In the spring of 1901 Iaremich had accompanied Vrubel to the twelfth-​century Church of St. Cyril in Kiev, where in 1884 the latter had both restored and re-​created a large number of frescoes under the direction of Adrian Prakhov. Standing in front of his Angels’ Lamentation mural (fig. 38), Vrubel observed: “In essence, this is the kind of work to which I should return.”1 At that point, Vrubel was based in Moscow and had already painted some of his most celebrated masterpieces: Seated Demon (1890), Portrait of Savva Mamontov (1897), Pan (1899), Lilacs (1900), and The Swan Princess (1900). However, Vrubel himself felt that he had produced his best work during his stay in Kiev in the 1880s, a period largely dominated by his restoration work in the Church of St. Cyril and his sketches for the unrealized murals in the revivalist Cathedral of St. Vladimir. Nikolai Punin would subsequently agree with the artist’s self-​assessment, praising Vrubel’s Kievan frescoes as some of his best work, in which he had “touched upon the known problems

of painting” with “such strength of spirit and insight . . . that the few existing pages that narrate Vrubel’s Kievan period of creativity should . . . grow into a huge body of literature, exclusively dedicated to [examining] the meaning and significance of these compositions.”2 Although a number of excellent scholarly monographs have discussed this formative stage in Vrubel’s career in considerable detail, few of them have situated it within the broader context of the Russo-​Byzantine revival.3 Neither have they considered how and why Vrubel’s preoccupation with religious subject matter came to influence his artistic outlook, evolving into an important subtheme within his oeuvre and culminating in the intriguing cycle of biblical paintings at the end of his life, which have typically been dismissed as his weakest work and the result of the onset of mental illness.4 And yet, in their unusual combination of modernist forms with mystical, transcendental themes, these works ought to be understood as nineteenth-​ century precursors to a strain of visionary modernism that found its full expression in the twentieth-​ century paintings of artists such as Pavel Filonov,

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Fig. 38  Mikhail Vrubel, Angels’ Lamentation, 1884. Oil on plaster, Church of St. Cyril, Kiev.

Vasily Kandinsky, and Kazimir Malevich, to name but a few. More importantly, period commentators, such as Stepan Iaremich, Vsevolod Dmitriev, Naum Gabo, Nikolai Punin, and Nikolai Tarabukin, all recognized Vrubel as an important forerunner, whose sustained engagement with the Russo-​Byzantine pictorial tradition both anticipated and shaped the avant-​garde espousal of icons by nearly thirty years. The present chapter thus repositions Vrubel as a key artistic figure in the emergence of a distinctive Russian modernist style around 1900 and recuperates a period view of his oeuvre that in the course of the twentieth century became somewhat attenuated in favor of other interpretations of his work. It likewise challenges the perceived binary categories of “new”

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and “old,” “vanguard” and “rearguard,” and “innovative” and “traditional” as they have too often been assumed, if not directly declared, in histories of turn-​ of-​the-​century Russian art. In fact, Vrubel’s trajectory toward a modernist style was redolent with inherent contradictions, which simultaneously both reflect and complicate the avant-​garde paradigm. On the one hand he was a trained academician, while on the other he was largely rejected by official critical and artistic establishments as a “decadent.” In his choice of subject matter Vrubel eschewed both the political radicalism of the Peredvizhniki and the modern cityscape and urbanized social environment of Impressionism. He was not interested in portraying

young revolutionaries and the suffering lower classes as the Peredvizhniki had done, nor was he drawn to celebrating Moscow and St. Petersburg as modern metropolises. Instead, he turned to largely metaphysical, esoteric, and Symbolist subject matter, and especially to Apocryphal themes of the demonic, angelic, and prophetic. In many ways his painterly explorations can be understood as visual analogues or antecedents to the later literary preoccupations of writers such as Alexander Blok, Osip Mandel­ stam, Mikhail Kuzmin, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Anna Akhmatova, whose works epitomized the modern move away from institutionalized religion and toward new spiritual and theistic possibilities.5 Born in Odessa in 1856 into the family of a military lawyer, Vrubel was intimately familiar with both Roman Catholicism and Russian Orthodoxy due to his mixed parentage—his father was of Polish descent, while his mother came from an old noble Russian family. However, he found organized religion to be restrictive and oppressive and in the late 1880s began to voice profound doubts about the Christian faith. Instead, Vrubel increasingly came to believe that the free pursuit of one’s artistic calling and individual creativity was the most direct route to spiritual attainment and fulfillment, famously stating toward the end of this life: “Art—this is our religion.”6 At first Vrubel pursued the study of law, graduating from the St. Petersburg University in 1880, but already during his university years he started to express a keen interest in art and attended evening drawing classes at the Imperial Academy of Arts from 1877 to 1879. Almost immediately upon graduating from the law faculty, Vrubel enrolled as a full-​time student at the academy, where he trained for four years under the direction of Pavel Chistiakov (1832–1919), eventually gaining the title

of “academician of painting” in 1905. Even during his early training at the academy, Vrubel was never a devoted follower of the academic style. His early nude studies demonstrate much looser brushwork and freer handling of paint than was typically practiced in the academy at this time. Nonetheless, it was not until his restoration experiences in Kiev that Vrubel began to develop a fragmentary brushstroke, unusual viewpoints and cropping devices, and a distinctive compression of the pictorial surface. In 1884, while still a student at the academy, Vrubel was approached by Adrian Prakhov, who was looking for a young artist to help him carry out the large-​scale restoration of the Church of St. Cyril. In order to secure the commission, Vrubel had first to produce a small work in the Byzantine manner. He painted an Annunciation scene (fig. 39), which unfortunately has not survived, except for a small black-​and-​white photograph originally reproduced in Iaremich’s biography.7 Based on the Byzantine iconographic type of the “spinning Virgin,” Vrubel’s work demonstrates an intimate familiarity with medieval prototypes, such as The Virgin Mary mosaic in the St. Sophia Cathedral in Kiev (fig. 40) and the twelfth-​century Ustiug Annunciation icon from the Assumption Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin. As a student at the academy, Vrubel would have had access to its Museum of Christian Antiquities, which at that point housed a vast collection of Byzantine and Russian icons, including those brought over by Petr Sevastianov from Mount Athos. Among these were several Annunciation icons, which Vrubel could have used as his models. In addition, the academy (as discussed in the first chapter) possessed a large arsenal of copies and photographs of the mosaics in the Hagia Sophia Church in Constantinople, Manuel Panselinos’s

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Fig. 39  Mikhail Vrubel, Annunciation, 1884. Watercolor and oil paint, dimensions unknown. Location unknown. From Stepan Iaremich, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel': Zhizn i tvorchestvo (Moscow: Knebel', 1911), 22. Fig. 40  The Virgin Mary, eleventh-​century mosaic, St. Sophia Cathedral, Kiev.

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thirteenth-​century frescoes in Mount Athos, as well as copies of the icons and frescoes in the twelfth-​ century Betania and Gelati Monasteries in Georgia. The academy also owned a Russian translation of Adolphe Didron and Paul Durand’s famous iconographic manual of Byzantine art, the Manuel d’iconographie chrétienne, grecque et latine; traduit du manuscrit byzantin “Le guide de la peinture” (Paris, 1845).8 Purportedly compiled in the eighteenth century by Dionysius of Fourna, a monk on Mount Athos, the manual explained techniques of Byzantine painting and described in detail the various iconographies of different religious figures and scenes.9 Lastly, Vrubel may have seen life-​size color copies of frescoes and mosaics from the eleventh- and twelfth-​century monuments of Kiev at an exhibition Prakhov had organized in St. Petersburg in 1883. Although it is now difficult to determine which specific work Vrubel had used as a model for his Annunciation, it is clear that he must have based it on an actual medieval prototype. A comparison between the famous twelfth-​century Annunciation icon (fig. 41) from the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai and Vrubel’s version demonstrates how intuitively the artist had understood the formal and symbolic language of icons without any official training in icon painting.10 Instead of inhabiting the pictorial space of the image, Vrubel’s figures seem to float against an infinite, continuous background that signifies a sacred, symbolic, and timeless realm. Vrubel avoided any directional lighting or shadows in his Annunciation, and his elongation of the figures, the linear dynamism of their draperies, and the serpentine twisting of the angel all closely resemble Byzantine originals. In lieu of altering the image along naturalistic lines with traditional modeling of the faces and the use of chiaroscuro, as was practiced

Fig. 41  Annunciation, late twelfth century. Tempera and gold on panel, 24 13/16 × 16 5/8 × 1 1/4 in. (63.1 × 42.2 × 3.2 cm). Holy Monastery of St. Catherine, Mount Sinai, Egypt.

at the time by academy-​trained artists, Vrubel adhered much more closely to the formal language of the medieval icon. It is therefore not surprising that Vrubel’s subsequent firsthand engagement with the monumental medieval art of Kiev allowed him

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Fig. 42  Mikhail Vrubel, Two Angels with Labara, 1884. Oil on plaster, Church of St. Cyril, Kiev.

to internalize the iconic mode of representation still further and in a way that continued to shape his artwork throughout his career. As part of the St. Cyril commission, Vrubel was tasked with restoring close to 150 fragmented figures. In a period of just seven months, with the help of student assistants from the Murashko School of Drawing, Vrubel repainted large sections of severely damaged murals, such as The Annunciation, The Entry into Jerusalem, and The Dormition of the Virgin, and created several wholly new compositions in place of the old ones that had perished. The Descent of

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the Holy Ghost (Pentecost), the Angels’ Lamentation, a medallion Head of Christ, Two Angels with Labara (fig. 42), and the figure of Moses all seem to have been entirely Vrubel’s own creations. The artist prepared for the commission by studying both the surviving medieval murals in St. Cyril and the paintings and mosaics in the Monastery of St. Michael of the Golden Domes and the Cathedral of St. Sophia. He also had access to Prakhov’s large collection of drawings, sketches, photographs, and chromolithographs of Byzantine and medieval Russian art, which the latter had acquired during his travels throughout

the Russian Empire, Europe, the Middle East, and other formerly Byzantine territories.11 Vrubel would spend many hours in Prakhov’s house studying these images and making copies from them, which he would then incorporate into his designs for the Church of St. Cyril. For example, Vrubel based his Two Angels with Labara fresco (1884), located on the arch of the baptismal chapel, on the angels in the Last Judgment mosaic in the Santa Maria Cathedral in Torcello (fig. 43).12 Although Vrubel’s composition is entirely his own original creation, he adopted many of the formal features of the medieval work, including the agitated fluttering of the draperies, the linear stylization of the folds, the dynamic movements and even the facial features of the angels. Similarly, both the iconography and the composition for the Descent of the Holy Ghost mural were inspired by a combination of original and photographic sources. Vrubel’s semicircular arrangement of the disciples, as well as his stylized streams of divine light emanating from the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, recalls the Pentecost mosaic in the Cathedral of Monreale in Italy. However, the fluidity, linearity, and movements of the figures seem more akin to the Pentecost fresco in the Cathedral of St. Sophia in Kiev. Analogous to his first Annunciation painting, Vrubel’s St. Cyril frescoes make manifest how closely the artist adhered to the medieval prototypes, imitating their penchant for bright color, pronounced outlining, and spatial ambiguity. Even outside of the St. Cyril commission, Vrubel began increasingly to incorporate these newfound pictorial techniques into his other works, developing an unusual syncretic modernist style in the process. For example, in A Man in a Russian Old-​ Style Costume (Ivan Tereshchenko) (1886) (fig. 44), Vrubel depicted a seated man in an archaizing and

Fig. 43  Angels, detail of Last Judgment, twelfth-​century mosaic, Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello, Venice.

richly ornamented tulup, or traditional Russian overcoat. The figure is abruptly cropped just above the eyes, so that the top of his head and forehead are entirely cut out of the picture frame. Although the slanted armrests together with the man’s reclining

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Fig. 44  Mikhail Vrubel, A Man in a Russian Old-​Style Costume, 1886. Watercolor, pencil, and whitewash on paper, 10 5/6 × 10 1/2 in. (27.8 × 27 cm). State Museum of Russian Art, Kiev.

posture and bent elbows suggest spatial recession, the large flat decorative motifs on his garments push forward to the picture surface and undermine the illusion of a convincingly three-​dimensional space. Vrubel’s intentional obscuring of a legible anatomy and convincing foreshortening makes the man’s body appear strangely contorted and compressed, augmenting the fragmented quality of the image. Finally, the back of the chair on which the man sits is rendered entirely parallel to the picture plane as a completely flat, rectangular form. In its pronounced two-​dimensionality, it seems to push forward rather than recede into the background. Additionally, the

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contours of the man’s left arm and shoulder seem to dissolve into the back of the chair, destabilizing the figure-​ground relationship. Strikingly modernist both in its structure and composition, this work radically departed from some of Vrubel’s earlier paintings, such as Romans Feasting (1883), which the artist had produced in St. Petersburg the year before he came to Kiev. Upon completion of the restoration works in St. Cyril, Prakhov asked Vrubel to repaint three mosaic archangels in the central dome of the St. Sophia Cathedral (fig. 45). Prakhov had uncovered the one surviving archangel together with the Christ Pantocrator mosaic in 1884 (as discussed in the first chapter). Since the extant angel had retained almost all of its original mosaic tesserae, it served as a model for the other three, which had been entirely lost over the centuries. Vrubel was tasked with imitating the mosaic tesserae in oil paint so that, from below, the restored angels would be impossible to differentiate from the original mosaic composition.13 This experience was undoubtedly formative for the artist, who proceeded to adapt this technique as part of his own signature style. For example, in one of his most significant works, Seated Demon (fig. 46), which Vrubel began immediately after his sojourn in Kiev, the plethora of tiny blocklike impasto brushstrokes, particularly on the right side of the painting (fig. 47), recall mosaic tesserae and suggest depth and volume while simultaneously emphasizing the flatness of the picture plane. The monumental figure of Satan is depicted in the immediate foreground of the painting, occupying a compressed, almost claustrophobically shallow space with very little by way of perspectival recession. Although Vrubel included a diminutive mountain and sunset in the distant background, the large geometrized flowers

Fig. 45  Christ Pantocrator with Archangels, eleventh century, St. Sophia Cathedral, Kiev.

on the right-​hand side of the painting emphasize the flatness of the canvas, breaking down the impression of three-​dimensional space. The disintegration of their legible forms approaches abstraction so closely that at first glance it is difficult to identify the indistinct angular shapes as flowers. By contrast, Vrubel’s treatment of the demon’s torso and tensely clasped hands accentuates the heavy solidity of the figure. The demon’s body registers as a bulky, imposing

form, reminiscent of Michelangelo’s nude figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. As Robert S. Nelson has convincingly shown, this inherent interplay between flatness and corporeality, stylization and individuation, and abstraction and concreteness was a defining feature of many works of Byzantine art as well.14 Indeed, the understanding of Byzantine images as entirely flat and two-​dimensional was the result of persistent period misreadings by

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Fig. 46  Mikhail Vrubel, Seated Demon, 1890. Oil on canvas, 45 1/2 × 84 in. (116 × 213.8 cm). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Byzantium’s critics and enthusiasts alike, misreadings that were successfully challenged by artists such as Vasily Kandinsky and Vladimir Tatlin and by thinkers such as Florensky, Punin, and Tarabukin, all of whom grasped the spatial complexities, nuances, and ambiguities of iconic representations. In his Portrait of Savva Mamontov (fig. 48), painted several years later, Vrubel similarly combined a number of contradictory viewpoints and emphasized the underlying geometrical structures of different objects. For example, rather than recede

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into the background space, the rug by Mamontov’s feet is tipped upward, while the square tabletop on the right-​hand side of the painting is depicted on a plane markedly different from that of the rug. The sculpture above Mamontov’s right shoulder seems to occupy yet another spatial register. Even the armrests of the armchair are not rendered parallel to each other but instead point in two different directions. Mamontov’s head and face are composed of interlocking contrasting tonal patches that meet at right angles, producing a particularly constructed

effect. His clenched fists and uneasy glance almost prophetically portend the devastating financial troubles that the industrialist was to face just two years later.15 Most striking of all is Mamontov’s emphatically flat white dickey, which seems to be the focal point of the portrait. Rather than being painted, the form of the dickey is created by an expanse of unpainted canvas, a feature that led most of Vrubel’s contemporaries to conclude that the portrait was unfinished. A comparison with Anders Zorn’s Portrait of Savva Mamontov from the previous year clearly reveals the radical nature of Vrubel’s treatment of form and space in his version of the portrait. Unlike Vrubel’s shifting volumes, spatial complexity, and psychological tension, Zorn’s flattering depiction of a genteel bourgeois gentleman is much more conventional. Owing to his masterly combination of pictorial flatness with depth and volumetric solidity, Vrubel has often been compared to Paul Cézanne both in his own time and in more recent scholarship. For instance, the Russian art historian Mikhail Alpatov wrote that “the problems that [Vrubel] solved very much recall the ones constantly faced by Cézanne. A textured painterly surface was elaborated by these masters so definitively—as though they were both charged with a similar goal—to create shifting forms that produce contrasts. A constructive composition, the shifting of different objects across the picture plane—this was what preoccupied Vrubel. And in this he anticipated his colleagues both in Russia and in the West.”16 In his 1962 book, Of Divers Arts, the Constructivist artist Naum Gabo similarly suggests not only that Vrubel’s radical formal innovations in works such as Seated Demon were akin to those of Cézanne but that the former had in fact anticipated the latter by almost fifteen

Fig. 47  Detail of Mikhail Vrubel, Seated Demon, 1890. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

years in his formulation of a “new pictorial vision and . . . technique.”17 In the illustration section of Of Divers Arts, Gabo strategically juxtaposes one of Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-​Victoire paintings from 1905 with a study that Vrubel had executed for the Seated Demon in 1890–91 (fig. 49), in order to demonstrate that the brushwork of the two artists was nearly identical; Gabo concludes that “at the beginning of [the twentieth] century, [when] many of us came

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Fig. 48  Mikhail Vrubel, Portrait of Savva Mamontov, 1897. Oil on canvas, 73 1/2 × 56 in. (187 × 142.5 cm). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

in contact with Western European art, we did not come to a foreign land: we came back home, and Cézanne was accepted by us quite naturally. It was not an accident that Russian collectors were the first to understand and accept the new trend in Western art which was inspired by Cézanne. They were the same patrons who . . . belonged to the circle of those who, in Vrubel’s time, kept him alive.”18 Indeed,

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in paintings such as Seated Demon and Portrait of Savva Mamontov, Vrubel’s crystalline textured brushstrokes bear some resemblance to the modular color patches and tectonic facture that Cézanne had developed in his late works, such as his series of self-​ portraits from 1890–98 and his Mont Sainte-​Victoire paintings (1900–1904). Both artists employed flat overlapping planes to create volume and space out of coloristic contrasts. Nevertheless, a closer analysis of Cézanne’s and Vrubel’s brushwork reveals significant structural differences. Unlike Cézanne’s reliance on a systematized grid and passage, which involved the seamless blending of intersecting perpendicular planes into one another, Vrubel’s brushstrokes tended to vary in size and direction, depending on their structural role in the image (fig. 47). As such, they differed from Cézanne’s regularized and geometrized blocks of color, functioning more like the individual tesserae in a mosaic composition. A few years after he had completed the St. Cyril project, Vrubel explained to Iaremich that his fascination with the materiality of the painted surface had evolved out of his encounter with Byzantine art, which had taught him to achieve “an ornamental distribution of forms in order to emphasize the flatness of the wall.” However, Vrubel did not see this as a leveling or flattening-​out of the image. On the contrary, he maintained that the “chief mistake of the contemporary artist who tries to revive the Byzantine style lies in the fact that he replaces the folds of the garments, in which the Byzantines demonstrate so much dexterity, with a mere bed sheet.”19 For Vrubel, then, the ingenuity of the Byzantine artist lay in his ability to create pictorial dynamism, animation, and corporeal presence without relying on the mimetic effects of three-​dimensionality.

Fig. 49  Reproductions of Paul Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-​Victoire and Mikhail Vrubel’s Demon Looking at a Dale. From Naum Gabo’s Of Divers Arts (New York: Pantheon Books, 1962), 168–69.

Consequently, in contrast to Gabo and Alpatov, Pavel Muratov contended that Vrubel and Cézanne were two very different types of artists, both stylistically and conceptually.20 According to Muratov, Cézanne was primarily interested in transcribing the “mundane” realities of everyday provincial life and in emphasizing their materiality and solidity. He “painted uncomplicated portraits, landscapes of his homeland, and elementary, simple still lifes.”21 Vrubel, on the other hand, aspired toward capturing the immaterial, the supernatural, and the divine in concrete pictorial form. His works were meant to be monumental and larger than life, at once reflecting novel painterly concepts and timeless, universal

themes.22 Muratov concluded that these antithetical artistic goals necessarily resulted in significant differences on the level of form. Indeed, as Aline IsdebskyPritchard has argued, “The near-​impossibility of Vrubel having seen Cézanne’s work . . . when [Vrubel’s] manner became fully developed . . . precludes his dependence on the French artist’s work.”23 On his trips to Europe, Vrubel appears to have missed both the first and third Impressionist exhibitions (1874 and 1877), in which Cézanne had participated, and Cézanne’s works did not enter Russian collections until 1904.24 Accordingly, Vrubel seems to have developed his peculiar modernist syntax simultaneously with but independently of the French master

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by incorporating the lessons he had learned from medieval representation into his own work. As Nina Dmitrieva aptly observes, “[I]n Kiev, Vrubel was the first [artist] to cast a bridge from archaeological research and restoration to a dynamic modern art.”25

Vrubel as Modernist “Martyr”: Misunderstanding, Rejection, and the Lost Commission for the St. Vladimir Cathedral Vrubel’s modification of his own painterly style in response to his encounter with medieval art radically departed from the practice of many of his contemporaries and fellow academicians, such as Viktor Vasnetsov and Mikhail Nesterov, who also worked on church commissions and restoration projects but tended to transform the iconic idiom into a more naturalistic style, rather than the other way around. Although Vasnetsov and Nesterov adopted the iconography of the Orthodox canon, their pictorial language remained principally that of academic illusionism. Shedding what they considered to be the “primitive” stylizations of medieval icons and frescoes, these artists saw themselves as modernizing and improving the religious simplicity and naïveté of Orthodox imagery. Thus, for example, in Vasnetsov’s painting of the Holy Trinity (1907) (fig. 50) for the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Warsaw, God and Christ are portrayed in a three-​dimensional, perspectival space. Their faces are modeled along naturalistic lines, their bodies are carefully foreshortened, and there is an illusionistic distribution of light and shadow throughout the image, all of which produce an almost trompe l’oeil effect. God and Christ are, as it were, emerging out of the heavenly realm into the human world through a ring of

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intertwined seraphim. Similarly, in his 1892 fresco of the Virgin Mary with Christ Child for the Cathedral of St. Vladimir, Nesterov depicted the figures within an illusionistically rendered niche, complete with atmospheric background and perspectival recession. Instead of being shown frontally, both the Virgin and Christ Child are rotated in space and do not return the viewer’s gaze. Typical of narrative easel painting, their actions are circumscribed within the frame of the image and do not engage the outside world as do the iconic portrayals of the Virgin and Child.26 Vrubel, on the other hand, understood that iconic visuality was part of a single, holistic aesthetic and ideological system, which could not be altered without violating the very essence of the iconic image. Almost forty years later Pavel Florensky clearly articulated this idea in his Iconostasis: In . . . norms of Church consciousness, secular historians and positivist theologians see this unique conservatism of the Church as the variety they know: a senile sustaining of habitual forms in the circumstances of Church art having ended, seeing the norms as obstacles that are preventing the emergence of new religious art. This fundamental misunderstanding of the Church’s conservatism is, simultaneously, a misunderstanding of artistic creativity itself. To the truly creative, the presence of a canonical tradition is never a hindrance . . . [it is] not an enslavement but a liberation. . . .

The immediate task, then, is to understand the

canon, to enter into it as an essential rationality of humankind . . . wherein our individual reason enters into the universal forms, opens the source of all creation. . . .

When contemporary artists look about for human

models in order to paint sacred images, then they are already proving that they do not clearly see the sacred person their imagery depicts.27

Fig. 50  Viktor Vasnetsov, Holy Trinity, 1907. Preparatory sketch for the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Warsaw. Oil on canvas, 105 1/2 × 157 1/2 in. (268 × 400 cm). State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

However, in the late 1880s and early 1890s the entrenched dominance of the Imperial Academy of Arts, coupled with the newfound popularity of the Peredvizhniki, ensured that the general public, the Holy Synod, and the official artistic establishment all favored a more naturalistic representational mode when it came to contemporary church art.28 It is important to emphasize, however, that the Orthodox Church did not indiscriminately accept all Realist representations of biblical subjects. For example, Ivan Kramskoi’s Christ in the Wilderness (1872), Vasilii Polenov’s Christ and the Adulteress (1886), and Nikolai Ge’s What Is Truth? (1890)

were viewed as deeply problematic—if not outright blasphemous—from an ecclesiastical standpoint because they reinterpreted the Christian narrative from historical, archaeological, secular, and subjective perspectives that were often at odds with established theological doctrine.29 By contrast, although Vasnetsov replaced the hieratic qualities of Russo-​Byzantine art with mimetic pictorial effects, he nonetheless closely adhered to officially approved Orthodox iconographies and compositions. Moreover, he repeatedly claimed that he was a “sincere Orthodox believer” who was genuinely committed to ensuring that his religious paintings “did not in

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any way contradict either the High Christian or the [Orthodox] Church ideal.”30 In other words, his works were “new” and “up-​to-​date” in form but “traditional” and “timeless” in content and could therefore be sacralized as modern iterations in the icon’s long evolution from the Middle Ages to the present moment. One period commentator even went so far as to praise Vasnetsov’s ability to “free” medieval iconic representations “from anatomical deformities, which gave the figures their hideous aspect.” He continued: “The infantile art of our ancient icon painters was, of course, powerless in managing this impossible task [of naturalistic representation], due to ignorance and ineptitude. In the drawings of Vasnetsov all of ancient antiquity attained new form and a new hue. And from here his art connects contemporaneity with the centuries-​ old history and past of the people, the poetry of its infancy with the perfection of new art.”31 Vasnetsov’s paintings simultaneously upheld the authority of the church and that of the Imperial Academy of Arts without deviating too much in the direction of the latter, as earlier eighteenth- and nineteenth-​century artists had done in their depictions of religious subjects. By synthesizing modern aesthetic sensibilities with the traditional Orthodox canon, Vasnetsov ostensibly resolved an enduring problem for the Russian ecclesiastical establishment: he bridged the long-​standing rift between sacred and secular art and was accordingly “designated as the heir apparent to centuries of religious painting in Russia.”32 Paradoxically, however, to the devout “simple folk,” who worshipped in the new revivalist churches, Vasnetsov’s images did not register as “icons.” Thus, Rosa Newmarch reported that when a group of “peasants” were asked how they liked the “splendid”

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new Cathedral of St. Vladimir and the “wonderful pictures in it,” they responded that they “like[d] the old icons best” because Vasnetsov’s works had “too much life in them,” affirming Florensky’s critique that naturalistic rendition obscured the religious symbolism and sanctity of the holy figures depicted in the iconic images.33 Vrubel’s religious artworks, on the other hand, were both aesthetically and theologically deviant. They violated the authority of the Imperial Academy of Arts and that of the church on the level of style and iconography and were accordingly censured. The St. Cyril frescoes were repeatedly criticized for being overly archaizing, and even anachronistic, since they did not reflect the most up-​to-​date, fashionable realist style but instead appeared to hark back to an earlier, outmoded representational idiom. Vrubel’s figures were deemed to be anatomically incorrect and poorly executed. They seemed perversely and deliberately to repeat the “hideousness” and “deformation” of the twelfth-​century originals. Ironically, it was Vrubel’s ostensible “medievalism” that affronted nineteenth-​century viewers. With the exception of a very small circle of admirers and supporters, these and Vrubel’s other artworks were largely misunderstood, underappreciated, and rejected during his lifetime. For instance, when the jubilee edition of Mikhail Lermontov’s celebrated poem The Demon: An Eastern Tale was published in 1891 with twenty-​ two of Vrubel’s illustrations on the theme of Satan’s doomed love affair with the young Georgian princess Tamara, the artist was widely censured and disparaged in the Russian press. In these illustrations, Vrubel had further developed some of the radical stylistic innovations he had already begun to explore

in the Seated Demon the previous year. The description published in the journal Artist was a typical response to these works: Mr. Vrubel, apparently, does not even feel that his figures resemble rag dolls and not people. . . . In many drawings it is even impossible to make out where the hands and legs are or the head, and one must admire only the play of several “artistic” dabs which, in Mr. Vrubel, replace drawing and plasticity and beauty. Apparently Mr. Vrubel makes a pre-

ever seen anything worse, more clumsy, and more repellent than that which is offered us here by Mr. Vrubel?36

Such recurring instances of critical misunderstanding coupled with a largely conservative public taste left Vrubel severely restricted in his activities. He had precious few public commissions, and oftentimes patrons would either entirely reject or insist on significant alterations to his designs. In the words of Nikolai Tarabukin:

tense to “mood,” but he forgets that where a neck is longer than a hand or an arm looks more like a leg, it is silly to look

[Vrubel was] a master who possessed the gift of monu-

for mood, and without drawing there is no illustration.

mental painting like no other [artist] since the fifteenth

34

century [but] was barred from the decoration works in

Similarly, Vladimir Stasov wrote that with these illustrations “Vrubel . . . has given us the most awful examples of revolting and repulsive decadence.”35 The persistent accusation of “decadence” was to dog Vrubel his entire life and became especially strident in the Stalinist era, when—in a twist of irony—Vrubel was consistently identified as an ally and advocate of “degenerate” Western artistic ideals instead of “indigenous” representational traditions. Such ideas and language were already ominously present in Stasov’s 1898 review of Sergei Diaghilev’s ambitious monthlong Exhibition of Russian and Finnish Artists at the Stieglitz Museum in St. Petersburg: What has been given first place in this hall, what has the greatest sympathy of the organizer? It is the painting by Mr. Vrubel called Morning—Decorative Panel. It is an enormous painting, and it now hangs in the most noticeable, central portion of the whole room. . . . Oh, how can we avoid these sorts of exhibitions and not see such “Mornings,” such “Demons,” even in our dreams! Indeed, even among the most outrageous French Decadents, has anyone

the St. Vladimir Cathedral in Kiev. . . . An artist who had an astonishing talent for decorative sculpture, [he] was unable to execute a single monumental creative idea, which required public buildings, streets, and squares for its realization. . . . A master who possessed in equal measure with [his] painterly talent an architectural vision, a sense of large-​scale proportions and architectonic relationships, was able to execute his design for only a small extension . . . to the mansion of virtually his sole patron.37

Given this state of affairs, it is hardly surprising that Vrubel failed to secure the prestigious and highly publicized St. Vladimir commission. The idea for the cathedral was first conceived by Nicholas I, who issued an order for its construction on July 23, 1853. It was initially designed by Ivan Strom in a Neo-​Byzantine style but was subsequently redesigned by Pavel Sparro (1814–1887) and Alexander Beretti (1816–1895). Construction of the cathedral began in July 1862 and was supposed to be completed by 1888, in time for the nine-hundredth anniversary of the conversion of Russia to

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Christianity. However, owing to shortages in supplies and engineering miscalculations, construction was paused for a period of ten years and was only restarted again in the late 1870s. In 1882, under the auspices of the recently crowned tsar Alexander III, Adrian Prakhov was placed in charge of the interior decoration of the cathedral, which he claimed would become a major “monument of Russian art,” reflecting “an [aesthetic] ideal that would inspire a generation.”38 Having already worked with Vrubel on the restoration of the St. Cyril Church, Prakhov again invited the artist to submit his designs for the new cathedral. Vrubel set to work immediately and produced a large number of pencil sketches and watercolor studies. Among them were some of Vrubel’s most innovative and radical images, from both a formal and a conceptual point of view. However, when submitted to the jury, these works were deemed too stylistically and iconographically unconventional to be included in the project and were promptly rejected. Instead, the commission was given to Vasnetsov, Nesterov, the brothers Pavel and Alexander Svedomsky, and the now largely forgotten Polish artist Wilhelm Kotarbinsky, while Vrubel was invited to execute only a few small decorative ornaments on the interior columns of the cathedral. Retrospectively, it is not hard to see why the conservative jury found Vrubel’s studies so problematic. In their compositional simplicity and modernist succinctness, Vrubel’s unprecedented designs stood apart from the mainstream of Russian nineteenth-​century church decoration. Unlike the St. Cyril frescoes, where Vrubel adhered much more scrupulously to the medieval originals, the St. Vladimir sketches betray a focused search for a stylistic and conceptual breakthrough. In these works, as in the Seated Demon, Vrubel employed medieval means

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to modernist ends. Prakhov himself recognized the originality of Vrubel’s proposed fresco cycle, observing that his “superb sketches” required a cathedral in an entirely different and “exceptional style.”39 For example, in one version of the Lamentation (1887) (fig. 51), Vrubel depicted the seated Virgin against a low horizon, towering above the flat, prostrate body of Christ, which is virtually reduced to a single white line. A diminutive cross is visible against the setting sun in the distant background, referencing the Crucifixion. Two cypress trees on the right-​ hand side of the image rhythmically repeat the vertical silhouette of the Virgin’s body. The resolutely perpendicular placement of the Virgin in relation to the horizontal Christ echoes the configuration of the cross, signaling the underlying spiritual geometry of the composition. Although Vrubel did not portray Christ and the Virgin with traditional haloes, the setting sun on the horizon, strategically rendered just above Christ’s head, metaphorically doubles as a luminous nimbus. Instead of employing standard Orthodox iconography, Vrubel relied on purely compositional devices to signal the sacred nature of the depicted scene. Similarly, in place of emphatic gesturing and outward signs of emotion, typical of lamentation scenes, Vrubel portrayed the Virgin with a stoic facial expression in a moment of quiet meditation, exemplifying a particularly modern sensibility of interiority and controlled grief. The solid, vertical, upward thrust of the Virgin’s body is striking in its reticent minimalism, while the entire scene is executed with just a few unmodulated strokes of color within a flattened, shallow space. In another variant of the Lamentation (1887) (fig. 52), Christ and the Virgin are situated indoors with two windows just above the Virgin’s head dominating the entire design.40 Instead of occupying the

Fig. 51  Mikhail Vrubel, Lamentation i, 1887. Sketch for a mural in the St. Vladimir Cathedral in Kiev. Pencil, watercolor, and whitewash on paper, 17 × 23 1/4 in. (43.4 × 59.2 cm). State Museum of Russian Art, Kiev.

center of the image, Christ and the Virgin are again relegated to the bottom edge of the composition. In his treatment of the Virgin’s garments and face, Vrubel has already begun to experiment with the mosaiclike fragmentation of form into distinct color patches, a technique he would develop more fully in his subsequent paintings such as the Seated Demon and the Portrait of Savva Mamontov. The two windows, rendered as flat white geometric planes against a monochromatic dark background, have an almost

proto-​Suprematist quality. Composed of passages of negative space—brilliantly white blank paper— they become the visual focal point of the composition. Their role as “windows” suggests an opening into another spatial register, inviting the viewer to look through them but simultaneously frustrating this desire with their flat opacity. Since Vrubel did not submit this particular work to the jury for the St. Vladimir commission, these blank windows cannot simply be understood as architectural features in

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Fig. 52  Detail of Mikhail Vrubel, Lamentation ii, 1887. Sketch for a mural in the St. Vladimir Cathedral in Kiev. Pencil, watercolor, and whitewash on paper, 17 × 23 1/4 in. (43.4 × 59.2 cm). State Museum of Russian Art, Kiev.

the cathedral around which the artist structured his design. Rather, they seem to serve a purely pictorial and metaphorical purpose in the image. In their striking white luminosity, they were perhaps intended to function symbolically as gateways into the holy realm, to which human beings do not have direct access except through the mediation of Christ and the Virgin, who are accordingly depicted in the immediate foreground of the image and closer to the viewer. Akin to the gold background of icons, these windows operate as a material reminder of the separation

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between this world and the one that lies beyond. In his choice of stark rectangular forms, Vrubel may have been drawing on the holy geometries of Orthodox iconography, where Christ is often portrayed enthroned against a background of three large geometrical shapes: a red diamond, a blue-​black oval, and a red rectangle. Vrubel repeated the same visual effect in his design for the Resurrection, in which Christ is shown emerging out of a grave, framed by a stylized mandorla of simplified geometric shapes. Lastly, the visual impenetrability of the windows in the Lamentation scene may also suggest the essential unknowability of the realm beyond, signaling Vrubel’s own existential doubts and long-​term interest in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche.41 Unlike Vasnetsov’s fanciful starry night sky in the Holy Trinity, Vrubel’s designs gesture toward a Nietzschean— and by extension a quintessentially modern—attitude toward faith and religion, marked by doubt, ambiguity, self-​questioning, and introspection. Needless to say, this stance was antithetical to official Church doctrine, which demanded that iconic representations affirm rather than question the metaphysical realities they depict. And yet, in the twentieth century it was Vrubel’s searching, dialectical, “free” approach to religious representation that struck viewers as more sincere, substantive, and resonant with modern reality, as well as paradoxically closer to the spiritual ethos of the medieval prototypes, than what was perceived as Vasnetsov’s and Nesterov’s passive, mechanical imitation of ossified Orthodox dogma. Thus, writing in 1900, Alexander Benois expressed his profound disappointment with the works of Vasnetsov and Nesterov in the St. Vladimir Cathedral: [At the time of their creation] the St. Vladimir frescoes aroused considerable pride among the Russian public as

only the contemporaries of Raphael and Michelangelo

been the only place in the world, in contemporary times,

might have been proud of these masters’ creations in the

where on the walls of God’s cathedral there would have

Vatican. . . . However, once I encountered the St. Vladimir

appeared truly living and truly inspired logos.44

murals in situ, I abandoned all of my previous illusions. I was deeply saddened . . . the problem was that [Vasnetsov] took more upon himself than he could manage! . . . The falsehood inherent in the St. Vladimir murals signified not the personal deception on the part of the artist but rather the deception, deadly and terrible, of our entire spiritual culture.

I was even more disappointed with the frescoes of

my “friend” Nesterov. His Nativity altarpiece betrayed both flagrantly bad taste and a sweet and flabby sensibility, which the artist tried to mask as something delicate and fragrant. . . . However, after having seen this Nativity, I fully understood that Nesterov was irretrievably lost to genuine

More than a decade later, the art historian and critic Vsevolod Dmitriev (1888–1919) made similar observations, writing that Vrubel’s Kievan works were “not the theatrical extras of Vasnetsov, dressed up in Byzantine costume and adopting a Byzantine pose,” but instead indicated “a genuine path toward the revival of ancient Russian icon painting.”45 Dmitriev contended that it was precisely because Vrubel “had approached icon painting so wonderfully closely” in his own works that his oeuvre was reassessed at the exact moment when the Russo-​Byzantine revival had reached its apogee, in the years 1912–15:

art.42 We are witnesses of and participants in a remarkable

Only Vrubel received unconditional praise from Benois:

reevaluation: ancient Russian icon painting, till quite recently dead and superfluous for us, today attracts us with ever greater force as a wellspring of living and imme-

I went . . . to the St. Cyril Church, specifically for the

diate beauty. This reevaluation, which has fundamentally

purpose of acquainting myself with Vrubel’s works.

transformed our tastes and our requirements [of art],

I dedicated almost three hours to the close scrutiny of his

has also extended to Vrubel. . . . The mural paintings in

frescoes, and even if I did not leave the church with some

the Church of St. Cyril, the studies for the Cathedral of

kind of sense of indefinable joy, I was nonetheless amazed

St. Vladimir, Vrubel’s late “Byzantine” works, which were

by the sheer technical mastery with which the very

previously understood only as the prelude and conclusion

unusual “local images” of the iconostasis were painted . . .

to the more important Moscow period in the artist’s oeu-

and by what I would call the “inspired intelligence” with

vre, we now want to put forward as Vrubel’s most funda-

which [Vrubel] restored the old Byzantine frescoes . . . and

mental, his most vital, aspect.46

created entirely new ones. . . . Everywhere a deep reverence toward antiquity is harmoniously combined with the creative outbursts of a free imagination.

43

If Vrubel, instead of Vasnetsov, would have been able to execute on a monumental scale his ideas [for the Cathedral of St. Vladimir] . . . then probably . . . we would have

Nikolai Tarabukin went even further in his estimation of Vrubel’s Kievan works, claiming that the artist was directly responsible for the aesthetic reevaluation of the iconic representational tradition: “At the time that Vrubel began his works [in Kiev], there were no archaeological discoveries of . . . nor

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scholarship on ancient mural painting, which are accessible to us today. The turning point in attitudes toward the ancient past of Russian art occurred after Vrubel. In his art, Vrubel himself turned out to be a pioneer of the heritage of Russo-​Byzantine art, as a result of which the [art of the] past appeared to the contemporary gaze in an entirely different light.”47 Tarabukin’s assertion betrays a biased twentieth-​ century outlook and is of course inaccurate, given that scholars such as Kondakov and Prakhov had already begun to publish their research on Byzantine and medieval Russian art and architecture as early as the 1870s and 1880s. However, as already mentioned, at that moment public taste was still largely rooted in a naturalistic tradition of painting, and it was not until the early 1910s that iconic representations began to enjoy a much broader aesthetic appreciation. As Jane Sharp astutely explains, “[V]anguard parallelisms of the ancient and modern [were] rejected outright in favor of a unified narrative that accounted for the icon’s stylistic evolution, not its literal continuation.”48 Consequently, Tarabukin was not entirely wrong in claiming that Vrubel’s artistic consciousness and worldview already belonged to the twentieth rather than the nineteenth century.

From Angels to Demons: Toward a New Iconography Vrubel’s exposure to medieval mosaics and frescoes in Kiev not only influenced his oeuvre stylistically but also made a lasting thematic impact on his art. During his student years at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, Vrubel had predominantly depicted literary, historical, and classical subject matter. It was only after his time in Kiev that the

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artist devoted himself almost exclusively to uncanny and supernatural themes. Even long after the completion of the St. Cyril project, Vrubel continued to depict biblical and religious subjects, developing his own particular brand of symbolism filled with celestial and mythological beings, fairies, woodland creatures, seers, angels, and demons. In fact, after the rejection of his sketches from the St. Vladimir project, Vrubel appears to have transferred his frustrated aspirations for monumental religious painting into his Demon series. In a telling letter to Vrubel’s sister, the artist’s father explained that Vrubel conceptualized the demon not so much as an “evil spirit” as one “that is suffering and insulted, but nevertheless a spirit that is powerful . . . noble”—a being that Vrubel’s subsequent biographers and critics would come to read as an avatar for the artist himself.49 Vrubel produced his first demon sketches in 1885, while he was still restoring the Church of St. Cyril. In his monograph on the artist, Tarabukin argues that there was a direct correlation between the demon paintings and the St. Cyril frescoes, even on the level of iconography. According to Tarabukin, the physiognomy of the St. Cyril Virgin gradually evolved into that of the demon, and he postulated that the latter became the antithesis of the former.50 Indeed, a comparison between Vrubel’s sketches of the Virgin’s head and the demon’s (figs. 53 and 54) reveals shared facial features such as the downward slant of the large round expressive eyes, the long uneven ridge of the nose, the full plump lips, and even the tilt of the head. It is as though Vrubel progressively transformed the Virgin’s face into the slightly hardened and more virile visage of the demon. By contrast, Iaremich believed that the facial features of Vrubel’s Moses (1884), rather than those of the Virgin, were directly translated into the early

Fig. 53  Mikhail Vrubel, Study for the Virgin, 1884. Pencil and gouache on paper, 17 × 12 3/4 in. (43 × 32.3 cm). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Fig. 54  Mikhail Vrubel, Head of Demon, 1890. Watercolor on cardboard, 9 × 14 in. (23 × 36 cm). State Museum of Russian Art, Kiev.

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Fig. 55  Mikhail Vrubel, Head of an Angel, 1887, or Head of the Demon, 1890. Charcoal and red crayon on paper, 16 × 26 3/4 in. (41 × 68 cm). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

demon works.51 In either case, there seems to be an explicit link between the iconographic types that Vrubel developed for the St. Cyril commission and that of the demon. As a matter of fact, in the years 1887 to 1900 Vrubel’s work underwent a stylistic and thematic evolution wherein the figure of the demon became an amalgamation of all the artist’s previous experiences with religious art and monumental painting. The lines of demarcation between the angelic, the demonic, and the Christological became increasingly blurred in these years, to the point of being wholly interchangeable. For example, Vrubel gradually transformed the iconographic and physiognomic type of the angel, which he had initially developed for the St. Vladimir project in 1887, into the prototype for the demon.

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In fact, subsequent scholars have alternatively labeled Vrubel’s Study of a Head (fig. 55) as either Head of an Angel, dated 1887, or Head of the Demon, dated 1890.52 Similarly, a pencil drawing from 1904 (fig. 56) has been variously titled The Standing Demon or Seraph in different publications, indicating the slippage in iconographic meaning.53 Of course, given the fact that the demon was himself an angel at one point, this iconographic continuity was certainly appropriate to the subject matter and the duality already implicit in the nature of the “fallen” angel. It is therefore not surprising that these subjects continued to overlap in Vrubel’s oeuvre from the beginning to the end of his career, becoming more prominent in his late paintings. For instance, the largest of Vrubel’s late works, the Six-​Winged Seraph of 1904, is closely related to his 1902 magnum opus, the Demon Cast Down (fig. 57). In these paintings the protagonists have almost identical facial features, and there is a marked visual emphasis on the agitated swirl of beautiful colored wings, which envelop both figures. However, the Demon Cast Down also alludes to Christ’s suffering and sacrifice by showing the demon wearing what looks like a crown of thorns on his head, a traditional symbol of Christ’s Passion. Moreover, according to the reports of his friends, Vrubel was planning to exhibit his Demon Cast Down in Paris under the title Icône, clearly aligning this work with the spiritual and aesthetic realm of religious art.54 Even on the level of form, Vrubel had wanted the Demon Cast Down to resemble an icon, and he had meticulously applied to the demon’s wings a metallic bronze powder that would catch the light, producing a glowing, reflective effect typical of an icon. As the artist Konstantin Bogaevskii wrote in 1941, recalling when he saw the painting on the first

day of its display at the World of Art exhibition in 1902: “It produced a strong impression on me, which I can compare to no other. It glowed as if it were made of precious gems, so that everything around it seemed gray and unsubstantial. . . . Vrubel’s ‘Demon’ has darkened severely, the colors that once shone on the canvas have paled; the bronze powder that was used for the peacock feathers has become green.”55 References to Christ have also been read into Vrubel’s Seated Demon, whose intense self-​reflection, clasped hands, and poignant isolation in an empty landscape have often been compared to Ivan Kramskoi’s painting Christ in the Wilderness (1872), which shows an emaciated and haggard-​looking Christ, deep in thought and contemplating his onerous fate in a rocky desert setting.56 In his later years Vrubel claimed to greatly admire this work, as well as Nikolai Ge’s Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane (1888), because of its “demonic” qualities.57 Vrubel’s unconventional blurring of the conceptual and formal boundaries between Christ and Satan, the angelic and the demonic, the sacred and the profane, and damnation and redemption reflects a particularly modern, fin de siècle mentality, characterized by a feeling of alienation from the Christian experience and a sense of disintegration of previously fixed and stable identities and institutions, including those of conventional morality and the religious establishment. Furthermore, it was precisely in the years that Vrubel first began to work on his demon, in the mid1880s, that he also produced a series of paintings illustrating Christ’s Passion, which he subsequently destroyed, leaving only a charcoal sketch of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane (1887) and a small oil painting of the head of Christ (1888). With his dark hair, fiery eyes, and brooding, somber expression,

Fig. 56  Mikhail Vrubel, The Standing Demon (also known as Seraph), 1904. Pencil on paper, 11 1/3 × 7 1/6 in. (29.1 × 18.3 cm). State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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Fig. 57  Mikhail Vrubel, Demon Cast Down, 1902. Oil on canvas, 54 3/4 × 152 1/4 in. (139 × 387 cm). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

the image of Christ in the latter work closely resembles Vrubel’s numerous studies of the head of the demon, executed in the same years. In fact, it was at this moment that Vrubel first experienced something of a personal religious crisis. Writing to his sister Anna in December of 1887, he complained that while he was working on his paintings of Christ “with all his might,” he began to feel a profound sense of malaise and estrangement from his Christian identity, an emotion that continued to plague him until the end of his life and especially during his illness.58 Given Vrubel’s long-​standing interest in the writings of Nietzsche, it would seem that in his conception of Christ, the demon, and the figure of the prophet, Vrubel envisioned a heroic individual—even a martyr—whose rebellion against the conventional morality and dominant trends of his times mirrored Vrubel’s own artistic struggles. From

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his university years the artist had rejected mainstream religiosity and especially its formulation in the works and theories of Leo Tolstoy, which Vrubel claimed resulted in the oppression of the human spirit and the creative impulse. Whether Vrubel saw himself in prophetic terms as an avant-​garde martyr to conservative artistic tastes is unclear, but he was certainly understood as such by many of his contemporaries, such as Alexander Blok, Alexander Benois, and Pavel Muratov. Blok’s articles “To the Memory of Vrubel” and “On the Present State of Russian Symbolism” imply that Vrubel combined prophetic vision with self-​sacrifice in his art, as well as in his life. Muratov articulated an analogous idea in his essay “About High Art.”59 Similarly, in his 1910 article on Vrubel for the journal Rech’, Benois concluded that “Vrubel was more than just an artist—he was a prophet, a seer, a demon.”60

Vrubel’s dedication to the prophetic, the visionary, and the iconic climaxed in the years leading up to his premature death, in 1910, and nearly all of his major late works deal almost exclusively with biblical subjects and supernatural themes. In the years 1904 to 1906 he painted the Six-​Winged Seraph (1904) (fig. 59), Angel with a Sword (1904), Head of the Prophet (1904–5), Prophet (1904–5), Head of John the Baptist (1905) (fig. 58), and The Vision of the Prophet Ezekiel (1906) (fig. 61), among others. In many ways, this final cycle of religious works can be interpreted as a symbolic summation or culmination of the central stylistic and thematic preoccupations that characterized Vrubel’s entire career. For example, in its iconic frontality, pronounced linearity, and vivid palette, the watercolor of the head of John the Baptist (fig. 58) recalls the artist’s St. Cyril murals, such as his frescoes of Moses and the head of Christ. Similarly, the Six-​Winged Seraph (fig. 59), also known as Azrael or the Angel of Death, harks back to Vrubel’s Demon paintings in its striking grandeur, monumentality, and ambiguous duality. In terms of iconography, the Six-​Winged Seraph closely resembles the Demon in its subject’s long black hair, powerful neck, blue-​gray complexion, hollow eyes, and large peacock wings. Akin to Vrubel’s demon, Azrael is an ambiguous, conflicted figure. Crowned with a lustrous diadem and holding a glowing red censer in his left hand, the angel is the source of heavenly light and salvation. However, wielding a large ominous dagger in his right hand, signifying suffering and destructive intent, he is simultaneously the harbinger of death. Just like the demon, who was once an angel, Azrael is a liminal figure, who stands on the threshold of heaven and hell, embodying both the angelic and the demonic, redemption

Fig. 58  Mikhail Vrubel, Head of John the Baptist, 1905. Watercolor and pencil on paper, 8 1/4 × 7 in. (21.3 cm × 17.6 cm). State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

and damnation. On a formal level, the Six-​Winged Seraph combines many of the techniques Vrubel first used in Seated Demon and Demon Cast Down. His modeling of form on the angel’s face and neck repeats the interlocking contrasting color patches he used to build up the bulky body of the seated demon (fig. 47), and in their regularity and geometricity, these blocks of paint resemble mosaic tesserae

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Fig. 59  Mikhail Vrubel, Six-​Winged Seraph (Azrael), 1904. Oil on canvas, 51 1/2 × 61 in. (131 × 155 cm). State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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Fig. 60  Detail of Mikhail Vrubel, Six-​Winged Seraph (Azrael), 1904. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

even more than in the demon picture and appear to have been applied with a palette knife, rather than a paintbrush (fig. 60). Meanwhile, the expressive swirl of crystalline brushstrokes on the angel’s wings and garments recalls the fragmented, chaotic mass of peacock feathers in Demon Cast Down (fig. 57). Measuring 131 by 155 centimeters, the Six-​Winged Seraph is one of the largest of Vrubel’s late paintings—his penultimate, poignant attempt at monumental religious art. The Vision of the Prophet Ezekiel (fig. 61) is considered to be one of Vrubel’s last works and

approaches near abstraction in its radical dissolution of form. Executed on cardboard in mixed media— charcoal, watercolor, and gouache—it depicts a heavenly vision as described in the Old Testament book of Ezekiel. In the bottom right-​hand corner of the image, the face of a bearded man—presumably Ezekiel—is depicted looking up at a tall, fearsome angel who holds a downward-​pointing sword in his right hand. Next to the angel is another floating masculine face, but one that lacks a clearly identifiable body. The pronounced spatial ambiguity of this work is produced by a multiplicity of layered, shifting

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Fig. 61  Mikhail Vrubel, The Vision of the Prophet Ezekiel, 1905. Charcoal, watercolor, and gouache on cardboard, 40 1/5 × 21 1/2 in. (102.3 × 55.1 cm). State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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fragments of form that splinter into infinite depths and yet insist on returning to the surface of the picture plane. An explosion of angular faceted shapes destabilizes the figure-​to-​ground relationship so that it becomes difficult to tell where one form projects forward and another one recedes into the background, producing a dynamic allover effect. The only stable visual anchor in the whole composition is the angel’s dark head, in the center of the image’s upper register. Otherwise, the intermingling of segments of wings, limbs, and dissolving faces creates a complicated, disorienting web of virtually abstract forms. In fact, it is as though Vrubel’s initial experimentation with the “abstract” qualities of Russo-​ Byzantine art in the Church of St. Cyril had come full circle and had reached its most logical conclusion in terms of both style and subject matter, heralding a new era in Russian art. Adrian Prakhov’s son, Nikolai Prakhov, went so far as to read the beginnings of Rayonism in the fragmented, linear shards of The Vision of the Prophet Ezekiel, and Larionov himself claimed that Vrubel exerted more influence on him than Cézanne (fig. 62).61 Whether Vrubel’s late religious works contributed to the advent of nonobjective painting in Russia in the new century is impossible to ascertain with any certainty. However, what is clear is that Vrubel’s radical rewriting of the Russo-​Byzantine artistic idiom, as well as his combination of formal innovation with visionary transcendentalism, paved the way for a number of twentieth-​century artists for whom spirituality and abstraction came to represent two sides of the same modernist coin. Vsevolod Dmitriev summed it up best in 1913, describing Vrubel as “an artist who managed to raise above the heads of his contemporaries the future ‘necessity’ of art . . . [he] already perceived his significance before and more astutely than

Fig. 62  Mikhail Larionov, Blue Rayonism (Portrait of a Fool), 1912. Oil on canvas, 27 1/2 × 25 1/2 in. (70 × 65 cm). Private collection, Moscow. © ADAGP, Paris, 2017.

anyone else. . . . Vrubel, in the last years of his life, had already arrived at a conception of art that we are only now beginning to approach. Consequently, our reappraisal is not the result of the fashion of the day. We are merely trying to follow the path that Vrubel indicated to us.”62 Indeed, as paradoxical as it may sound, Vrubel, by embracing the artistic traditions of the past, was able to anticipate and enable many of the formal and conceptual innovations of the future and was accordingly espoused by the subsequent generation of artists and critics as the “father” of the Russian avant-​garde.

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From Art Nouveau to Soviet Productivism: Vrubel and the Avant-​Garde As outlined in the first chapter, the first two decades of the twentieth century witnessed the rise of a new generation of Russian art critics and theorists who were well versed in the latest artistic trends of both Russia and Europe. Unlike their nineteenth-​century predecessors and subsequent Soviet successors, they were deeply invested in the rise of international modernism and Russia’s historical contribution to it. Art historians and critics such as Igor Grabar, Pavel Muratov, Nikolai Kulbin, Iakov Tugenkhold, Nikolai Tarabukin, and Nikolai Punin rejected artworks that unabashedly delivered overt political and ideological messages without paying due attention to form. Until this time, the criticism of art had been overseen primarily by men of letters such as Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Stasov, who approached painting from a literary perspective and evaluated a work of art based on its content and narrative, rather than its pictorial qualities. By contrast, younger critics such as Nikolai Punin and Nikolai Tarabukin called for an art that would be in dialogue with the latest international technical innovations but would simultaneously preserve a national specificity. What they hoped for was an entirely new type of representation that would move beyond a purely mechanical imitation of French modernism and would reflect Russia’s unique history in the visual arts while maintaining international relevance and significance. For Punin and Tarabukin, among others, Vrubel typified this perfect union of a distinctly national art, rooted in ancient, indigenous traditions, with a formally forward-​looking visual vocabulary. The Peredvizhniki had adopted national themes and subjects in their paintings but were stylistically

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retrograde. Conversely, French Impressionism and Postimpressionism were formally progressive but were alien and emptied of meaning in a Russian context. Parisian promenades, boulevards, and night cafés had little resonance in the less urbanized environs of Moscow and St. Petersburg. A comparison between Vasily Polenov’s Moscow Courtyard (1878) (fig. 63) and Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris: A Rainy Day (1877) (fig. 64) makes these differences manifest. In his portrayal of a Moscow courtyard, Polenov included a wooden well, dilapidated wooden buildings, chickens, a horse and cart, a woman carrying a bucket, and children playing on the sunlit grass. The Moscow skyline is predominantly composed of church spires and low-​storied buildings. The overall impression is that of a rural idyll rather than an urbanized metropolis. By contrast, Caillebotte’s Paris: A Rainy Day presents an image of a busy, modern city with expansive paved boulevards and gas lighting, inhabited by fashionable, urbane city dwellers, each carrying one of the nineteenth century’s most modern emblems: an umbrella. In the absence of these external and localized markers of modernity, Vrubel’s art offered a different model of modernist painting. His distinctly fin de siècle reformulation of traditional, folkloric, and Russo-​Byzantine themes and subjects into an unsettling dialectic of alienation and liminality closely resembled the parallel efforts of artists such as Gustav Klimt, Edward Munch, Max Klinger, and Odilon Redon. Much like these artists, Vrubel attempted to capture the disorienting, phantasmagoric, and hallucinatory effects of modernity through the portrayal of the deviant and the uncanny. By the same token, his numerous still lifes, portraits, and nature studies, with their sustained exploration of pictorial structure and optics, recall the interests of leading French

modernists such as Edouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, and Georges Seurat. Consequently, in the eyes of a younger generation of Russian theorists and critics, Vrubel’s work seemed to combine the best of both worlds: on the one hand it was appropriately national, while on the other it was suitably modern and progressive in its style. To quote Tarabukin: Vrubel frees art from genre elements, raising the downfallen techniques of painting to the height of the best European masters, [all the while] remaining throughout all the periods of his oeuvre in [his] most profound essence a realist.63 In the painting of Cézanne, Vrubel could have found an interrelation of color and volume akin to his [own]. . . . However, for Vrubel, Cézanne’s art was unacceptable in its “still-​life” view of the world.64

For Tarabukin, Vrubel was a “realist” because he had rejected academic illusionism in favor of asserting the material “reality” of paint on canvas. However, he had simultaneously “surpassed” Cézanne by moving beyond the base transcription of external phenomena, which in the end was merely the continuation of the dead-​end naturalism that was so deplorable in the art of the Peredvizhniki. On the contrary, Vrubel’s imaginary, often discordant and disturbing works seemed to presage a number of subsequent modern artistic movements such as Expressionism, Pittura Metafisica, and even Surrealism. In their ominous palettes, unorthodox human anatomies, and unconventional subject matter, his paintings frequently elicited a powerful sense of malaise and psychological tension in their viewers, which led many younger artists and theorists to see in Vrubel’s art the seeds of a variety of different

Fig. 63  Vasilii Polenov, Moscow Courtyard, 1878. Oil on canvas, 25 1/3 × 31 1/2 in. (64.5 × 80.1 cm). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Fig. 64  Gustave Caillebotte, Paris: A Rainy Day, 1877. Oil on canvas, 83 1/2 × 108 3/4 in. (212.2 × 276.2 cm). Art Institute of Chicago, Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection.

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twentieth-​century artistic currents. Indeed, to a certain degree, Vrubel’s preoccupation with the otherworldly signaled the beginning of the modern obsession with dreams, hallucinations, and the subconscious. Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1899, the same year that Vrubel began active work on his Demon Cast Down, a painting that marked the onset of his own mental illness and subsequent hospitalization. By the same token, Vrubel’s attempts to portray dynamism and rapid motion in works such as The Rider (1890) and Robert and the Nuns (1896) seemed to prefigure the twentieth-​century experiments of the Futurists. In the former work, the diagonal thrust of the rider in combination with the broken, striated contours of the man and horse produce a compelling impression of fast-​paced movement. As a result, in their efforts to construct a specifically Russian prehistory for the bourgeoning new movements of Cubo-​Futurism, Rayonism, Suprematism, Constructivism, and Productivism, various art theorists and critics found a natural nineteenth-​ century forebear in Vrubel, whose versatile, multivalent art could support a wide variety of modernist “beginnings.” Thus, for example, in his 1915 article simply entitled “Cubism,” the art critic Nikolai Kulbin boldly asserted that the founders of Cubism were Cézanne in France and Vrubel in Russia: Almost contemporaneously with Cézanne, but independently, Vrubel was working in Russia. Cubism was first expressed openly in Vrubel’s work in his studies for The Demon. . . . With equal brilliance Cubism was manifested in other works of his as well. In Vrubel’s paintings are elucidated both the plastic values of surfaces and the role and interrelationship of straight and curved lines.

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Along with the harmonious crystallization of forms, we also see a complex harmony that takes the form of excrescences like clinker.65

The artist Sergei Sudeikin went even further, claiming that Vrubel directly influenced Pablo Picasso. Recalling what he had personally observed at the Russian section of the 1906 Salon d’automne in Paris, Sudeikin recounted that “in the Vrubel hall . . . Larionov and [he] would invariably meet a stocky little man who looked like a young Serov and who would spend hours standing in front of Vrubel’s works. It was Picasso.” Sudeikin therefore provocatively concluded that “all the principles of Cubism, Constructivism, and Surrealism were founded and developed by Vrubel. And, despite our respect for Picasso, the founder of modern painting was Vrubel.”66 Subsequent Russian art historians, such as Mikhail Alpatov, have even gone on to imply that Picasso’s celebrated modernist masterpiece the Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)—which was begun by the artist in 1906—may have evolved out of his formative encounter with Vrubel’s art earlier that year.67 While such exaggerated claims for Vrubel as a proto-​Cubist, proto-​Constructivist, and proto-​Surrealist betray an inflated national pride, if not chauvinism, they simultaneously show how readily Vrubel was repositioned by twentieth-​century art criticism as the founder of a national school of modern art, which existed simultaneously with—but independent of—the French tradition. Consequently, within just a few years Vrubel’s name became ubiquitous in Russian artistic discourse, and an intimate acquaintance with his oeuvre seemed to be the universal prerequisite for the next generation of Russian avant-​garde artists. Accordingly, in 1909, when Liubov Popova traveled to Kiev to see Vrubel’s St. Cyril frescoes,

she claimed she was left “vanquished” by the artist’s “incinerating” talent.68 Similarly, Alexander Rodchenko asserted that in the early 1910s he “painted like Vrubel,” while Vladimir Tatlin prized and avidly collected Vrubel’s artwork.69 Other budding avant-​ garde talents who had encountered Vrubel’s work in Kiev in the early 1900s include Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Alexandra Ekster, Alexander Archipenko, David Burliuk, and Kazimir Male­ vich. Naum Gabo summarized the pervasiveness of Vrubel’s influence on his generation: “Vrubel freed the arts of painting and sculpture from the academic schemata . . . his influence on our visual consciousness was as decisive as Cézanne’s, and equivalent to the latter’s on the trend of painting in western Europe. . . . Even Cubism was not entirely a surprise to us.”70 Indeed, it is not hard to see how Gabo might have drawn inspiration from Vrubel’s oeuvre in his own Constructivist works (fig. 65). In a piece such as the latter’s Head of a Lion (1891) (fig. 66), the protruding geometrized planes and shifting volumes explicitly emphasize the underlying structural armature of the represented animal and reflect Vrubel’s deconstructive and analytical approach to form— an approach that subsequently became one of the central tenets of Constructivist art. John Bowlt specifically attributes Gabo’s, Rodchenko’s, and Tatlin’s interest in Vrubel’s art to this unique “constructive” method: “There are two very distinctive properties in Vrubel’s painting—his ‘broken’ composition divided into geometric patterns . . . and his very conscious use of texture (facture or faktura). . . . Thanks to these two essential properties, Vrubel’s painting often produces a peculiarly ‘constructive’ effect as if the artist has built the canvas vertically, horizontally and in relief . . . it seems [his forms are] about to move outwards from the pictorial surface.”71

In his attempt to demonstrate just how far Vrubel anticipated twentieth-​century developments in art, Tarabukin even insinuated that it was Vrubel who first prophetically grasped the concept that Viktor Shklovsky was to term ostranenie, or defamiliarization, decades later and Rodchenko so successfully put into practice in his formalist photography of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Analyzing Vrubel’s painting Eastern Tale (fig. 67), Tarabukin wrote: The first impression of Eastern Tale is of absolutely stunning brightness, ringing, diversity of color, and nonobjectivity. The eye is incapable of discerning the outlines of figurative form. . . . However, as the eye gradually becomes accustomed to the range of colors, the contours of the drawing become clearer, and finally, the image emerges in all of its plasticity, and one is astonished at . . . [not having originally seen] the harmoniously balanced composition, in which the sculptural rendition of the figures is almost palpable. . . .

In the given case we encounter a characteristic

trait of Vrubel’s art: the symbolic, fantastic, and abstract elements of his works take as their source fully concrete reality . . . the realistic features [of which] are subsequently rendered abstract through ostranenie [defamiliarization].72

Not only was Vrubel rediscovered and refashioned as a convenient predecessor to the historical avant-​garde in the early 1910s, but engagement with his work continued to influence leftist art criticism and theory well into the 1920s. However, Punin’s and Tarabukin’s writings on Vrubel—and nineteenth-​century Russian art more broadly—have typically been dismissed as an early and somewhat “embarrassing” youthful phase, to be replaced by their ensuing “mature” work on the Soviet avant-​garde. Almost never have these earlier interests been seriously considered as

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Fig. 65  Naum Gabo, Head No. 2 (1916), enlarged version, 1964. Steel, 69 × 52 3/4 × 48 in. (175.3 × 134 × 122 cm). Tate Modern, London, Collection Miriam Gabo.

important factors in shaping and directing Punin’s and Tarabukin’s views on Constructivism and Productivism. Needless to say, Vrubel’s artworks have likewise rarely been discussed in relation to these movements. Of course, at a time of fast-​paced change and innovation—where one avant-​garde trend was rapidly replaced by another—arguably the interests and commitments of art critics and theorists evolved along similar lines. While such a strictly

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linear narrative of progressive “isms” certainly serves to reinforce a particular modernist teleology, it does not reflect the much more complex and symbiotic reality of the historical moment under consideration. Instead, as already briefly touched upon in the first two chapters, the Constructivist and Productivist theories of Punin and Tarabukin—even in their most radical phases—always coincided and coexisted with their work and interests in earlier Russian art.73 Thus, in his 1923 polemical essay From the Easel to the Machine Tarabukin declared the death of painting and the triumph, in its place, of mechanized, utilitarian, and collective forms of production and distribution. However, that same year he also wrote an essay on “rhythm and composition in ancient Russian icon painting” and founded a group at the State Academy of Artistic Sciences in Moscow for the study of Vrubel’s art in order to “present Vrubel in a new light, by removing the ‘decadent’ and ‘mystical’ stigma imposed on the artist by critics.”74 Similarly, while Punin was participating in the radical avant-​garde activities of Apartment No. 5 alongside Vladimir Tatlin, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Velimir Khlebnikov in the years 1914–15, he was simultaneously penning articles on medieval art and was an active member of the Department of Monuments of Russian Icon Painting and Church Relics in the Russian Museum of His Imperial Majesty Alexander III. It was also in these years that Punin published a lengthy study of Vrubel’s drawings and observed in a letter to his future wife: “Today, I thought a lot about art because I spent a long time looking at the [museum] halls of the modern masters. Not a single one of them satisfies me, except for Vrubel.”75 Three years later, in 1917, Punin published in the journal Apollon a polemical article rhetorically

titled “In Defense of Painting,” in which he fervently endorsed easel painting as a form of artistic production.76 And yet, at exactly the same time, Punin declared his passion for “Tatlinian Constructivism,” “living materials,” and “living space” and claimed that Tatlin’s influence on him in the years 1915–17 was “boundless.”77 In his famous monograph on Tatlin’s art, provocatively titled Tatlin (Against Cubism) (1921), Punin rooted Tatlin’s artistic practice in the ancient iconic tradition, rather than in contemporary French Cubism. As elaborated in the first chapter, Punin believed that the icon offered contemporary art enormous possibilities of development beyond the formalist hermeticism of Cubism and that the first artist to have discovered its boundless potential for modernist artistic practice was Vrubel. As opposed to modern French art, which Punin considered fatally individualistic, Tatlin’s works were communal and useful, in the same way that Vrubel’s St. Cyril frescoes, created for public rather than private consumption, had a functional devotional purpose. It was perhaps no accident that as late as 1923 Punin noted in his diary that he took his VKhUTEMAS students to the Russian Museum to study Vrubel’s paintings, among others, and concluded that “in ‘new art’ there is not a single new formal element that was not already present in the old [art]; but ‘new art’ is a genuinely novel sense of the world: the form is not new, the content is new.”78 Tarabukin, even more than Punin, attempted to build a conceptual and historical bridge between Vrubel, medieval Russo-​Byzantine art, and Constructivism and Productivism. In his 1928 monograph on Vrubel, Tarabukin observed that the artist was “a traditionalist and an innovator simultaneously . . . [who], by drawing inspiration from the Byzantines, opened new paths in Russian art.”79

Fig. 66  Mikhail Vrubel, Head of a Lion, 1891. Glazed majolica, 18 × 18 3/4 × 11 in. (45.5 × 47.5 × 28 cm). State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

As already mentioned, Tarabukin insisted that Vrubel was above all a “Realist”—in the materialist sense of the word—and that the artist resorted to “cheap Symbolism” in only a few of his paintings.80 For the most part, however, according to Tarabukin, Vrubel’s art was “concrete,” “simple,” “straightforward,” and “true,” just as the icon and the new Constructivist object were “honest” and “realist,” in opposition to dissembling illusionistic painting.81 In addition, Tarabukin maintained that in his applied works Vrubel demonstrated an extraordinary sense both of architectonics and of the all-​encompassing social role of art. Vrubel’s oeuvre thus anticipated the two central principles underpinning Constructivist and Productivist art: first, the radical departure from two-​dimensional surfaces and, second, the

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Fig. 67  Mikhail Vrubel, Eastern Tale, 1886. Watercolor and gouache on paper, pasted on cardboard, 10 2/3 × 11 in. (27.8 × 27 cm). State Museum of Russian Art, Kiev.

functional, utilitarian role of the art object, which led Tarabukin to conclude that the artist “had always aspired to go beyond the limitations of easel painting. Vrubel had always dreamed of an art that would be monumental, socially important, that would

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enter daily life, that would be connected to its environment; an art of active social impact and [capable of] transforming life.”82 With this Productivist rhetoric, Tarabukin transformed Vrubel’s interest in decorative projects and Art Nouveau into radical,

leftist avant-​gardism. Needless to say, the terms “Art Nouveau” and “Productivism” are rarely, if ever, used in the same sentence. And yet, as Punin himself wrote: “[O]ur generation, which came out of ‘Art Nouveau’ . . . has every basis for being interested in its origin,” which, according to Punin, marked the beginning of modernism.83 Consequently, while conventional histories of Russian art tend to emphasize the diametric contrasts between the traditional and the innovative, the derivative and the original, the retrospective and the forward-​looking, and the sacred and the secular, I would like to complicate these binary categories by highlighting the multiple

connections that obtained between images, audiences, institutions, and individuals across ostensibly antithetical cultural spheres, which I believe were more porous and mutually generative than is generally assumed. Though typically viewed as a radical break from and rejection of the prerevolutionary period, the Soviet avant-​garde project was in many respects deeply indebted to the former in both its art and its criticism. It was, in fact, the revivalist impulse of the late nineteenth century—as exemplified in the art of Mikhail Vrubel—that first spurred artists and theorists to envisage the formal and conceptual possibilities of the twentieth.

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4 VASILY KANDINSKY’S ICONIC SUBCONSCIOUS AND THE SEARCH FOR THE SPIRITUAL IN ART

In his autobiography, the Russian artist Viktor Ufimtsev describes a memorable modern art exhibition that he attended in the early years of the Soviet regime. Organized in a disused church in the Siberian town of Barnaul, the display “started at the porch, and the further one went, the more unexpected, the more shocking it was. Hanging near the Royal Doors, in the choirs and the chancel were works by objectless painters: by Kandinsky, Malevich, Rozanova.”1 Although unsure about how to respond to these abstract works, members of the public nonetheless observed: “[T]hey do give us the feeling of being inside a church.”2 In 1913 Kandinsky could scarcely have imagined that only a decade later his paintings would be exhibited in such a setting. By the same token, it is hard to envision a more appropriate environment for the works of an artist who believed that the fundamental goal of his art was to awaken people’s “capacity for experiencing the spiritual in material and in abstract phenomena.”3 From the earliest stages of his artistic career, Kandinsky had a messianic conception of the artist’s role in society and believed that only a new type of

modern painting, born of “inner necessity,” could rejuvenate a moribund Western culture mired in rationalism.4 Although Kandinsky was unquestionably a pioneer of nonobjective painting, he has often been seen as something of a black sheep in modernist historiography. His insistence on the “spiritual” dimension of his artworks, as well as his association with occult movements such as Theosophy, has retrospectively appeared to be hermetic and idiosyncratic when compared to the deconstructive, materialist approaches of French Cubism and Soviet Constructivism. Moreover, in contrast to the daring geometric solutions of Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, the lyrical, subjective abstraction that Kandinsky developed in the early 1910s seems to be more indebted to the Symbolist impulse of the nineteenth century than to the new mechanistic spirit of the twentieth. Lastly, Kandinsky’s florid language and his insistence on using poetic terminology such as “soulful vibrations,” “inner sound,” and “the Great Spiritual” have often led scholars to dismiss him as an antiquated, sentimental artist, who lacked the

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daring vision and radicalism of later, Soviet avant-​ garde artists. As early as 1919 Nikolai Punin called on modern artists to effect a “mechanization of the soul” in place of the “organicism” of their paintings.5 An avid supporter of the Russian Cubo-​Futurist and Constructivist movements, Punin harshly criticized Kandinsky as “not only a poor master, but simply a vulgar and most ordinary artist.”6 According to the critic, there was no place for superficial “private fantasies” in contemporary art. Twentieth-​century art had to be objective, accessible, and universal and not “subjective, remote, [and] estranged.”7 In the present chapter I challenge such (mis)in­terpretations of Kandinsky’s art by demonstrating that it was neither “remote” nor “estranged”; on the contrary, it aspired to be universal, timeless, and resonant, with a broad, international public. By encoding “veiled” Christian iconography into many of his ostensibly nonobjective paintings, Kandinsky intended his art to have transcendental signification beyond its own materiality. That is not to imply that Kandinsky’s mode of abstraction was somehow reactionary or not “truly” abstract. Rather, he arrived at a nonfigurative visual vocabulary via a conception of abstraction’s role in modernity alternative to the one advocated by the later Soviet avant-​garde. Accordingly, Kandinsky’s artistic practice resisted the reductive and purely formalist interpretation subsequently developed by the art critic Clement Greenberg in the mid-​twentieth century. The artist equally objected to Alfred Barr’s famous flowchart of modern art, which graced the catalogue cover of MoMA’s 1936 exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art. Instead, in his formulation of a new “spiritual” art for the twentieth century, Kandinsky seemed to rely on the image philosophy of the icon and the dual nature of the ancient Christian archetype.

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Moving beyond the established theosophical and primitivist readings of Kandinsky’s early works, I resituate his art within the rigorous philosophical, political, and aesthetic debates that accompanied the rediscovery of the iconic tradition in Russia. In doing so, I propose a new set of cultural and historical coordinates, largely overlooked by scholars, within which to understand Kandinsky’s paintings. Challenging Punin’s now widely accepted critique of Kandinsky as an “estranged” and idiosyncratic artist, I demonstrate that his artistic and theoretical output from the early teens was very much shaped by and in dialogue with the rich and complex discourse surrounding the iconic revival. By the same token, I do not mean to claim that Kandinsky’s paradigmatic move to nonobjectivity was a direct response to the Russo-​Byzantine revival. As with most paradigm-​ shifting breakthroughs, Kandinsky’s was most certainly the result of a combination of extremely complex psychological, social, cultural, and aesthetic shifts rather than any one stimulus. Accordingly, this chapter aims to achieve a number of different objectives. First, it traces Kandinsky’s interest in and exposure to the iconic tradition. Second, it demonstrates how his works from 1908 to 1913 engaged with iconic representation on both formal and theoretical levels. Third, it examines Kandinsky’s aesthetic philosophy from this period within the context of the Russian Religious Renaissance, and especially the writings of Pavel Florensky. In particular, it explores the theoretical parallels between Florensky’s and Kandinsky’s so-​called medievalism and their respective conceptualizations of the role of religion in modernity, while also highlighting key differences in their ideas. Finally, and most importantly, this chapter challenges the prevalent interpretation that Kandinsky’s

engagement with icons was nothing more than a passing romantic interest in primitive art, mysticism, and occultism. Instead, it positions Kandinsky’s pre–World War I body of work as manifesting an alternative theorization of art’s role in modernity, countering the louder claims of the formalist and materialist avant-​garde that are generally privileged by modernist historiography. Whether consciously or not, Kandinsky’s formulation of a new spiritual art was steeped in Eastern Orthodox ideology and aesthetics. As such, he essentially conceptualized a “modern icon” for the twentieth century.

The Iconic Subconscious According to the reports of his relatives and friends, Kandinsky was a practicing member of the Russian Orthodox Church and an avid collector of old icons. Photographs of Kandinsky’s Munich apartment and his house in Murnau show a rich array of Christian images. For example, in the well-​known 1911 photograph of Kandinsky sitting at his desk in his Munich apartment at 36 Ainmillerstraße (fig. 68), there is a prominent image of an angel, three Orthodox crosses, two small brass icons, a Crucifixion scene, and a statue of the Virgin Mary. Kandinsky continued to be interested in iconic representation throughout his lifetime, as evidenced by Nina Kandinsky’s description of his studio in their Neuilly apartment at 135 boulevard de la Seine: “Since Kandinsky died, I have changed hardly anything in the apartment . . . the antique icons in his studio continue to hang where he hung them. He did not want anything but those icons in his studio, and especially not his own creations; nothing was supposed to distract him from his work; with bare trails

he was sure he would be able to concentrate.”8 In the various statements that Kandinsky made throughout the course of his career, he repeatedly attributed a central role to iconic representation in his artistic formation. For example, in his Reminiscences (Rückblicke), from 1913, Kandinsky claimed that his first experience of synesthesia occurred “in the Moscow churches, and especially in the cathedral of the Assumption and the Church of St. Basil the Blessed.” This experience, as he himself recognized, later became a central concept in his aesthetic theory: “It was probably through these impressions, rather than in any other way, that my further wishes and aims as regards my own art formed themselves within me.”9 Citing an even more direct influence, Kandinsky states boldly: “There is no other type of painting that I value as highly as our icons. The most valuable things that I have learned, I learned from our icons, and not only in terms of art, but also in terms of religion.”10 Even as early as the 1880s—long before Kandinsky took up painting—he already expressed a latent interest in the way that icons mediated spirituality and religious experience in everyday life. A sketch that Kandinsky produced during an ethnographic trip to the Vologda region in northern Russia depicts a group of peasants kneeling in front of icons, absorbed in prayer and meditation (fig. 69). Almost a decade after this trip, Kandinsky famously asserted that his first intimation of the potential of abstract painting had occurred as early as 1896, when his exposure to Impressionism encouraged him to look at the art of icons “with new eyes”: “I ‘acquired eyes’ for the abstract element in this kind of painting.”11 In this last statement Kandinsky was merely echoing the dominant discourse in Russia at the time, wherein French modern art was repeatedly aligned with Russian medieval

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Fig. 68  Gabriele Münter, Vasily Kandinsky at His Desk in His Apartment at 36 Ainmillerstraße, Munich, June 1911. Gabriele Münter- und Johannes Eichner-​Stiftung, Munich.

representation. In 1913, the same year that Kandinsky published his Reminiscences recounting his fateful encounter with Claude Monet’s Haystacks, the artist Aleksei Grishchenko wrote that “in a strange way twentieth-​century Paris echoes medieval Muscovy,” and Alexander Benois claimed that icons “help us to understand Matisse, Picasso, Le Fauconnier.”12 Moreover, as a fervent admirer of Matisse, Kandinsky would certainly have paid close attention to the French artist’s laudatory comments on Russia’s iconic tradition during the latter’s visit to Moscow in October of 1911. In On the Spiritual in Art Kandinsky describes Matisse as “one of the greatest of the modern French painters,” an artist who “seeks to

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reproduce the divine” in his art.13 Accordingly, when Matisse asserted that “from [the Russian icons] we ought to learn how to understand art,”14 Kandinsky must have taken his suggestion to heart. Indeed, it is precisely in these years that Kandinsky’s theoretical and pictorial output reveals a sustained preoccupation with religious thought patterns and iconic themes. It was at this time that Kandinsky published the essays “Content and Form” (Inhalt und Form), “Whither the ‘New’ Art?” (Kuda idet ‘novoe’ iskusstvo), and On the Spiritual in Art, all of which employ messianic language and announce the coming of a new “Spiritual Epoch.”15 Kandinsky believed that this new epoch would be the third and final revelation—the Revelation of the Spirit—following the revelation of the Father in Old Testament times and that of the Son in the Christian era.16 Kandinsky also produced a series of paintings on biblical themes, such as the Last Judgment, Last Supper, Sound of Trumpets, All Saints, and Saint George cycles, in which the individual works ranged from easily legible figurative representations to increasingly dissolved and abstracted imagery (figs. 78, 79, 83, 87). More importantly, these years marked both a distinct transformation in Kandinsky’s painterly style and a concretization of his program for a new theory of modern art. As Reinhold Heller points out, at this moment “the synthetic flatness akin to Jugendstil which [Kandinsky] had sought during 1908–09 gives way to a nascent sense of pictorial or painterly space, and the identity of forms in an illusionistic sense becomes more and more disguised. . . . A radical transformation of his ideas and art is taking place. Precisely what motivated it is unknown.”17 One explanation that is typically advanced to explain Kandinsky’s sudden interest in religious subject matter at this

time is his involvement in a collaborative project. Together with Franz Marc, Alfred Kubin, Paul Klee, Erich Heckel, and Oskar Kokoschka, Kandinsky wanted to create a series of illustrations for a new edition of the Bible.18 However, Klaus Lankheit dates the inception of this project to the spring of 1913.19 Meanwhile, religious and iconic motifs had already begun to appear in Kandinsky’s work as early as 1908 and 1909. It is much more plausible that Kandinsky’s steady interest in religious imagery prompted him to evolve the idea of the biblical illustrations in 1913 rather than the reverse. Since the years 1908 to 1913 coincide with the height of the iconic revival in Russia (as demonstrated in the first two chapters), it is logical to assume that this would have been the most immediate stimulus for Kandinsky, especially as the artist made repeated trips to Russia in these years and even lived in Moscow for several months in the autumn of 1910. In fact, Kandinsky never severed his connection to Russia during his stay in Germany and remained attentive to all that was new and exciting in contemporary Russian art and thought. While in Munich, he was a columnist for the Russian art journals Mir iskusstva and Apollon, and he continually corresponded with Russian artists, critics, and exhibition organizers. It is therefore not coincidental that Kandinsky ensured that the first draft of On the Spiritual in Art was publicly presented in Russia rather than Germany. The text was read by his close friend Nikolai Kulbin at the 1911 All-​Russian Congress of Artists in St. Petersburg, where it was fervently discussed alongside scholarly tracts that called for the preservation and restoration of Russia’s ancient icons and monuments.20 Kandinsky’s call for a new spiritual and transcendental art was undoubtedly attractive to an audience likely to see his project as a contemporary reiteration of an age-​old, disappearing

Fig. 69  Vasily Kandinsky, The Blessing of the Bread, 1889. Watercolor and graphite on paper, 7 1/6 × 9 1/2 in. (18.3 × 24.6 cm). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

tradition.21 Moreover, as John Bowlt has already demonstrated, this first version of the text differed significantly from the more well-​known German edition of 1912.22 The Russian version of On the Spiritual in Art was much more direct, clear, and laconic than the German one and omitted many of the more obscure and cryptic references to Theosophy that subsequently appeared in the German publication. Given the academic nature of the St. Petersburg congress and its predominantly scholarly audience, it becomes increasingly clear that, at least on this occasion, Kandinsky consciously attempted to ally his aesthetic theories with the broader concerns of the Russo-​Byzantine revival that dominated much of the discourse at the congress. In addition to this Russian context, Kandinsky would also have had considerable exposure to Byzantine art and theory within his Munich

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Fig. 70  Vasily Kandinsky, Untitled, 1906–7. Inscription: “La nuit dans la miniature grec du x siècle / colorée en gris-​ violet / le nimbe est bleu / (Kondakoff); in Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris! / (Miniature Byzantine).” Pencil on ruled paper, 8 1/4 × 5 1/4 in. (20.9 × 13.4 cm). Gabriele Münterund Johannes Eichner-​Stiftung, Munich.

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environment. It was precisely at the moment of his arrival in Munich in 1896 that Byzantine studies were becoming institutionalized as a discipline in Germany, and various publications on Byzantine art and architecture began to appear throughout the 1890s and early 1900s.23 The prominent Byzantinist Karl Krumbacher became the first chair of Byzantine studies at the University of Munich in 1891, inaugurating the Munich School of Byzantinology and launching a leading journal of Byzantine studies, the Byzantinische Zeitschrift, in 1892. Unlike many of his fellow artists, Kandinsky actually read Byzantine scholarship and quoted Nikodim Kondakov’s Histoire de l’art byzantin considéré principalement dans les miniatures in his notes to On the Spiritual in Art.24 He even went so far as to copy one of the Byzantine miniatures from the Paris Psalter that were reproduced in Kondakov’s book (figs. 70–71).25 In addition, for the second volume of the Blaue Reiter Almanac Kandinsky was actively planning to invite scholars to contribute articles and essays, writing in 1935 that the editors “intended to draw upon scholars as collaborators in order to expand the earlier basis of art and in order to show how the work of the artist and the scholar is related and how close together their two spiritual fields are.”26 More importantly, beyond academic circles, Byzantine art was increasingly discussed in both the popular press and the most progressive art criticism of the day. For example, in his 1904 book Modern Art: Being a Contribution to a New System of Aesthetics, Julius Meier-​Graefe devoted an entire section to a discussion of Byzantine mosaics, which he considered to be important precursors to modernist aesthetics.27 Similarly, Wilhelm Worringer saw a powerful drive toward abstraction in Byzantine art, which he

Fig. 71  Isaiah’s Prayer with Dawn, from the Paris Psalter, tenth century, fol. 435v. Tempera and gold leaf on vellum, 14 1/8 × 10 1/4 in. (36 × 26 cm). Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, ms gr. 139.

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defended as a valid alternative to naturalism in his Abstraction and Empathy from 1908: During the Theodosian age abstract tendencies, as expressed in the geometrization of decoration . . . and in the diminution of feeling for form, enjoyed a pronounced supremacy. Instead of sculptural modeling, we find flat engraving with a pattern-​like alternation of light and dark. . . .

Artistic estimation of this art is of very recent date.

Previously its conscious artistic volition was almost completely overlooked, and nothing was seen in it but lack of artistic power, the epithets “schematic” “lifeless” “rigid” were not only statements of fact, but also the expression of unfavorable value-​judgment. This was because everyone was completely under the spell of a view of art which had derived its aesthetic from the Antique and the Renaissance, and had consequently made the organic-​true-​to-​life the criterion of its evaluation. The supposition that the goal of art might be sought in the lifeless, in the rigid, was out of the question from the standpoint of the earlier science of art.28

Kandinsky was intimately familiar with both texts and was planning to invite Worringer to write an essay for the second edition of the Blaue Reiter Almanac. Moreover, in addition to all of these textual references, Kandinsky also had an indirect connection to Byzantine art through his friend and colleague Franz Marc. Marc’s brother, Paul, was a Byzantine scholar, and in April of 1906 Franz had accompanied him on a three-​week research trip to the monasteries of Mount Athos to study medieval Byzantine frescoes and icons.29 Ironically, some six years later Franz discovered “a huge collection of panel paintings from Athos” at an art dealer’s shop in Berlin and wrote to Kandinsky that they should

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reproduce some of these works in the second volume of the Blaue Reiter Almanac.30 It was probably around this time that Franz sent a small tempera-​ and-​oil study of a seated Byzantine saint to Kandinsky in the form of a postcard.31 However, long before the watershed years of 1910–13, Kandinsky had already repeatedly demonstrated a latent interest in medieval culture and representation. During his sojourn in Paris in 1906–7, Kandinsky produced a series of tempera paintings and woodcuts on the theme of medieval Russian life, including Volga Song (1906), The Funeral (1906–7), Riding Couple (1907), The Morning Hour (1907), and Colorful Life (Motley Life) (1907) (fig. 72). Set in a distant, medieval past, these works are replete with an imaginative array of national characters in archaic costumes: Slavic knights on horseback, boyars and merchants in tall fur hats, rosy maidens in kokoshniks, Orthodox priests, monks, and ascetics—all surrounded by white-​walled Kremlins with onion-​domed churches.32 Although these works betray more of an ethnographic—than an iconic— approach to image making, in many of them, and in Motley Life in particular, the mosaic construction of the image already hints at the disembodied, planar pictorial structure that Kandinsky would actively pursue in his later works. The figures are distributed seemingly haphazardly across the entire surface of the picture plane without a dominant narrative focus. Meanwhile, the uneven scale of the different figures and the lack of clear perspectival recession produce a symbolic, otherworldly quality rather than a documentary one. Accordingly, both in their mosaic structure and medieval subject matter, these tempera works clearly testify to Kandinsky’s growing interest in Russia’s premodern history and visual culture. It is also noteworthy that Kandinsky

Fig. 72  Vasily Kandinsky, Colorful Life (Motley Life), 1907. Tempera on canvas, 51 × 64 in. (130 × 162.5 cm). Bayerische Landesbank, on permanent loan to the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.

produced these retrospective Slavic-​themed works at exactly the same time as he discovered Matisse and the Fauves, as well as Picasso, Braque, Metzinger, and Rousseau, all of whom seemed to make a strong impression on him.33 Consequently, even at this early stage of his career, Kandinsky had already begun to intimate the “strange” connections between “twentieth-​century Paris” and “medieval Moscow” while simultaneously seeking to

differentiate his artistic practice from the vanguard of French modernism by explicitly aligning it with a particularly Russian native tradition. However, in an odd act of disavowal, scholars such as Will Grohmann and Johannes Eichner, writing in the 1950s, at the height of modernist dominance, dismissed Kandinsky’s medievalizing motifs russes as merely an inconsequential “outlet for homesickness” and a “nostalgic quirk” that stood entirely

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outside of the mainstream of his own artistic development.34 Disregarding Kandinsky’s own repeated assertions that the tempera pictures and woodcuts of 1906–7 played an important role in his ongoing and “consistent” development toward abstraction, Eichner wrote that “in the overall art-​historical evolution . . . they [the temperas] were an appendage to the late-​Impressionist technique and to the formal language of Jugendstil, not children of a new spirit but only ‘apart.’ ”35 And yet, in his introduction to On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky wrote that he first began to make notes for this work some five to six years earlier, which places the origins of the treatise roughly at the time that Kandinsky was living and working in Paris.36 Needless to say, Kandinsky’s exposure to contemporary French art certainly had a major impact on his subsequent artistic development, as evidenced by his Murnau landscapes of 1908–9. Several publications, and in particular Jonathan David Fineberg’s exhaustive study of Kandinsky’s activities in Paris, have already adequately explored all the possible French influences on Kandinsky’s early artistic development.37 However, scholars have largely overlooked the artist’s exposure to medieval Russian and Byzantine art during his stay in Paris, even though it must have significantly contributed to his burgeoning interest in medieval Russia, so clearly expressed in his tempera works. While in Paris, Kandinsky continued to move in Russian émigré circles, and he would likely have been aware of the two major Russia-​related events that took place in the French capital in 1906. The first of these was Sergei Diaghilev’s Russian section at the 1906 Salon d’automne. Although the show was mounted separately from the rest of the Salon exhibition, visitors to the Grand Palais could view it free of charge. Diaghilev was allocated ten large

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rooms—later increased to twelve—where he displayed more than 750 works of art ranging from the Middle Ages to the contemporary period. Among these were a large number of ancient icons from Nikolai Likhachev’s vast collection, as well as a rich selection of eighteenth-​century Russian paintings, and some of the most radical art from the youngest generation of Moscow avant-​garde artists such as Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova.38 The exhibition was opened with great fanfare by French president Fallières on October 6, 1906, and received widespread coverage in the local press. Le Figaro in particular devoted a long article to it, singling out various artists for special praise. Diaghilev was made an honorary member of the Salon, along with the artists Leon Bakst, Alexander Benois, Nikolai Roerich, and Mikhail Vrubel. After the Salon closed, the Russian exhibition traveled on to Berlin, where it also met with great success, according to Diaghilev, who wrote in a letter to Walter Nouvel: “The Germans like it. There have been hordes of visitors. We’ve done it again!”39 Kandinsky had contributed twenty-​one of his own works to the same Salon d’automne—four paintings, five temperas, five woodcuts, and seven applied artworks—and was awarded a grand prix on this occasion.40 It is therefore highly unlikely that he would have missed the Russian exhibition, given both his steady interest in contemporary Russian art and his own involvement in the 1906 Salon d’automne. The year after the Russian exhibition of 1906, another important exhibition of medieval Russian art was organized by Princess Maria Tenisheva, a major proponent of the Russian medieval revival and a patron of the Russian Arts and Crafts movement. In the years 1905 to 1908 Tenisheva began an active campaign to promote Russian culture in Paris

and mounted a series of small exhibitions of medieval Russian art in her Parisian home. These shows eventually attracted the attention of the French minister of fine arts, who offered Tenisheva four halls in the Musée des arts décoratifs at the Louvre and all the display cases in the Pavillon de Marsan. In 1907 she organized a major exhibition of medieval Russian art objects, which were largely drawn from the collections of the Smolensk Museum of Russian Antiquities and were specifically loaned to her for the occasion. The exhibition ran for five consecutive months from May 10, 1907, until October 10, 1907; and according to Tenisheva, it was “the most successful exhibition of the whole season and was widely discussed and written about. There were 78,000 visitors.”41 It is difficult to determine with any certainty whether Kandinsky saw this exhibition, since he did not explicitly mention it in any of his memoirs or his correspondence from this period. However, it was precisely at this time that he immersed himself in scholarship on Russo-​Byzantine art, and the sketch of the Paris Psalter miniature from Kondakov’s Histoire de l’art byzantin considéré principalement dans les miniatures was executed during his stay in Paris (figs. 70–71). An inscription in Kandinsky’s handwriting on the right-​hand side of the drawing states that the original tenth-​century Byzantine manuscript is in the “Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris!,” suggesting that Kandinsky may even have gone to the trouble of seeing it in person during his stay in Paris. All of this implies that despite his constant contact with and exposure to contemporary French art, the Russo-​ Byzantine representational tradition was never far from Kandinsky’s mind. Moreover, given his explicit interest in medieval subject matter and his experimentation with medievalizing stylistic elements

in the years 1905–7, it is clear that long before his artistic breakthroughs of 1910–13 Kandinsky had already begun to meditate on the parallels between contemporary art and his native artistic tradition. Several years later he observed in On the Spiritual in Art that in contrast to the “soulless” art produced in ancient Greece and Rome, medieval representation had a profound philosophical and “spiritual” affinity with modern times: It is impossible for our inner lives, our feelings, to be like those of the ancient Greeks. Efforts, therefore, to apply Greek principles, e.g., to sculpture, can only produce forms similar to those employed by the Greeks, a work that remains soulless for all time. This sort of imitation resembles the mimicry of the ape. . . .

There exists, however, another outward similarity

of artistic forms that is rooted in a deeper necessity. The similarity of inner strivings within the whole spiritual-​ moral atmosphere—striving after goals that have already been pursued, but afterward forgotten—this similarity of the inner mood of an entire period can lead logically to the use of forms successfully employed to the same ends in an earlier period. Our sympathy, our understanding, our inner feeling for the Primitives arose partly in this way. Just like us, those pure artists wanted to capture in their works the inner essence of things, which of itself brought about a rejection of the external, the accidental.42

Here it is important to clarify that Kandinsky used the term “primitive” to refer not only to tribal, popular, and folk art but also to medieval Christian imagery. In On the Spiritual in Art he identified “the Primitives” as “the ancient Germans and Italians,” a designation that was often employed in the nineteenth century to describe European art before the advent of the Renaissance and the development

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of linear perspective.43 This conception of the “primitive” closely related to that of the German Nazarenes and the British Pre-​R aphaelites, who valued early Christian art for its purity, sincerity, and spirituality, in contrast to the overly refined, mathematical, and corrupt art of the Renaissance and post-​Renaissance periods. It is no accident that Kandinsky specifically mentioned Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-​Jones as exemplary “artists who [sought] the internal in the world of the external” and “turned towards Raphael’s forerunners and tried to reanimate their abstract forms.”44 It is equally telling that out of the five illustrations by artists other than himself that Kandinsky included in On the Spiritual in Art, four were religious artworks from the premodern period, which seems to suggest that Kandinsky saw in medieval representation an important aesthetic and conceptual precedent to his own artistic and theoretical project. Lastly, as Andrew Spira writes, “Kandinsky tended to read some Orthodox imagery” as “Christianized representations of a far deeper psychic and preconceptual dynamic that was rooted in the shamanistic cultures of northern Russia and Siberia.”45 Consequently, Kandinsky did not view Christian art as antithetical to that of the “primitive” pagan past, but instead considered the two to be on a continuum—avatars of formidable spiritual energies—linked together by “internal necessity.”46

Alone Among the “Savages” Most of the scholarship published on Kandinsky to date contends that his interest in medieval representation hinged almost exclusively on the “primitive” form of the medieval image. However, I would like

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to propose that, in addition to form, Kandinsky was also interested in the transcendental dual nature of the iconic image as it was theorized by Byzantine theologians during the iconoclastic controversies of the eighth and ninth centuries. In addition to the mystical, theosophical, and apocalyptic explanations discussed in existing scholarship, I would like to advance the possibility that Kandinsky’s ideas about the inner and outer nature of the image were at least partly shaped by the dualism inherent in iconic representations.47 In On the Spiritual in Art he contended that “the two kinds of resemblance to forms of past ages which modern art contains are diametrically opposed—which is immediately obvious. The first kind is an outward resemblance and, therefore, has no potential. The second kind is an inward resemblance and, therefore, contains the seeds of the future.”48 This distinction between “outward” and “inward” resemblance was crucial to Kandinsky’s project and set him apart from the majority of his European and Russian avant-​garde contemporaries such as Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova. In contrast to the latter, Kandinsky maintained that art was “one of the most powerful agents” of “the spiritual life” and sincerely believed in its ability to revitalize the waning religious sensibilities of late modernity.49 Larionov and Goncharova, on the other hand, “took an active part in [the] desanctification of high art” and employed a number of different strategies to expose and critique “high/low stratification, be it in art or in social categories.”50 For example, Larionov deployed a provocative iconographic program of dubious, lower-​class characters such as soldiers, gypsies, barbers, and prostitutes and adorned his paintings with deliberately misspelled and semiliterate graffiti of vulgar words as a subversive parody of the holy inscriptions

on icons and frescoes. Similarly, as John Malm­ stad points out, Larionov’s infamous nudes from the Seasons cycle (1912–13) blasphemously adopt “poses reminiscent of Christian . . . art.” For instance, in Autumn, the female figure is depicted with “hands upraised as though in prayer, cop[ying] the Mother of God Orant.”51 Instead of treating icons as sacred objects and exemplars of an indigenous “high-​art” tradition—in the way that Benois and Muratov had done—Larionov contended that icons were in the same artistic category as the cheap, mass-​produced broadsheet, or lubok, as well as the base patterns on gingerbread. To underscore this point, he organized an exhibition titled Genuine Icon Painting and Lubki in February of 1913, which contained more than 170 lubki and icons, 129 of which came from Larionov’s personal collection. In the accompanying catalogue Larionov wrote: “The lubok . . . was printed on cloth, stenciled, stamped on leather and broadsheet icon cases made of brass, beads, glass . . . sewing, stamped pies and dough (an art which continues to be practiced in our bakeries). All this is the lubok in the widest sense of the word and it is all great art. . . . Such a miracle of painterly mastery and inspiration as the icon of the Smolensk Virgin of the thirteenth century and the Archangel Michael at the exhibition of Russian Ancient Art also have qualities which one can attribute to the copy and lubochnost.”52 Rather than focus on differences, Larionov repeatedly emphasized both the “outward” resemblance and the equivalent intrinsic value of various national forms. Goncharova similarly fused the pictorial languages of ancient icons and frescoes with those of lubki, traditional folk embroideries, wooden toys, stone statuettes, and commercial signboards, all with the explicit and transgressive purpose of “neutralizing hierarchies of value and originality.”53 Thus,

in a work such as Religious Composition: Virgin (with Ornament) (1910) (fig. 73), the thick contouring, robust brushwork, and exaggerated facial features of the Virgin and Christ Child recall the graphic visual language of the lubok while simultaneously employing traditional Orthodox iconography. The merging of the profane pictorial mode of mass-​produced, printed broadsheets with the sacred subject matter of holy icons was perceived by many of Goncharova’s contemporaries as sacrilegious, and she was accused of blasphemy and subsequently fined and censored.54 What seemed to offend the public the most was not what Goncharova had depicted but how she had depicted it. After all, various members of the Peredvizhniki had also painted religious subjects in a Realist mode, which departed from the Orthodox canon just as much as Goncharova’s work. However, in the latter case it was the perceived “crudeness” and “vulgarity” of the popular “primitive” lubok in contrast to the sacredness and refinement of the icon that resulted in the notorious “slap in the face of public taste.”55 Even a sympathetic art critic such as Iakov Tugenkhold attributed her work to “cynical irony” and “demonic possession,” while Alexander Benois viewed it as a “deliberate effort . . . to rid [herself] of virtuosity.”56 These and other equally negative critical responses recalled the analogous accusations that almost three decades earlier were hurled at Vrubel, whose St. Cyril frescoes and “unorthodox” St. Vladimir sketches were likewise perceived as “hideous” and “deformed.” However, because the aesthetic estimation and national value of the Russo-​Byzantine representational tradition had evolved so dramatically between the 1880s and the 1910s, what was qualified as poor craftsmanship and an error in artistic judgment on Vrubel’s part was viewed in Goncharova’s work as a conscious

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Fig. 73  Natalia Goncharova, Religious Composition: Virgin (with Ornament), 1910. Central panel of a triptych. Oil on canvas, 38 1/2 × 35 in. (98 × 89 cm). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. © ADAGP, Paris, 2017.

and irreverent provocation, aimed at shocking polite society and affronting public morality. Hers and Larionov’s approach to art making was therefore primarily understood as fundamentally iconoclastic: a deliberate debasing of holy images and “high” art in the service of secular, avant-​garde polemics. By contrast, Kandinsky considered himself an iconophile and hoped to return art to its original, primeval role as the anchor of spirituality, unity, and transcendence, rather than the mere secular object

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of aesthetic contemplation and entertainment. He thus aimed to achieve an “inward” rather than an “outward” resemblance to the art of the past.57 As evidenced by his earlier tempera works, Kandinsky longed to return to a harmonious, utopian, medieval “golden age,” where the spiritual bonds of an organic, cohesive culture were consolidated by the collective veneration of the icon. Although Kandinsky—like Larionov and Goncharova—also collected folk and popular art, including Russian lubki and Bavarian glass paintings, he tended to gravitate toward overtly religious rather than secular subject matter. Furthermore, although Kandinsky retrospectively claimed that he wanted to “demolish the walls that existed between one art and another, between official and rejected art,” the vast majority of his own work remained firmly rooted in the traditional media of high art: oil painting, tempera, watercolor, and woodblock printing.58 Instead of the transgressive collapsing of artistic categories and the mixing of sacred and profane elements as means of effecting institutional critique, Kandinsky’s interest in “primitive” art seemed to be largely motivated by a nostalgic, utopian interest in a distant Christian past, where a “spiritual” holistic art was not yet fragmented into different categories of high and low, predicated on class divisions. This fragmentation was the result of modernization, with its emphasis on classification, partition, and materialism. Unlike Larionov’s and Goncharova’s subversive impulse to demonstrate the lubochnost or popular roots of the “elite” icon, Kandinsky’s interest was primarily in the seeming universality of medieval artistic production. Given his familiarity with Byzantine scholarship, he would most certainly have known that in the medieval context iconic and monumental art was largely produced

by master artists for aristocratic audiences and royal patronage. In his review of the 1913 Exhibition of Ancient Russian Art, Pavel Muratov insisted that medieval Novgorod icons “undoubtedly answered to some exclusive and aristocratic demands of taste and imagination” and that the icon painters who produced them were not humble artisans carrying out conventional tasks but instead “genius” artists experiencing divine inspiration.59 It is precisely this medievalizing conception of the divinely inspired artist or visionary that Kandinsky considered the paradigm for artistic production, a paradigm that had largely been lost under the conditions of modernity, where artists had become trained professionals. With his characteristic prophetic flair, Kandinsky wrote in On the Spiritual in Art:

the artist’s role in contemporary society, Kandinsky radically departed from the younger Russian avant-​ garde artists. Although he participated in their exhibitions and was briefly associated with the Jack of Diamonds group, Kandinsky was, as one period commentator astutely observed, by and large “alien and alone” and did not belong with the “savages” of Russia.62 Furthermore, Kandinsky always remained vehemently against the iconoclastic and antagonistic stance of the more radical avant-​garde factions. When four of Kandinsky’s prose poems from Sounds (Klänge) were reprinted in the Futurist pamphlet A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, he hastily sent to the editor of the newspaper Russkoe slovo an open letter of complaint in which he emphatically stated: From the prospectus for the book A Slap in the Face of

And then, without fail, there appears among us a man

Public Taste, I learned quite by chance that my name and

like the rest of us in every way, but who conceals within

my texts had been published both in the prospectus and

himself the secret, inborn power of “vision.” He sees and

in the book itself. Both the former and the latter were

points. Sometimes he would gladly be rid of this higher

done without my permission. I warmly condone every

gift, which is often a heavy cross for him to bear. But he

honest attempt at artistic creativity, and I am prepared to

cannot . . . he continues to drag the heavy cartload of

forgive even a certain rashness and immaturity of young

struggling humanity, getting stuck amidst the stones, ever

authors. . . . But under no circumstances do I consider the

onward and upward.

tone in which the prospectus was written permissible.

60

I condemn the tone categorically no matter whose it is.63 First of all, then, the artist must . . . [recognize] his duty toward art and toward himself, regarding himself not as master of the situation but as the servant of higher ends, whose duty is precise and great and holy.61

In these and other passages Kandinsky’s language is overtly religious. Throughout On the Spiritual in Art he employs Christian metaphors and biblical allusions. Accordingly, both in his interest in medieval religious imagery and in his understanding of

In contrast to Goncharova and Larionov, who defiantly attacked bourgeois tastes and sensibilities, Kandinsky maintained a romantic, sacralizing attitude toward art making. His insistence on the “spiritual” value of art and his claim that “the question of art is not that of form but that of artistic content” align his ideas more with Eastern Orthodox aesthetics than with the formalist tradition of the European avant-​garde.64

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Kandinsky’s “Byzantinism” The Russian scholar Viktor Bychkov has persuasively argued that in the Eastern Orthodox tradition “aesthetics” has a connotation fundamentally different from that in Western thought.65 Unlike the discrete secular system of aesthetics developed by Kant and Hume, aesthetics in Eastern Orthodoxy are closely linked to theology. As such, both representation and visuality in Orthodoxy extend far beyond appearances and immediate sensory experience. In her influential essay on the Russian philosopher, theorist, and semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin, Caryl Emerson argues that Orthodoxy has traditionally been “less an intellectual system than an observation of proper liturgical procedures, a field of vision wherein all things on earth are seen in their relation to things in heaven.” To Bakhtin and other influential twentieth-​century Russian thinkers and philosophers, the “proper spiritual orientation is as much a matter of the eye as of the book.”66 Accordingly, in the Russo-​Byzantine tradition images are at the core of the Orthodox belief system, while religious ritual and spirituality are intimately linked with the practices of image making. Discussing the fundamental differences between Eastern and Western Christianity in their respective approaches to biblical meaning and scriptural revelation, the scholar, theologian, and ordained Orthodox deacon Anthony Ugolnik suggests that “in the Western encounter with the Word of God, Christians relate to a text. The central quest is to wrestle meaning from the Book.” By contrast, in the Eastern Orthodox tradition “the Book is regarded and treated as if it were itself an image begetting images . . . transforming dead matter into the reflected image of Jesus Christ.” Ugolnik thus concludes that “the East and

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the West clothe the Word in different manifestations. . . . [Western] Christians obey the Augustinian injunction ‘Take up and read!’ Their Russian counterparts are apt to concentrate upon the insight that follows the imperative ‘Look up and see!’ ”67 Consequently, in the Orthodox context images have always been intimately connected to religious cult and ritual, transcendence and divinity. Bychkov contends that “the aesthetic, characterized by the notions of beauty and pleasure[,] is . . . a most important component of social and cosmic being (along with truth and love, or the gnoseological and the ethical). . . . In other words, the concept of the aesthetic is intimately linked with a spiritual transformation of the viewing subject.”68 This spiritual transformation of the viewing subject lay at the core of Kandinsky’s theoretical and artistic project. Although Kandinsky was also interested in the art of the medieval West, it was specifically the Eastern Orthodox tradition that provided him with the necessary philosophical and theoretical framework within which to formulate his theories of transcendental abstraction. It is worth mentioning that in the first two decades of the twentieth century many German art critics considered Kandinsky’s output to be distinctly different from that of his fellow Blaue Reiter colleagues because of his specifically “Eastern” background. According to them, the Russian artistic tradition was in its essence much more closely aligned with the great cultures of the Orient than those of Germany and western Europe. On a formal level, icons were repeatedly compared to Persian and Indian miniatures, and Kandinsky’s brand of abstraction was curiously associated with the “arabesque” and a specifically “Eastern” mystical spirituality. For example, in German Expressionist Culture and Painting, Eckart von Sydow wrote: “But where . . . is the

breakthrough of abstract tendencies taking place today? . . . Out of the Russian spirit the new European religiosity has grown. . . . From Russian artistry the longing for the pure arabesque as an expressive art form has arisen: Kandinsky! And now: is the Russian spirit not the shelter of mystic spirituality of all kinds and variations?”69 Such commentary makes manifest that in the minds of his German contemporaries, Kandinsky’s movement toward abstraction seemed to evolve organically out of his artistic, cultural, and religious heritage as a Russian Orthodox believer.

Against Abstraction: Kandinsky’s “Hidden Construction” Although Kandinsky retroactively claimed that he painted his First Abstract Watercolor in 1910, in 1912 he cautioned: “Today, the artist cannot manage exclusively with purely abstract forms. These forms are too imprecise for him. To limit oneself exclusively to the imprecise is to deprive oneself of possibilities, to exclude the purely human and thus impoverish one’s means of expression.”70 In Kandinsky’s understanding the “human” element involved an interactive, intuitive, and visceral response to an artwork, which was more valuable than a detached and purely retinal or cerebral one. Accordingly, as Rose-​Carol Washton Long explains in her seminal study of Kandinsky’s oeuvre, Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style, the artist would systematically hide the physical aspect of objects in his paintings through a process of “veiling and stripping.” Veiling involved “placing the object where it would not be expected or blurring its outline with unrelated colors. The process of stripping involved

simplifying the object to a partial outline.” Employing this method, Kandinsky produced what he called “the hidden construction,” with which he hoped to void both the materialism of representational art and the opacity of nonrepresentational art by providing the spectator “with familiar key motifs.”71 In Kandinsky’s mind, religious imagery in particular could trigger certain subconscious associations in the viewer, allowing him or her to engage with an image on a deeper level than mere aesthetic contemplation. The idea that a “veiled” image could penetrate the viewer’s consciousness much more effectively than either a fully representational or a nonobjective form in many ways prefigured the central tenets of Surrealism and must have been stimulated by Kandinsky’s active interest in psychology. Already in On the Spiritual in Art Kandinsky devoted an entire section to “the psychological working of color,” and in his later position as the vice president of the newly formed RAKhN he both established and headed the Physico-​Psychological Department, which staged elaborate experiments on the psychological effects of visual representation.72 Although Kandinsky never openly espoused Freudian psychoanalysis in the same way that the Surrealists did, he was nonetheless interested in some of its fundamental principles, and while in Munich, he would regularly attend debates on Freud at the Café Stefan.73 Subsequently, during his tenure at the RAKhN in the early 1920s, Kandinsky closely followed—and sometimes even participated in—a number of different research projects that examined human psychology and explored psychoanalytical theory. To a certain degree, Kandinsky’s concept of the “the hidden construction” was analogous to the Freudian—and subsequently Jungian—theory of the “archetype,” which postulated a universally shared psychic

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repository of “mythological motifs or primordial images” that are responsible for “the whole spiritual heritage of mankind’s evolution.”74 More precisely, Kandinsky’s “veiled” iconic motifs could potentially tap into millennia of accumulated Christian imagery on the level of the “collective unconscious,” which in turn could produce a transformative psychic or “spiritual” experience in his audience. Accordingly, the artist contended that it was “not the immediately obvious, eye-​catching type of ‘geometrical’ construction” that was “the richest in possibilities” or “the most expressive, but rather the hidden type that emerges unnoticed from the picture and thus is less suited to the eye than to the soul.”75 Here it is important to emphasize that both the German word Seele and the Russian word dusha are not adequately translated by the English word “soul,” because they combine the concepts of both “psyche” and “soul” in a single word and therefore carry the dual connotation of the subconscious and the spiritual. In a letter to his biographer, Will Grohmann, Kandinsky wrote that he wanted people to see “what lay behind his circles and triangles,” and he later began to describe his paintings as “concrete” rather than “abstract.”76 Consequently, despite claiming later in life that he was the founder of abstract art, in the years 1910 to 1913 Kandinsky was still largely wary of embracing purely nonobjective painting. In On the Spiritual in Art he warned artists: “If, even today, we were to begin to dissolve completely the tie that binds us to nature, to direct our energies toward forcible emancipation and content ourselves exclusively with the combination of pure color and independent form, we would create works having the appearance of geometrical ornament, which would—to put it crudely—be like a tie or a carpet. Beauty of color and form (despite the assertions of

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pure aesthetes or naturalists, whose principal aim is ‘beauty’) is not a sufficient aim of art.”77

The Icon Reimagined Both in Byzantium and in medieval Russia the iconic image was believed to be the “energetico-​material bearer” of the divine archetype rather than simply its “sign” or “symbol.”78 This meant that the mere depiction of the divine already ensured its spiritual presence in the material object, which may explain why Kandinsky continued to encode Christian— and more specifically Russo-​Byzantine—iconography in many of his works throughout his career.79 A close analysis of Kandinsky’s artworks shows that he continued to rely on iconic iconography and composition well into the mid-1910s and even as late as the 1930s and 1940s. As Peg Weiss has persuasively demonstrated, the motif of Saint George—most likely inspired by a nineteenth-​century Russian icon in Kandinsky’s possession (fig. 74)—first appeared in the artist’s work in the early 1900s and recurred persistently throughout the various stages of his career.80 Even in Kandinsky’s tightly structured geometric compositions of the Bauhaus period, many of the forms seem to morph into the motif of Saint George. For example, in his ostensibly “abstract” works such as In the Black Square from 1923 (fig. 75) and Yellow-​ Red-​Blue from 1925 (fig. 76), the heroic attributes of Saint George are clearly perceptible, such as his lance, shield, and galloping horse, as well as the writhing figure of the vanquished dragon.81 In the former work one can distinguish a plumed helmet in the form of a green semicircle, bisected by a series of short black parallel lines. A curved arc in the left-​ hand side of the picture plane doubles as the neck of

the horse, whose front legs rear upward in the shape of an angular, three-​pronged brown-​and-​blue form. Saint George’s sharp lance darts diagonally across the canvas as a black sliver, while the round shield in the form of a yellow circle inscribed with a triangle occupies the center of the work. The irregular trapezoidal shape of the white support further augments the dynamism of the rider, emphasizing his movement from right to left. In the Black Accompaniment of 1924 we recognize the same motif of a rider and horse bounding diagonally across the picture plane. In this case Saint George is depicted with outflung arms atop his valiant steed, who rears up on his hind legs, his patterned, multicolored equine cover fluttering

Fig. 74  Saint George and the Dragon, nineteenth century. Oil on wood, 11 1/2 × 8 3/4 in. (29.5 × 22.5 cm). Formerly in Kandinsky’s personal collection, now in the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Fig. 75  Vasily Kandinsky, In the Black Square, 1923. Oil on canvas, 38 3/8 × 36 3/4 in. (97.5 × 93 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, by gift (37.254).

in the wind. A miniaturized, diminished dragon thrashes about in the lower left corner. Here the rider’s body—or perhaps his shield—is rendered as a brown circle inscribed with a white border. His head is shown in profile as a pink-​and-​gray irregular quadrilateral, punctuated by a circular white eye and decorated with a yellow feathered headdress in the

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Fig. 76  Vasily Kandinsky, Yellow-​Red-​Blue, 1925. Oil on canvas, 50 1/4 × 79 1/4 in. (128 × 201.5 cm). Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

form of three flying triangles. A lavender triangle forms the horse’s head, while his arched neck and fluttering mane are depicted as a curved green line, punctuated by a succession of short red stripes. The horse’s erect tail flies out behind the rider in a series of thin black lines surrounded by a white amorphous contour. In both the Black Accompaniment and In the Black Square the intentional arrangement of disparate forms into an abstracted but still legible motif of Saint George clearly manifests Kandinsky’s reluctance to abandon figuration completely. Even in his uncanny proto-​Surrealist, biomorphic forms of the 1940s, such as L’élan brun, one can still detect the motif of an armored rider on horseback in a

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plumed helmet and with a long lance, leaping above a defeated serpent, who coils at bottom left. In addition to Saint George, Kandinsky revisited several other iconic motifs throughout his career, including the Ascension of the Prophet Elijah (fig. 77), Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, the Resurrection, and the Last Judgment.82 As with Saint George, Kandinsky owned a nineteenth-​century icon of Elijah’s ascension, in which the prophet is depicted upright in a horse-​drawn carriage that speeds across a fiery, vermilion firmament. According to the Old Testament account, as he departed, Elijah dropped his mantle to his successor, Elisha; in the icon, Elisha is indeed shown holding the mantle by its edge.

Fig. 77  The Fiery Ascension of the Prophet Elijah, Novgorod icon, fifteenth century. Tempera on wood, 26 1/2 × 22 1/5 in. (67.5 × 54 cm). Location unknown.

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Fig. 78  Vasily Kandinsky, All Saints i, 1911. Oil on card, 19 1/2 × 23 1/4 in. (50 × 64.5 cm). Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.

Although Elijah is frequently represented in Byzantine iconography as a standing figure with a scroll in his hand or seated in the desert with a raven, the Ascension of Elijah was a less common type and was more typical of Russian icon painting. As discussed by Washton Long and Sarabianov, Kandinsky reproduced this motif in several of his All Saints paintings from 1911 (figs. 78–79), where a simplified, schematic form of Elijah’s burning chariot drawn by three white horses is distinctly visible in the upper left corner of both works. However, I would like to propose that in

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addition to these obvious citations, Kandinsky also used these motifs as “hidden constructions” in several other works. For example, in Red Spot ii (fig. 80) Kandinsky seems to have transplanted Elijah’s fiery, scarlet cloud, spherical black cave, and flowing stream into his painting after subjecting them to a system of geometrization akin to his treatment of the Saint George motif in Black Accompaniment and Yellow-​Red-​ Blue. A glass painting of All Saints ii from 1911 (fig. 79), which depicts Elijah’s fiery ascension on the left-​hand side of the image, suggests that the rounded triangular

Fig. 79  Vasily Kandinsky, All Saints ii, 1911. Tempera and oil on glass, 12 1/4 × 18 7/8 in. (31.1 × 47.8 cm). Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.

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Fig. 80  Vasily Kandinsky, Red Spot ii, 1921. Oil on canvas, 54 × 71 1/6 in. (137 × 181 cm). Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.

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form of Elijah’s fiery cloud directly evolved into the central red “spot” of the later work. Similarly, the angel’s curved green trumpet with a series of orange striations seems to have migrated from the upper register of All Saints ii to the bottom left corner of Red Spot ii. In addition, the overall color scheme and especially the striking rich blues, deep greens, vibrant yellows, and passages of white and black in Red Spot ii appear to have been directly drawn from the earlier work. Lastly, the suspended, disembodied aspect of Kandinsky’s abstract forms in All Saints ii, and even more so in Red Spot ii, visually recalls the same incorporeal quality of the spatial arrangement of the icon, where Elijah, his chariot, and the angel all seem to hover in space above the gilded surface of the icon. Even the black-​and-​white patterns in the upper right corner of Red Spot ii bring to mind the hallowed corner of the icon, where the hand of God reaches down to welcome Elijah into heaven. Analogous to Red Spot ii, Kandinsky’s Impression iv (Gendarme) (fig. 81), which depicts a mounted figure against a steep terrain, also seems to structurally rely on iconic sources and in particular Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem (fig. 82). The centrally placed mounted figure in Kandinsky’s foreground, the walled city in the background, the hilly landscape, and the crowd of onlookers all seem to be based on the well-​known iconic representation of Christ riding into Jerusalem astride a donkey. Although Kandinsky obscured his source images by rearranging certain elements of the original composition, blurring outlines, dissolving easily recognizable forms, juxtaposing fields of unrelated color, and bleeding different colors into each other, the overall spatial arrangement and structure of Impression iv betrays the original iconic point of departure. Moreover, in his own explanation of the gestation

Fig. 81  Vasily Kandinsky, Impression iv (Gendarme), 1911. Oil and tempera on canvas, 37 1/3 × 42 1/4 in. (95 × 107.5 cm). Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.

of several of his abstract paintings, Kandinsky stressed the importance of traditional iconography. He explained in “Three Pictures” that he gradually “dissolved” into “abstract” forms recognizable motifs that he lifted from religious imagery. Describing Composition vi, he wrote: My starting point was the Deluge. My point of departure was a glass-​painting that I had made more for my own satisfaction. Here are to be found various objective forms, which are in part amusing (I enjoyed mingling serious forms with amusing external expressions): nudes, the Ark, animals, palm trees, lightning, rain, etc. When the glass-​painting was finished, there arose in me the desire to treat this theme as the subject of a Composition, and I saw at that time fairly clearly how I should do it. . . . In a number of sketches I

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my return from Moscow in December 1912. It was the outcome of those recent, as always extremely powerful impressions I had experienced in Moscow. . . . This first design was very concise and restricted. But already in the second design, I succeeded in “dissolving” the colors and forms of the actions taking place in the lower right-​hand corner. In the upper left remained the troika motif, which I had long since harbored within me and which I had already employed in various drawings.84

Fig. 82  Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, fifteenth century. Tempera on wood, 11 3/4 × 9 5/6 in. (30 × 25 cm). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

dissolved the corporeal forms; in others I sought to achieve the impression by purely abstract means.83

Similarly, in his description of the artistic process involved in the creation of Picture with the White Edge, Kandinsky explained: For this picture, I made numerous designs, sketches, and drawings. I made the first design immediately after

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One such preparatory pencil drawing (fig. 83) survives in the collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou. It depicts a segment of a painted mural, showing scenes from the Last Judgment, which Kandinsky must have copied from a church interior. Although the sketch is undated and does not stipulate a particular location, the image looks very similar to the seventeenth-​century Last Judgment scenes in the St. Sophia Cathedral in Vologda (figs. 84–85), which Kandinsky would have seen during his ethnographic trip to northern Russia. Another possible source for Kandinsky’s sketch is the Last Judgment fresco in the Dormition Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin, which the artist would have known as well. In fact, such scenes were fairly widespread in Russian Orthodox monumental decoration and were typically painted on the west walls of churches. Accordingly, Kandinsky could have encountered them in a number of different churches or cathedrals in the Moscow, Iaroslavl, Novgorod, or Suzdal regions. In this sketch Kandinsky depicted the large coils of a serpent, the prominent figure of a prophet gesturing up to the heavens, a number of praying and kneeling figures, and an archangel with a spear—all of which have antecedents in monumental fresco cycles. The motif of the serpent came to feature prominently in several of Kandinsky’s

Fig. 83  Vasily Kandinsky, Last Judgment, undated. Ink and watercolor on paper, 8 × 6 in. (20.4 × 15.2 cm). Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

works, such as his Composition v (fig. 86) from 1911, where its winding, serpentine black form dominates the entire upper half of the painting. Similarly, akin to the figure of Saint George, the trumpeting angels who first appear in Kandinsky’s Last Judgment and All Saints paintings of 1911 and 1912 (figs. 78, 79, and 87) continue to populate his works well into the

1920s. Thus, for example, the left-​hand side of Yellow-​ Red-​Blue (fig. 88) is dominated by what is evidently a schematized figure of an angel. Surrounded by a radiant glow of warm yellow and ochre hues, the body of the angel consists of a large yellow rectangle, while the head is signified by a small pale-​blue rectangle inscribed with a white circle. The most telling

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Figs. 84 and 85  Details of Last Judgment, seventeenth-​century fresco, St. Sophia Cathedral, Vologda. Fig. 86 (bottom)  Vasily Kandinsky, Composition v, 1911. Oil on canvas, 74 2/3 × 108 1/6 in. (190 × 275 cm). Private collection.

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feature is the narrow red triangle floating just above the left side of the angel’s head, which clearly connotes a trumpet. Meanwhile, the black semicircle dissected with a series of thin black lines on the right-​hand side of the yellow rectangle stands in for the angel’s wings. Other motifs that are typically depicted in Orthodox frescoes and icons and that Kandinsky portrayed in several of his own works include figures enclosed in circular nimbi (fig. 89) and the sacred triangle used to depict the Trinity, to which Kandinsky referred as a “mystical” form and which became a central conceptual paradigm in his theories on art. Meanwhile, the nimbus—which in Orthodox iconography symbolizes the inner radiance of a holy figure—repeatedly appears in several of Kandinsky’s paintings, such as Black Lines (1913), Composition vii (1913) (fig. 90), and most prominently Concentric Circles (1913) (fig. 91) and Several Circles (1926). As these examples demonstrate, the sacred geometries of the Orthodox canon clearly held a special appeal for Kandinsky, who continued to employ them as important leitmotifs throughout his career. This does not, however, imply that Kandinsky resisted nonfigurative art or that he continued to cling to representation. After all, he was one of the first modern artists in Europe to advocate the complete rejection of direct references to external reality. Rather, there is a complex duality at play in many of Kandinsky’s works that is almost entirely lost with a purely materialist or formalist reading. Fig. 87  Detail of Vasily Kandinsky, All Saints i (fig. 78), 1911. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.

Spiritual Versus Empiricist Vision In his 1945 “Obituary and Review of an Exhibition of Kandinsky” Clement Greenberg accused the artist

Fig. 88  Detail of Vasily Kandinsky, Yellow-​Red-​Blue (fig. 76), 1925. Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

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Fig. 89  Last Judgment, Novgorod icon, sixteenth century. Tempera on wood, 63 3/4 × 45 1/6 in. (162 × 115 cm). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

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Fig. 90  Vasily Kandinsky, Composition vii, 1913. Oil on canvas, 78 2/3 × 118 in. (200 × 300 cm). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia.

of being a “provincial” who had failed to understand the essence of modern painting, namely “the sensuous facts of its own medium.”85 According to Greenberg, in contrast to Picasso’s Analytical Cubist works or the vast Abstract Expressionist canvases of Jackson Pollock, Kandinsky’s paintings failed to acknowledge the continuous, uniform flatness of the pictorial surface. Instead, Kandinsky ruptured the homogeneous shallowness of Cubist space by reintroducing a figure-​ground relationship into his canvases and filling them with “an aggregate of discrete shapes . . . so that the picture plane became pocked with holes.” He thus reversed the “all-​over” effect achieved by the School of Paris, and ultimately

negated the materiality of the canvas, reintroducing “illusionistic depth by a use of color, line, and perspective that were plastically irrelevant.”86 What Greenberg considered to be neglect or provincialism on Kandinsky’s part was in fact the result of an alternative understanding of the role and function of art. Kandinsky feared that emphasizing the two-​dimensionality of the canvas would only serve to reinforce its material—even ornamental— effect and by extension its objecthood.87 Abstract painting would thus be just as prone to seducing the viewer with its base materiality as a traditional illusionistic work: both fetishized the object and surface values, albeit in antithetical ways. Although

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three-​dimensionally but also, so to speak, “four-​ dimensionally.” . . . Nonetheless, in his composition, he proceeds from flatness, he accepts the preconditions of the flat plane. However, his pictorial language is not at all two-​dimensional. . . . [By contrast,] a western European perspectival artist, beginning with the Renaissance epoch, simply excludes flatness from his artistic inventory. He constructs an illusionistic deep space in opposition to the flat plane, destroying the impression of two-​dimensionality.89

Fig. 91  Vasily Kandinsky, Concentric Circles, 1913. Watercolor, gouache, and black crayon on paper, 9 3/8 × 12 3/8 in. (24.9 × 31.5 cm). Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus.

Kandinsky believed that it was important to “retain the material surface [of the canvas]” and to “fix the latter as a flat plane,” it was likewise crucial to create a sense of depth by manipulating the “thinness or thickness of a line” and superimposing “one form upon another.” In doing so, Kandinsky hoped to “constitute an ideal surface” and to “exploit it as a three-​dimensional space”—a theorization of pictorial spatial structure that closely aligned with Tarabukin’s ideas on the way space was conceived and constructed in iconic representations.88 An exact contemporary of Kandinsky, Tarabukin explained in Philosophy of the Icon that flatness for an icon painter is not a self-​sufficient value but only a starting point, which to some extent determines the spatial features of his composition. An icon painter conceptualizes the space he depicts not only

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In other words, the icon painter represents space schematically or symbolically, rather than illusionistically. Kandinsky’s practice of overlapping shapes and depicting simultaneous planes in many of his works is typical of iconic structure. For example, in his glass painting of Saint George from 1911, Kandinsky rendered the figure of the rider from above, while portraying the horse in profile. Similarly, in Impression iv (Gendarme) from the same year, the central figure on the horse is depicted slightly from below, while the two figures in the bottom left-​hand corner of the canvas and the architectural structures in the background are shown from above. Although such pictorial techniques were employed by a number of German, French, and Russian avant-​garde artists in this time period, in Kandinsky’s case they may have carried additional meaning beyond purely formal experimentation. In her study of iconic space and medieval visuality, Clemena Antonova explains that, according to mystical theology, art has the potential to allow the beholder to “imitate,” or approach the experience of, “divine vision.”90 More specifically, she contends that the use of simultaneous planes in icons assumes an omnipresent universal “eye” that sees all aspects of an object at all times. This vision would

be comparable to that of “a timelessly eternal God to whom all moments in time exist simultaneously [and who] should be able to see all points in space simultaneously as well.”91 A similar idea is articulated by Bychkov, who explains that “the [iconic] representation is a certain synthetic image of [an object] which emerges in the process of its comprehensive examination. Living perception—it is precisely this that constitutes the life of such a synthetic image, ever changing, pulsating, sparkling, turning its various facets.”92 Unlike the momentary, static viewpoint dictated by Renaissance art or nineteenth-​century naturalism, the multiple viewpoints employed in the icon presuppose an active viewer, moving through space in time.93 Thus, for example, in Andrei Rublev’s Old Testament Trinity (fig. 1) the small platforms under the angels’ feet are depicted along two planes different from that of the central table, which is slightly tilted upward. Rather than follow the diagonal delineated by these platforms, the vertical sides of the chairs occupy yet another spatial register. The feet of the two side angels are simultaneously portrayed from the side and from the front in a physically impossible configuration. Finally, the architectural structure in the upper left corner of the icon is at once shown from the side and from below, with the hanging canopy flipping up and revealing yet another viewpoint, which seems at odds with the rest of the composition. These multiple simultaneous viewpoints allow the beholder to experience— at least temporarily—a mobile, disembodied, theophanic perception, which “transcends the human constraints of space and time.”94 As Cornelia Tsakiridou notes, medieval Byzantine theologians such as Saint Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022) and Saint Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) believed that theophany—or the

revelation of God in the world—was “a reality to which all beings are attuned.” She explains: Palamas borrows the Areopagite notion of “spiritual sensation (pneumatiken aisthesin)” that is, sensation infused with the Holy Spirit. He describes it in terms of “participation (methexis),” “reception (lepsis)” and “divinization (ektheosis).”

. . . Those who sense spiritually do so because their

senses have come alive in grace and are looking at the world with new eyes. “Ektheosis” implies divinization from within: one becomes a God by reaching out for God. . . .

. . . Objects are typically positioned in our visual field

according to proximity, distance, sequence and succession. . . . In theophany this order is inverted: “even things far off are accessible to the eyes, and the future is shown as already existing (os onta deiknytai).” . . .

. . . According to Palamas, theophany de-​materializes

objects . . . [they] are seen through each other and on an equal scale—perhaps without the usual divisions of foreground and background that order our perception of things. Vision becomes panoramic, and perspectives multiply. Tensions that usually result from the arrangement of objects in space are eliminated. The relationships between solids and voids that define space and help orientate perception are suspended. Simple, ethereal and evanescent forms appear as integral expressions of the luminous field that envelops them.95

Palamite theology and hesychast spirituality not only were highly influential in Byzantium but also made a considerable impact on fourteenth- and fifteenth-​century Russian religious thought and artistic practice, finding direct expression in the works of Theophanes the Greek and Andrei Rublev, among others.96 Consequently, in both form and iconography, images such as Theophanes’s Holy

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Trinity (Hospitality of Abraham) (1374) and Rublev’s Old Testament Trinity aspire to convey a theophanic reality in material form, which is meant to effect a spiritual transformation in the viewer and to help him or her attain theosis, or union with God. Iconic representations were thus direct articulations of Orthodox theology in visual form, and not merely its extensions or appendages. Although Kandinsky was familiar with current Byzantine scholarship, it is unlikely that he would have been aware of the sophisticated theological nuances of iconic space and form outlined above.97 However, he nonetheless seems already to have intuited in 1911 that iconic spatial structure demanded a different kind of perception from its viewers: a disembodied, antimaterialist, and more “spiritual” vision. Kandinsky’s abstraction is therefore an inversion of Greenbergian theory, wherein an artwork’s abstract surface announces its own materiality. On the contrary, Kandinsky’s compositions were meant to suggest depth and to create a sense of unbounded, dynamic, transcendental space, which in its turn aimed to stimulate a more contemplative, self-​reflecting, and “spiritual” perception.

Kandinsky’s Art and Theories Within the Context of the Russian Religious Renaissance As a latecomer to art—Kandinsky only took up painting at the age of thirty—the artist was nearly twenty years older than the majority of his fellow Russian avant-​gardists such as Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Alexander Rodchenko, Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, and Vladimir Tatlin. As such, in his mentality and worldview, Kandinsky was

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much closer to the Symbolist generation of the 1890s and early 1900s than to the young artists and theorists who came to dominate the Soviet art scene in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Accordingly, his rejection of nineteenth-​century positivism, his interest in spirituality, and his utopian belief that art could heal social ills corresponded more closely to the ideas of older thinkers such as Vladimir Soloviev, Nikolai Berdiaev, Petr Struve, Semen Frank, Mikhail Gershenzon, and Sergei Bulgakov. In the first decade of the twentieth century the publications and activities of these theorists and philosophers came to form what later became known as the Russian Religious Renaissance.98 The spring of 1909 saw the publication of a collection of their essays under the title Vekhi, or Landmarks, which almost immediately became a major literary and political event.99 In this work the authors forcefully criticized the positivist, materialist, and largely anti-​Christian stance of the Russian intelligentsia and called for a change in attitudes toward Christianity in general, and to the Orthodox Church in particular.100 “Our task was to denounce the spiritual narrow-​mindedness, ideological deficiency, and dullness of the traditional outlook,” Semen Frank wrote in his biography of Petr Struve.101 Rejecting the Marxist stance of the previous generation, these self-​proclaimed religious humanists advocated a new direction for Russian revolutionary liberalism, one that would abandon class antagonism, political violence, and sacrificial nihilism in favor of a new social cohesion, spiritual idealism, and religious philosophy. In particular, the Vekhi authors indicted the liberal intelligentsia for borrowing “the empty shell of atheistic socialism from the West, without its important Christian substratum or heritage of law, order, and social morality.”102 In particular,

they believed it was the irresponsible radicalism of the leftist intelligentsia that had led to the tragic events of Bloody Sunday and the failed Revolution of 1905. As a result, the innocent lives of the lower classes had been callously sacrificed for the sake of abstract concepts such as “freedom,” “equality,” and “democracy.” Berdiaev recalled in 1935 that with the publication of Vekhi “a battle was declared in support of the individual spirit, inner life and creativity, and their independence from social utilitarianism. At the same time this was a struggle for individualism and the integrity of the creative life of the individual, which had been suppressed by socialism.”103 Within a year the book had gone through five editions and had elicited hundreds of reviews, commentaries, and analyses. Although some commentators saw the Vekhi group as reactionary, the authors vehemently espoused social and political change, but they believed that the best way to achieve this was through a return to conciliatory Christian traditions and widespread moral and spiritual reforms. Kandinsky, who had just spent much of the autumn of 1910 in Moscow, was clearly aware of the Vekhi group and their philosophy, not least because he had a personal connection to Sergei Bulgakov, with whom he had worked and studied at the Law Faculty in Moscow University. About eight months after his Russian trip, Kandinsky wrote to Franz Marc that the Blaue Reiter Almanac had to include material on the religious tendencies in Russia: “We will include some reports on the Russian religious movement in which all classes participate. For this I have engaged my former colleague Professor Bulgakov (Moscow political economist, one of the greatest experts on religious life).”104 Although the reports were not published in the final version of the Blaue Reiter Almanac, it is clear that Kandinsky considered these

new religious and political debates to be an important marker of the philosophical and cultural climate of those years, a climate that has yet to be fully explored by scholars in relation to Kandinsky’s own art and theories. One thinker who is rarely discussed in relation to Kandinsky is Bulgakov’s close friend, colleague, and fellow theologian Pavel Florensky. Although Kandinsky never overtly mentioned Florensky in his writing, the latter’s views on art, spirituality, and modernity often closely corresponded to Kandinsky’s own ideas. In fact, as a philosopher, scientist, and cultural theorist, Florensky shared many of Kandinsky’s interests and pursuits. As Nicoletta Misler observes, their personal libraries contained many of the same literary, philosophical, and scientific texts, such as Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner’s Transcendental Physics and So-​Called Philosophy of 1878, Henri Bergson’s Introduction to Metaphysics of 1903, Rudolph Steiner’s Theosophy: An Introduction to the Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man of 1904, as well as writings by the chemist and spiritualist Alexander Butlerov.105 Much like Kandinsky, Florensky was also very interested in the psychophysiological effects of visual representation, the synthesis of different art forms, and the possibility of a transcendental Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. Moreover, in the early 1910s, Florensky—akin to Kandinsky—associated with the younger Russian avant-​garde artists such as Vladimir Tatlin, Liubov Popova, and Nadezhda Udaltsova but later opposed what he saw as the lifeless and mechanical forms of Constructivist and Productivist art, preferring organic, transcendent, “living” artworks.106 Above all, in contrast to the younger generation of avant-​garde artists, both Kandinsky and Florensky zealously believed in the spiritual,

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prophetic role of artistic representation in addition to its aesthetic and utilitarian possibilities. It is highly probable that the two men were personally acquainted, since they not only moved in some of the same artistic and social circles but also were formally affiliated with a number of early Soviet cultural, educational, and research institutions, such as the RAKhN and the VKhUTEMAS, where they both taught a number of courses in the years 1920 to 1924.107 In the summer of 1921 Kandinsky established and headed the Psychophysiological Department at RAKhN, which aimed to research the psychological and physical effects of aesthetic experience. Florensky was likewise associated with this institution for several years from 1921 onward, where he worked with art historian Alexander Larionov on compiling the Symbolarium, a theoretical dictionary of universal symbols.108 However, despite these parallel activities and shared institutional affiliations, no known documents record an actual meeting between the two men. Consequently, their level of interaction and intellectual exchange remains in the realm of conjecture. Moreover, because from the 1930s onward the Soviet regime systematically suppressed most theological, religious, and philosophical texts, much of the rich discourse that informed Kandinsky’s early artistic production remains unknown to a broader international audience. Thus, for example, many of Florensky’s theories and ideas were only rediscovered in the 1960s, and the first English-​language anthology of Florensky’s art-​historical essays was published in 2002. As a result, Florensky’s unconventional views on art history and his alternative formulation of art’s role in modernity have been almost entirely left out of modernist historiography and unfortunately still remain largely neglected to

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this day. In addition, Kandinsky’s emigration from Soviet Russia at the end of 1921 and the subsequent Stalinist crackdown on all abstract art ensured that many of Kandinsky’s pre- and postrevolutionary activities in Russia were habitually omitted from the historical record.109 As a result, the theoretical and aesthetic convergence between Kandinsky as artist and Florensky as scholar has been largely unexplored, despite several scholars’ having noted striking similarities in their artistic philosophies and broader worldview.110 However, perhaps the most significant ideological point of contact between Florensky and Kandinsky is their unapologetically “medieval,” sacralized conception of art, which radically departed from the ideas of both the Constructivist and Productivist avant-​garde and the proto– Socialist Realists. As demonstrated earlier, Kandinsky often aligned his own artistic production with that of medieval Europe and Russia, and Florensky also identified himself as a “man of the Middle Ages” who supported a “medieval worldview.”111 In fact, just as Kandinsky adopted the motif of Saint George as one of his most prominent iconographic symbols, Florensky too seemed to associate himself with the figure of the medieval knight, as evidenced by two book designs produced for him by his friends and VKhUTEMAS colleagues Aleksei Sidorov and Vladimir Favorksy. Both images depict a knight in medieval armor with an arrow piercing his heart.112 For Florensky, as much as for Kandinsky, the Middle Ages symbolized a pure, organic, cohesive culture where aesthetics were structured by a collective religious impetus and images were expected to reflect a transcendental and objective truth. Florensky’s cultural philosophy in particular divided all artistic production into two antithetical categories, each one

governed by an opposing set of principles: empirical versus spiritual knowledge, rational versus intuitive cognition, retinal versus spiritual vision, linear versus reverse perspective, and realist (in the transcendental sense) versus illusionistic painting. As Douglas Greenfield astutely observes in his excellent essay “Florensky and the Binocular Body,” the theologian believed that “all cultures alternate between what he called medieval and Renaissance worldviews.” The former category included the Homeric Age, Hellenic culture, and the European Middle Ages, which were all “characterized by organicity, objectivity, concreteness and cohesion.”113 The latter encompassed the Minoan Age, the Archaic Age, the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, and finally the materialist, positivist spirit of the nineteenth century, which had persisted to Florensky’s own day. In his “Reverse Perspective” essay, Florensky outlined a materialist, positivist teleology, which, according to him, had begun with the development of “scientific” linear perspective by Renaissance artists, whose “bitter Kantian fruits” continued to grow and flourish in the ensuing centuries, culminating in the Productivist and Constructivist experiments of the Soviet avant-​garde.114 In Florensky’s theory, the single point of view dictated by linear perspective was predicated on a false, artificial, monocular vision driven by the rationalist, empiricist desire to control and structure nature: The single “point of view” in perspective is an attempt by the individual consciousness to tear itself away from reality—from the body, from the second eye.115 We see with two eyes, not one, that is, from two points of view at once, not one as perspective projection requires. Therefore, the image we form during real sight is not the

one abstractly posited in manuals on perspective but instead one that necessarily represents the combination of at least two separate, noncoincident perspectives.116

Accordingly, Florensky argued that all art based on artificial, man-​made rules was inherently “false” and therefore could not be categorized as representation. Such art did not attempt to “represent things but instead to re-​create them.”117 As such, naturalistic painters and Suprematists alike were “makers of machines, not artistic creations,” who sacrificed all possibility of transcendence to “volume and thingness.”118 Florensky elaborated: “There’s absolutely no point in enquiring how well or adequately these machines fulfil their function in reality. Such a test is no more an exigency than a testing of the technical quality of mechanical machines invented by an artist. Good or bad, a machine is always a machine and not a representation.”119 By contrast, Florensky believed that medieval images were closer to organic human vision—which is synthetic in nature—precisely because they depicted objects from multiple viewpoints. Although Florensky generally opposed nonobjective art and frequently criticized avant-​ garde artists, many of his ideas closely paralleled Kandinsky’s views on art making and the central, life-​affirming role of the artist. In fact, given that Kandinsky’s artworks during the early 1910s were neither illusionistic nor fully abstract and were frequently structurally based on iconic sources, they actually formed an apropos visual corollary to Florensky’s theories on what constituted “true art” in late modernity. Even in his language, Florensky recalls Kandinsky’s terminology, particularly with reference to “vibrations,” which was one of the artist’s key concepts. In “Reverse Perspective” Florensky observes that

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the artist should and can depict his idea of a house, but

of form—the embodiment of its content. Form is the

he absolutely cannot transfer the house itself to canvas.

material expression of abstract content. Thus, only its

He grasps this life of his idea, whether it be a house or a

author can fully assess the caliber of a work of art; only he

human face, by taking from the various parts of the idea

is capable of seeing whether and to what extent the form

the brightest, the most expressive of its elements, and

he has devised corresponds to that content which impe-

instead of a momentary psychic fireworks it provides a

riously demands embodiment of its content. . . . Thus in

motionless mosaic of its single, most expressive moments.

essence, the form of a work of art is determined according

During contemplation of the picture, the viewer’s eye,

to internal necessity.121

passing step by step across these characteristic features, reproduces in the spirit what is now an image extended in time and duration of a scintillating, pulsating idea, but now more intense and more cohesive than an image deriving from the thing itself, for now the vivid moments observed at different times are presented in their pure state, already condensed, and don’t require an expenditure of psychic effort in smelting the clinkers out of it. As on the incised cylinder of a phonograph, the sharp point of the clearest vision slips along the picture’s lines and surfaces with their notches, and in each spot arouses in the viewer corresponding vibrations. And these vibrations constitute the purpose of the work of art.120

In his “Content and Form” essay Kandinsky writes in an analogous vein: The inner element, taken in isolation, is the emotion in the soul of the artist that causes a corresponding vibration (in material terms, like the note of one musical instrument that causes the corresponding note on another instrument to vibrate in sympathy) in the soul of another person, the receiver. . . .

In art, form is invariably determined by content.

And only that form is correct which expresses, materializes its corresponding content. All other considerations, in particular, whether the chosen form corresponds to what is called “nature,” i.e. external nature, are inessential and damaging, in that they detract from the sole purpose

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In addition, Kandinsky’s concept of the “hidden construction” corresponded to Florensky’s understanding of the picture plane as a dynamic “field” in which “the viewer and the viewed interact in reciprocal correlation, constituting a dynamic unity.”122 For Florensky the two-​dimensionality of the pictorial surface was crucial because it constituted an autonomous virtual plane that acted as an ideal “screen” connecting the viewer to a higher reality. This idea originated with the medieval Russian iconostasis, which was understood to function as a porous surface connecting the terrestrial space of man with the celestial realm of God, Christ, and the saints. The surface of the image was therefore not a “static,” motionless entity but rather a dynamic locus of triangulation between the artist, the viewer, and a spiritual reality. By rejecting the pictorial surface, the Constructivists and Productivists had limited themselves to “the thing as such,” eschewing any possibility of transcendence and producing works of “artistic nihilism,” on which “humanity cannot be sustained for long.”123 According to Florensky, in their positivist, materialist approach, these artists had reduced art to simple engineering and as such were continuing the rationalist project of the Renaissance perspectival artist.124 Adopting the anti-​Western polemics of the Vekhi authors, Florensky argued that the

analytical-​scientific approach to art making was a foreign imposition on Russian artistic consciousness that dated back to the times of Peter the Great and was antithetical to the collective, indigenous living tradition of icon painting. Douglas Greenfield persuasively demonstrates how Florensky mapped this conceptual metaphor of a sterile, rationalist, perspectival West versus a creative, prolific, antiperspectival East onto the cities of St. Petersburg and Moscow respectively: The Westernizing Tsar Peter I stands and surveys the swamp and forest upon which he will lay the geometric and rectilinear grid of his capital city. . . . Western engineers and architects designed Peter’s city according to the norms of classical perspective and symmetry.

Indeed, St. Petersburg is a kind of Alberti’s window,

with its strict 2:1 or 4:1 ratios of street width to building height and its Western façades. It is as if this “tsar and lawgiver,” as Florensky suggestively calls the artist-​

Russian book-​making, Russian literature, in general Russian learning, all received their main nourishment from the educational activity concentrated in and around the Lavra.126

While one city represented the deadening, formalizing spirit of rationalism, the other held the key to Russia’s cultural and spiritual regeneration. Greenfield thus astutely concludes that while “Peter, the perspectivist[,] sees not living reality but a grid. . . . Florensky’s icon painter, wielding an icon-​ax, breaks a window back to the Slavic East, to the City of God seen in Orthodox revelation.”127 It is telling that Kandinsky, just like Florensky, saw Moscow—rather than St. Petersburg—as his “spiritual tuning fork.”128 Not only did he paint several paintings in homage to the city, such as Lady in Moscow (1912), Kleine Freuden (1913), and Moscow i (1916), but he also credited it with some of his most formative intellectual and aesthetic experiences:129

perspectivist, projected a map on the landscape from his detached, fixed vantage on the shore.125

My mother is a Muscovite by birth, and combines qualities that for me are the embodiment of Moscow: external,

By contrast, Florensky viewed Moscow—and especially the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, which was located just outside of the city—as the historical birthplace of Russia’s spiritual, intellectual, and artistic culture:

striking, serious, and severe beauty through and through, well-​bred simplicity, inexhaustible energy, and a unique accord between [a sense of] tradition and genuine freedom of thought, in which pronounced nervousness, impressive, majestic tranquility, and heroic self-​control are interwoven. In short: “white-​stone,” “gold-​crowned,”

The Lavra is the fulfillment or the manifestation of the

“Mother Moscow” in human guise. Moscow: the duality,

Russian idea. . . . For it is only here, at the noumenal center

the complexity, the extreme agitation, the conflict, and

of Russia, that you live in the capital of Russian culture. . . .

the confusion that mark its external appearance and in



the end constitute a unified, individual countenance; the

Russian icon-​painting continues the thread of its

tradition in the icon-​painting school of the Lavra. Russian

same qualities in its inner life, incomprehensible to the

architecture over the course of many centuries has made

unfamiliar eye (hence the many contradictory opinions

its best contributions here, in the Lavra, so that the Lavra

of Moscow held by foreigners); and yet, just as unique

is a genuine historical museum of Russian architecture.

and, in the end, wholly unified—I regard this entire city

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of Moscow, both its internal and external aspect, as the origin of my artistic ambitions. It is the tuning fork for my painting. I have a feeling that it was always so. And that in time thanks to my external, formal progress, I have simply painted, and am still painting, this same “model” with ever greater expressiveness, in more perfect form, more in its essentials.130

More specifically, Kandinsky claimed that it was “in the Moscow churches and especially in the Cathedral of the Assumption” that he first experienced the synesthetic possibilities of artistic expression. According to him, the experience of being inside a medieval church was equivalent to inhabiting a multisensorial, three-​dimensional artwork, and he continued to explore the psycho-​physiological effects of synesthesia on human perception both at the INKhUK and the RAKhN. In the former, Kandinsky developed and headed the Section of Monumental Art, which investigated the interrelationships between different art forms, and their simultaneous impact as a single totalizing aesthetic environment. Florensky, in his turn, argued that the Orthodox liturgy created the ultimate synesthetic experience by combining images, movement, light, sound, and smell. He believed that the monastery was the age-​old Gesamtkunstwerk from which contemporary avant-​garde artists could learn. In his essays “The Trinity–St. Sergius Lavra and Russia” and “The Church Ritual as a Synthesis of the Arts,” Florensky envisioned the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius as a sacred locus of a renewed medieval culture, a Third Rome or the promised Jerusalem, just as it had once been in the medieval period. Here a community of artists and scholars would come together to oversee “a truly miraculous and historic attempt to bring into being that ultimate synthesis of the arts for which . . .

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modern aestheticians yearn.” This “House of Saint Sergius,” as Florensky called it, would function as “a type of experimental center, a laboratory for the study of fundamental problems in contemporary aesthetics, a kind of modern Athens,” where theoretical discourse and artistic practice would be united in order to address some of modernity’s most pressing philosophical, spiritual, and moral problems.131 Several years earlier, Kandinsky had articulated a similar idea, claiming that “the great epoch of the Spiritual, which is already beginning, or, in embryonic form, began already yesterday amidst the apparent victory of materialism, provides and will provide the soil in which this monumental work of art [Gesamtkunstwerk] must come to fruition. In every realm of the spirit, values are reviewed as if in preparation for one of the greatest battles against materialism. . . . And this is happening also in one of the greatest realms of the spirit, that of pre-​ eternal and eternal art.”132 In his aspiration for the Gesamtkunstwerk, and with his redemptive message and “medieval” vision, Kandinsky would undoubtedly have received a warm welcome in Florensky’s “House of Saint Sergius” had the Soviet Revolution not taken the course that it did. Indeed, given his orientation toward spirituality and transcendentalism, in addition to his messianic approach to art making, it is not surprising that Kandinsky was quickly rejected by the younger generation of avant-​garde artists such as Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Vladimir Tatlin, Liubov Popova, and Varvara Stepanova, who considered his “mysticism” and Symbolist leanings to be out of place at both the INKhUK and the VKhUTEMAS. The Constructivists and Productivists advocated a new materialist, rationalist, and impersonal approach to artistic production and

vehemently opposed any artists or intellectuals who still upheld prerevolutionary ideals in their theoretical and aesthetic programs. In 1920 Rodchenko famously declared that “art is a branch of mathematics, like all sciences . . . [and] the future will not construct monasteries for the priests, prophets and minstrels of art.”133 Rodchenko’s wife, Varvara Stepanova, noted in her diary in the same year that she, together with several of her INKhUK colleagues, had decided to openly antagonize Kandinsky by launching “a schism” and “founding a special group for objective analysis, from which Kandinsky [. . .] is running away, like the devil from incense.”134 As Nicoletta Misler observes, analogous attacks by the same group of artists were aimed at the “mystic” Florensky, who was repeatedly accused of “undermining the integrity of VKhUTEMAS and causing it to ‘collapse.’ ”135 One such example is the 1923 statement published by the Productivists in the journal Lef, which indirectly criticized Florensky and his followers for their “mystical Productivism”: “A curious subgroup of ‘mystical Productivists’ has formed among the ‘decorative’ painters (Pavlinov, Favorsky and the priest Florensky). This intimate company has declared war on all other groups and claims to be the only authentic group of Productivist art. They go around the Department of Polygraphy, filling the heads of students with the following kind of problem: ‘The spiritual meaning of the images of letters of the alphabet’ or ‘The struggle of white and black spaces in graphics.’ ”136 As these polemics clearly demonstrate, Kandinsky’s and Florensky’s “spiritual”

ethos and aesthetic theories, rather than being marginal or outdated, must have garnered a large enough following in the late teens and early twenties to elicit such virulent attacks from artistic groupings who considered the popularity of their ideas a threat to their own endeavors. Nonetheless, for the most part, modernist historiography has tended to privilege the “vanguard” radicalism of the Constructivists and Productivists over these alternative and ostensibly “backward-​ looking” approaches to modern art. The persistence of Greenbergian formalist methodology well into the second half of the twentieth century, as well as the insistent secularism of modernist discourse, meant that these alternative conceptualizations of art’s role in modernity were continually marginalized for several decades. In the present chapter I have attempted to complicate this dominant narrative by demonstrating that many of Kandinsky’s ideas and concepts evolved out of a broader philosophical and religious movement that had swept through Russia in the first decade of the twentieth century and continued to persist well into the 1920s. In Kandinsky’s case, as much as in Vrubel’s, revivalism, experimentation, historicism, and avant-​ gardism were not mutually exclusive categories but were, on the contrary, mutually generative, challenging the prevailing assumption that the most significant modernists were those who most effectively liberated themselves from the past and its sacred and spiritual traditions.

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5 TOWARD A NEW ICON Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, and the Cult of Nonobjectivity

On December 19, 1915, the museum-​going public of St. Petersburg (called Petrograd between 1914 and 1924) was scandalized by the artworks on display at 0.10: The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting, which was held at the private “Art Bureau” of Nadezhda Dobychina.1 One commentator wrote that “to describe these absurdities would be ridiculous. Suffice it to say that the shamelessness of the exhibitors knows no bounds.”2 Another review claimed that the artists and organizers would undoubtedly “come to a sticky end. On the walls . . . hang the limits of human morals, for here begin pillage, murder, banditry, and the road to the penal colony.”3 Such extreme levels of critical indignation testify to the unprecedented novelty of the artworks on display at 0.10. This show would subsequently come to be regarded as “one of the ten most important exhibitions of the twentieth century.”4 Not only did it alter the course of modern art in Russia, but it inaugurated an entirely new artistic consciousness—one that would come to influence several generations of artists throughout the world.

By the same token, as Vasilii Rakitin has astutely observed, as much as it heralded a new epoch, 0.10 also marked “the end of an era.”5 Taking place just two years after the 1913 Exhibition of Ancient Russian Art, the 0.10 show self-​consciously engaged with many of the aesthetic and thematic concerns that had dominated the artistic landscape of prerevolutionary Russia and was therefore appropriately named the “last” Futurist exhibition.6 If the 1913 exhibition had challenged the public to see Russia’s artistic past in an entirely new light, then 0.10 proposed a wholly novel set of representational paradigms for Russia’s artistic future. It is also worth remembering that less than a kilometer away from Dobychina’s art gallery, the Russian Museum had in the previous year opened its newly reinstalled medieval-​art collection, which was described by various commentators as a “temple of novel aesthetic revelations for [contemporary] artists,” from which they should “draw inspiration” to “produce new creations.”7 It would appear that a number of the young artists at 0.10 had heeded such critical calls and

179

Fig. 92  Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915. Oil on canvas, 31 1/4 × 31 1/4 in. (79.5 × 79.5 cm). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

consciously adopted a dialogical stance toward the iconic tradition and the discourse surrounding it. Embracing the injunctions of theorists such as Punin and Tarabukin, they used the icon as an ontological and philosophical model for reimagining “the concept of art” and moving beyond purely “formal qualities” to reflect the full “depth and breadth of . . . [a novel] worldview.”8 Thus, for example, Kazimir Malevich notoriously hung his epoch-​making Black Square (fig. 92) across the corner of the art gallery, directly under the ceiling, parodying the sacred placement of icons in traditional Russian homes (fig. 93). In his review of the exhibition, Benois immediately understood Malevich’s “creation” to be

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“undoubtedly . . . [an] icon.”9 Here the critic implied a conceptual parallel rather than a formal resemblance, since the Black Square had—by analogy— assumed the icon’s consummate totality as the “zero of form.” Moreover, Malevich’s subsequent copies of the Black Square, as well as its virulent reproduction in miniature on plates, cups, saucers, clothes, and architectural models, only served to further its claims to iconicity as a “sacred” prototype. Ironically, the same notable gesture on the part of Vladimir Tatlin seemed to be largely overlooked both by the general public and the critical establishment, with the exception of Punin, a longtime friend and ardent supporter of the artist. Tatlin’s Corner Counter-​Reliefs (figs. 94 and 95) were not understood as “spatial icons,” and only Punin argued that Tatlin’s paradigmatic shift into three-​dimensionality was deeply indebted to the iconic tradition, both in its espousal of material heterogeneity and in its conceptual shift from pictorial to real space.10 Instead of being aesthetic meditations on or representations of some perceived reality, Tatlin’s Corner Counter-​Reliefs remained autonomous and abstract “presentations” of different materials in the same way that icons were physical manifestations of a metaphysical reality, rather than simply symbolic or illusionistic interpretations of that reality. By contrast, after 1917 a new generation of artists began to move away from such sustained investigations into the structure, essence, and meaning of the individual artwork under the conditions of modernity in favor of more pragmatic, industrial, and “productivist” concerns, which would ultimately dominate the Soviet art world throughout the 1920s. Accordingly, this final chapter examines 0.10: The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting as the limit case study of the Russo-​Byzantine revival,

where the icon was both literally and figuratively deployed in the service of a conceptual refiguration of the modernist idiom. More specifically, it analyzes how the historical discourse on icons inflected the production and reception of Vladimir Tatlin’s Corner Counter-​Reliefs and Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, generating a rich plurality of both intended and unintended meanings. Indeed, theirs were perhaps the most famous avant-​garde iterations of the icon among a multiplicity of different responses in an ongoing dialogue that had begun several decades earlier. What is especially striking and sets their artworks apart is the way in which they renegotiated the spiritual and the secular, the sacred and the profane, and the objective and subjective. As Bissera Pent­cheva and Aleksei Lidov have persuasively demonstrated in their recent publications on Byzantine and medieval Russian art, icons were not “flat and immobile . . . frozen images and discrete objects”; they were instead orchestrators of “shifting phenomenal effects” and totalizing “visual spectacles” that had the power

Fig. 93  Posledniaia futuristicheskaia vystavka kartin 0,10 (nol'-desiat') (Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10 [Zero-​ Ten]), Khudozhestvennoe Buro, Petrograd, December 1915– January 1916. Photograph by the studio of Karl Bulla. Private collection. Fig. 94  Vladimir Tatlin, Corner Counter-​Relief, 1914–15. Iron, aluminum, and paint, dimensions unknown. Location unknown. On display at the Posledniaia futuristicheskaia vystavka kartin 0,10 (nol'-desiat') (Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10 [Zero-​Ten]), Khudozhestvennoe Buro, Petrograd, December 1915–Janaury 1916. Photograph by the studio of Karl Bulla.

to “transform the viewer from observer to participant, communing with the divine.”11 As such, icons constituted “image-​paradigms” that “enabled the structuring of space” and triggered a range of “literary and symbolic meanings and associations” in their viewers.12 Pentcheva provocatively concludes that “Byzantine artistic production rises as a precociously modern phenomenon . . . [w]here an object is staged, where the interaction between subject and object transforms the work into animate presence.”13

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What’s in a Corner?—The Historical Conflict Between Malevich and Tatlin

Fig. 95  Vladimir Tatlin, Corner Counter-​Relief, 1914–15. Wood, iron, metal cable, etc., dimensions unknown. Location unknown. On display at the Posledniaia futuristicheskaia vystavka kartin 0,10 (nol’- desiat’) (Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10 [Zero-​Ten]), Khudozhestvennoe Buro, Petrograd, December 1915–Janaury 1916. Photograph by the studio of Karl Bulla.

Accordingly, in this final chapter, I argue that it was precisely the Byzantine phenomenon of “simulated presence” and “image as performance” that Tatlin and Malevich harnessed so successfully in their own “iconic” artworks.14

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The Icon and the Square

As has often been observed, the 0.10 exhibition marked the emergence of two major artistic movements and modern “isms”: Suprematism and Constructivism.15 To a certain degree the exhibition can even be understood as the personal “battleground” between Tatlin and Malevich and their competing concepts of the modern artwork.16 Such ideas were already clearly articulated by a number of the artists’ contemporaries. The Productivist theoretician Boris Arvatov contrasted Tatlin’s “materialism” with Malevich’s “idealism,” while Punin claimed that Tatlin and Malevich shared “a particular destiny”: “for as long as I remember them, they always shared the world between the two of them: the earth, the sky, and interplanetary space, everywhere establishing their sphere of influence. Tatlin usually claimed the Earth for himself, trying to push Malevich out into the sky for his objectlessness; Malevich, while not giving up his claims on the planets, would not give up the Earth, fairly supposing that it is also a planet, and therefore can be objectless. . . . It was a permanent conflict and a perpetual competition.”17 Similarly, Ivan Kliun recalled that Malevich and Tatlin “were irreconcilable enemies because Tatlin was also vain [like Malevich] and could not tolerate being in second place.”18 Although the two artists had previously exhibited together on several separate occasions and seemed to have been on comparatively collegial terms before the 0.10 exhibition, their rivalry in the days leading up to and during 0.10 were marked by rising suspicion and animosity.19 Vera Pestel reported that Tatlin kept the blinds in his studio closed at all times: “[E]ven during the day [he] doesn’t raise them, because he fears Malevich,

who can cross Griboedov Lane and see [his Corner Counter-​Reliefs] in the window.”20 According to Tatlin’s biographer, Anatolii Strigalev, on one occasion the artist even went so far as to destroy a number of his own works to prevent Malevich from seeing them.21 Malevich, in turn, tried to discredit Tatlin’s work and to undermine the originality of his Corner Counter-​Reliefs by claiming that they were entirely derivative of Cubism: To distinguish his material selections from Picasso’s selections, Tatlin called his “contre-​reliefs.” But in this instance, the name does not alter the matter for us, since it has produced no real changes in the construction; on the contrary, these selections proved to be so close to Picasso’s work, that not everyone can distinguish between Picasso’s work and Tatlin’s. Comparing Picasso’s “relief ” with Tatlin’s “contre-​reliefs” we see that they have a common structure, and that likewise the texture and contrasting comparisons are not vastly different in sharpness. Picasso’s “relief ” is sharper in its variety of contrasting elements, and, on the whole, more correct. The “contre-​relief ” of Tatlin is more plane, although the aim was space and contrast.22

If we are to accept contemporary accounts, it would appear that tensions between the two artists came to such a head right before the opening of 0.10 that Tatlin resolutely refused to exhibit in the same room as Malevich and their mutual hostility ultimately erupted into a legendary fistfight.23 Several scholars have suggested that this conflict may have been precipitated by Malevich hanging his Black Square in the corner, rather than on the walls, of the art gallery—an installation concept first developed by Tatlin for his Corner Counter-​Reliefs.24 Indeed, other than the Black Square, none of Malevich’s

other paintings at 0.10 was presented in this way. By contrast, the corner hang was integral to Tatlin’s reliefs and was implicit in their formal structure and nomenclature. What was so significant about the corner display, and why did it trigger such a—literally—violent confrontation between the two artists? I propose that at stake was the creation of a new artistic paradigm, the lionized “avant-​garde icon,” where the Russo-​Byzantine representational tradition was deliberately restaged as a uniquely national and, more importantly, an entirely “original” nonobjective idiom. I intentionally place the word “original” in quotation marks, since by 1915 the politics of originality had reached a fever pitch in the Russian art world. As Jane Sharp points out, the rapid succession of “isms” in the preceding years had generated an intense “anxiety of anticipation” among Russian artists.25 Above all, the likes of Tatlin and Malevich wanted to avoid being labeled “derivative” of their western European counterparts—in other words, as being merely mechanical imitators of the French modern masters. Both artists were fully conversant with the latest Parisian trends and had experimented with Fauvist and Cubist visual vocabularies in their own respective oeuvres. The icon, by contrast, furnished them with an “authentic” starting point, a uniquely “Russian” representational ancestor, which differentiated Malevich and Tatlin from Picasso and Matisse.26 As a result, an explicit connection to and citation of the icon at 0.10 allowed Malevich and Tatlin to claim an alternative, “indigenous” genealogy for themselves and to legitimate their respective artistic projects as genuinely “new” and “unprecedented” in an art world “marked by competition, stylistic eclecticism, and real social and economic disenfranchisement.”27 That is, the corner

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display proved to be a crucial polemical signifier of both “Russianness” and “originality.”28 In his seminal 1927 publication, The Russian Icon, Nikodim Kondakov traced the history of the krasnyi ugol—the “sacred” or “beautiful” corner where icons were displayed—in domestic interiors to the sixteenth century: The multiplication of icons was broadly connected with the custom of having in every house an oratory, generally several glazed kiots filled with icons and set in the so-​ called “fair corner” (krasnyi ugol) of a reception or a dining room. Richer people would have a separate room for the oratory and in it the icons would be arranged in regular tiers with shelves for lamps to burn before them. . . .

. . . the devotional icon in private hands . . . came to

stand not merely as a symbol or sign, but a kind of household protector and defender against evil spirits and the invasion of the Devil . . . against fiery conflagration, the figure of Elias the Prophet or his Ascent in a Fiery Chariot or else of Our Lady of the Burning Bush; against murrain among cattle, the icon of S. Blaise (Vlasi); from sickness, S. Panteleimon; from sudden death, S. Christopher; there were also icons to give protection against fever, against pestilential winds, against catching cold, against poisonous snakes, and beasts of prey, and the like.29

Sherwin Simmons proposes a much earlier origin for this practice than the sixteenth century, dating it all the way back to the sixth-​century Byzantine legend of the miraculous healing of King Abgar of Edessa by the Mandylion, an image of Christ “not made by human hands” and the archetype for all iconic representations.30 According to one version of this story, the king was suffering from leprosy but was instantly healed upon coming into contact with a washcloth on which Christ had wiped his face and

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which had retained an imprint of his divine visage. As a symbol of his gratitude and newfound Christian faith, Abgar replaced the ancient pagan idols in his city with the Mandylion, which was prominently hung in a corner of the city walls.31 The genesis and precise genealogy of this centuries-​old custom notwithstanding, what is important is that to most early twentieth-​century viewers at 0.10—including Alexander Benois—an artwork prominently displayed in a corner of a room immediately connoted an icon or sacred image. Furthermore, in the context of the ongoing aesthetic debates that had accompanied the Second All-​Russian Congress of Artists in 1912, the Exhibition of Ancient Russian Art in 1913, and the opening of the medieval-​art sections at the Russian Museum in 1914, Malevich’s and Tatlin’s radical reinvention of the icon in 1915 placed them at the vanguard of the “new artistic consciousness in Russia” that had been heralded by Sergei Makovsky just two years earlier. In fact, both Tatlin and Malevich had expressed an interest in iconic representation from the beginning of their respective artistic careers.32 A few surviving drawings made by Malevich’s colleagues at the Fedor Rerberg Art Institute, such as Nikolai Goloshchapov’s Caricature of Kazimir Malevich, a “Rare Bird” (1908–9) and Lef Zak’s Parody of a Kazimir Malevich Painting (1908–9) (fig. 96), satirize the artist’s sustained preoccupation with religious subject matter during his student years in Moscow.33 The first sketch portrays Malevich in profile with a halo around his head, while the second depicts five haloed figures seated behind a long table with two additional winged figures standing on either side in what is a clear reference to the Last Supper. In addition, between 1907 and 1908 Malevich executed a series of fresco designs on a number of religious

Fig. 96  Lef Zak, Parody of a Kazimir Malevich Painting, 1908–9. Ink and watercolor on paper, 2 3/4 × 6 1/4 in. (7 × 16 cm). Album of Fedor Rerberg’s School. Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow.

themes, such as Triumph of Heaven (1907), Prayer (1907), Assumption of a Saint (1908), and Entombment (1908).34 To this day no commissions or projects have come to light that would have required Malevich to produce studies for a fresco cycle. Much like Vrubel’s designs for the Cathedral of St. Vladimir, Malevich’s works appear to have been “pure creation[s],” inspired by the multiple restoration and revivalist projects that were taking place around him in Kiev and its environs during his youth.35 Here the young Malevich would have seen the recently restored mosaics and frescoes of the St. Sophia Cathedral, the St. Cyril Church, and the Monastery of St. Michael of the Golden Domes, as well as the newly constructed Cathedral of St. Vladimir. In his autobiography the artist recalled that he was greatly attracted to the city’s art and culture and that it had made a lasting impact on his artistic development.36 He even recounted a childhood episode where

he went to observe “the most famous artists in St. Petersburg” painting “icons in the cathedral.”37 Typically referred to as The Yellow Series, Male­ vich’s fresco cycle departs significantly from the stylistic and iconographic canon of traditional Orthodox representation and ultimately has more in common with turn-​of-​the-​century Russian Symbolism than with medieval Russo-​Byzantine art. Nonetheless, Malevich still incorporated certain iconic features into his works. For example, he used tempera and gouache instead of oil paint; and in their predominantly ochre and cinnabar palette, these paintings recall the gold backgrounds and earthen tones of mosaics and portable panel icons. Similarly, in Malevich’s Self-​Portrait (1907) (fig. 97) from the same series, the artist included a vertical inscription of his name in red lettering—a clear reference to the signage on icons. Moreover, as Myroslava Mudrak points out, on the level of subject matter, this fresco

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Fig. 97  Kazimir Malevich, Self-​Portrait (Sketch for a Fresco Painting), 1907. Oil on cardboard, 27 1/4 × 27 1/2 in. (69.3 × 70 cm). State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

cycle mainly depicts the supernatural and otherworldly, forming “a cohesive content addressing the discrete themes of creation, sacrifice, resurrection, and redemption.” As such, it emphatically departs from Malevich’s earlier foray into “Impressionism and its temporal relation to the natural world,” thus laying the foundation for his subsequent rejection of external reality in favor of “timeless” and nonobjective Suprematism.38 Conversely, Tatlin rarely painted religious subjects and instead incorporated the formal language of icons into his art. Before he enrolled in art school and embarked on a career as a professional

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artist, Tatlin first trained as an apprentice in an icon-​ painting workshop.39 However, even before this formative experience, Tatlin—like Malevich—had already gained significant exposure to Byzantine and medieval Russian art as a result of his childhood proximity to Kiev and his subsequent travels as a sailor. At age eighteen Tatlin had left his family home in Kharkov for the port of Odessa, where he enrolled in the Marine College of Odessa as a cadet sailor. He then traveled for several months throughout the eastern and southern Mediterranean on the Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna, visiting Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Morocco, Egypt, Syria, and Turkey, where he would have had the chance to see a large number of different Byzantine monuments. It is not accidental that in his autobiography he remarked: “[B]esides giving me a wage this [trip] was an education for me as an artist.”40 The pictorial lessons he gleaned from these early encounters with Byzantine and medieval Russian art evidently had a significant and lasting impact on his subsequent artistic production. For example, two of his best-​known early works from 1911, Fishmonger and Sailor (fig. 98), draw on iconic imagery in both their palette and compositional structure. Although often described as “proto-” or “quasi-​Cubist,” these works bear a stronger resemblance to Russo-​ Byzantine stylistic conventions than to contemporary Cubism. In fact, Christina Lodder asserts that “neither of these is a Cubist work. Despite the use of perspectival distortions and a tendency toward the analysis of form into facets and planes, these are curvilinear, as is the treatment of mass. These qualities, together with the powerful monumentality of these paintings, point to native sources . . . [and are] strongly reminiscent of icon-​painting.”41 Indeed, Tatlin’s distinctive use of highlights in the Sailor

radically departs from the arbitrary distribution of chiaroscuro effects in contemporary Cubist painting. Instead of the playful juxtaposition of light and dark areas, characteristic of Cubist shading, Tatlin indicated light schematically and entirely avoided the use of cast shadows on the sailor’s face. For example, on the sailor’s neck, immediately below the chin, is a prominent triangular white highlight where one would normally expect to see a shadow. As already discussed in the third chapter, the lack of directional lighting was a characteristic feature of iconic representation.42 With few exceptions, Byzantine and medieval Russian icons, mosaics, and frescoes rarely portrayed cast shadows (see figs. 1, 7, 27, 28, 30, 41, 43, 77, and 99). Although Tatlin adopted this iconic technique, he nonetheless adapted it in a distinctly modernist way by leaving breaks in the paint application and allowing the white support of the canvas to become part of the overall design, thus reversing the roles of negative and positive space. Tatlin’s approach recalls Vrubel’s treatment of Mamontov’s dickey in the Portrait of Savva Mamontov (fig. 48) and inverts the pictorial methods of the Russo-​Byzantine tradition, where the artist built the colors up from the darkest ones at the bottom to the lightest ones at the top, leaving pure white pigment for the last layer.43 This departure from medieval archetypes is significant because it illustrates that Tatlin, much like Vrubel, Kandinsky, and Malevich, did not merely replicate iconic stylistic effects but transformed them in the service of modernist painting. As Strigalev argues, Tatlin’s stance toward iconic art was not “passive” or “imitative” but “active and regenerative, dialogical and polemical.”44 The Sailor’s square format, saturated colors, and shallow background space likewise point to Tatlin’s familiarity with iconic formal devices. The centrally

Fig. 98  Vladimir Tatlin, Sailor, 1911. Tempera on canvas, 28 1/8 × 28 1/8 in. (71.5 × 71.5 cm). State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

placed bust of the sailor occupies the entire height and width of the canvas, and together with the two diminutive figures in the background, it evokes the formal structure typically found in Byzantine and Russian icons of the Mandylion and bust-​size depictions of saints and martyrs. In iconic representations, disparities in scale usually signify differences in the spiritual importance of the depicted figures rather than spatial recession. For instance, in the famous twelfth-​century Byzantine icon The Heavenly Ladder of Saint John Climacus (fig. 99), which shows a procession of monks ascending a diagonal ladder into heaven, the more important monks are larger in size than the others, even though they all occupy the

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Fig. 99  The Heavenly Ladder of Saint John Climacus, twelfth century. Tempera and gold on wood panel, 16 1/4 × 11 3/4 × 3/4 in. (41.3 × 29.9 × 2.1 cm). Holy Monastery of St. Catherine, Mount Sinai, Egypt.

same spatial register. Tatlin’s deliberate placement of the two tiny side figures immediately next to the dominant head of the sailor seems consciously to play with these iconic conventions. Moreover, Tatlin—much like Malevich in his Yellow Series—used tempera in this work, which he applied in relatively

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concentrated and unmodulated patches of color, particularly on the face and neck of the main figure. The juxtaposition of the distinct blue of the sailor’s collar with the rich ochre of the skin recalls the separation of colors typically practiced by icon painters, necessitated by the individual preparation of different pigments. Lastly, the emphatic arcs in the corners of the image, which are continued in the curved bodies of the flanking figures, also create a circular configuration reminiscent of a halo. Even the writing on the sailor’s hat playfully invokes the inscriptions on icons that identify different holy persons. Tatlin’s two studies of female nudes from 1913 similarly resemble iconic imagery and radically depart from Picasso’s Analytical Cubist works of 1911 and 1912. Although relatively flattened, Tatlin’s paintings still maintain a clear allusion to a foreground and background space against which he portrays easily legible human figures. For example, in Female Model (Nude 1: Composition Based on a Female Nude) (1913) (fig. 100), the model sits on top of a red cube-​ shaped support against a deep blue background. A distinct horizon line separates the horizontal floor and the vertical wall. Likewise, in Female Model (Nude 2) (1913), the woman is shown sitting on top of a rectangular white platform in front of a red background. By contrast, in Picasso’s Portrait of Daniel-​ Henry Kahnweiler (1910) and Ma Jolie (1911), the human figures are virtually indistinguishable from the dynamic, pulsating background forms, which transform the entire surface of the painting into a single, continuous grid. Akin to those in the Fishmonger and Sailor, the human figures in these nude studies are predominantly composed of elongated arcs and curvilinear lines instead of the fragmented, angular, geometric forms in Cubism. Much as in his 1911 works, Tatlin’s use of a deep cinnabar for the

Fig. 100  Vladimir Tatlin, Female Model (Nude 1: Composition Based on a Female Nude), 1913. Oil on canvas, 56 1/4 × 42 1/2 in. (143 × 108 cm). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

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Fig. 101  Vladimir Tatlin, Seated Figure, 1913. Charcoal on paper, 17 × 10 1/8 in. (43 × 26 cm). Leaf 95 from Tatlin’s sketchbook of drawings. Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow.

models’ skin, as well as the prominent, expressive white highlights on their bodies, recalls the pictorial techniques of medieval frescoes and panel icons, with which he was evidently intimately familiar. Here it is important to note that by 1913 Tatlin would most certainly have been acquainted with Picasso’s recent works from Sergei Shchukin’s collection and from photographic reproductions in a number of different art journals, such as Zolotoe runo and Iskusstvo. In fact, a series of Tatlin’s pencil sketches from 1913–14 reveal his awareness of and interest in

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Analytical Cubism. In a study such as Seated Figure (fig. 101) Tatlin subjected the human body to a grid-​ like geometrization, reminiscent of Cubist pictorial structure. However, as Magdalena Dabrowski cautions, he does not seem to have fully assimilated the Cubist system into his own visual vocabulary: “[W]hile Picasso . . . [emphasizes] the transparency of the planes composing the figure, Tatlin simply superimposes a grid over an otherwise realistically rendered female nude. . . . Even when the geometry of the figure is reduced to a linear grid, the differences between Tatlin and Picasso are crucial. In Picasso, the grid is structural; in Tatlin, only superficial. Tatlin’s composition remains a geometrized figure with the linear scaffolding playing an accessorial, not a structural, role.”45 Furthermore, Tatlin’s explicit explorations of the Cubist idiom seem to have been limited to his private sketchbooks and were not manifestly integrated into any of his major works from 1911 to 1913. Indeed, it appears that despite his obvious familiarity with Cubism, Tatlin preferred to invoke the iconic tradition in his early paintings in order to avoid the damning accusations of derivativeness, belatedness, and mindless foreign importation—a gambit that clearly bore fruit in the form of Punin’s provocatively titled 1921 monograph, Tatlin (Against Cubism). Just as Vrubel’s enthusiasts had argued that the artist’s experiences in the Church of St. Cyril had facilitated his evolution toward a distinctly modernist style akin to, but independent of, Paul Cézanne’s, so Tatlin’s advocates would go on to make analogous claims, maintaining that his engagement with the iconic tradition had led him to develop a visual vocabulary that converged with but did not duplicate Pablo Picasso’s and Georges Braque’s Cubist techniques. Although rhetorically compelling, such interpretations were themselves the products of the Russo-​Byzantine revival

and should therefore not be accepted uncritically. As discussed in the first two chapters, many period critics and theorists such as Punin and Tarabukin were actively involved in the reevaluation of Russo-​ Byzantine art and were deeply invested in relating it to modernist aesthetics and the historical avant-​garde. The Russo-​Byzantine revival was thus intimately linked with the production of national art-​historical narratives even after the Bolshevik Revolution and well into the 1920s, testifying to the pervasiveness and longevity of its discursive reach.

Tatlin Against Cubism In the years immediately preceding his move into three-​dimensional construction, Tatlin associated closely with Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova and exhibited fifty of his works in their Donkey’s Tail Exhibition, which was held in the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in March of 1912. However, his collaboration with the Donkey’s Tail group was relatively short-​lived. As already discussed in the preceding chapter, Larionov and Goncharova were primarily interested in the deliberate confrontation of different aesthetic systems and in the intentional blurring of boundaries between “high” and “low” art forms, “refined” and “primitive” subject matter, and ancient and modern representational traditions. In his booklet Neoprimitivism: Its Theory, Its Potential, Its Achievements, Larionov’s and Goncharova’s friend and fellow artist Alexander Shevchenko (1883–1948) outlined the Neoprimitivist philosophy in the following terms: We are striving to seek new paths for our art, but we do not reject the old completely, and of its previous forms,

we recognize above all—the primitive, the magic fable of the old East. . . .

Primitive art forms—icons, lubki, trays, signboards,

fabrics of the East, etc.—these are specimens of genuine value and painterly beauty. . . .

The word Neoprimitivism on the one hand testifies to

our point of departure, and on the other—with its prefix, neo—reminds us also of its involvement in the painterly traditions of our age.46

By contrast, as Dmitrii Sarabianov contends, “Tatlin in no way regarded Primitivism as his chief artistic goal” and instead allied himself, “not to the popular variant of Russian icon painting, as did Goncharova and Larionov, but to the classical one.”47 A comparison between Tatlin’s Sailor (fig. 98) and Goncharova’s Savior in Majesty (1917–18) (fig. 102) makes this difference obvious. Goncharova’s saturated kaleidoscopic painting, with its energetic brushwork, vibrant colors, and bold patterns, is a far cry both from the traditional palette of icons and from Tatlin’s more muted image. Unlike the stratified spatial structure of the Sailor, with its distinct background and foreground, Goncharova’s Savior is much more aggressive in asserting its flatness. Although Christ’s throne and bent legs suggest some depth, the stylized floral motifs and white-​on-​blue designs push the background forward to the surface of the image, destabilizing the figure-​ground relationship. Goncharova’s emphasis on decorative qualities and pronounced patterning is closer to the visual syntax of Matisse’s paintings like the Red Dining Room (1908), Still Life with Blue Tablecloth (1909), Spanish Still Life (1910) (fig. 103), and Seville Still Life (1910–11) than to medieval icon painting.48 These similarities were discerned by a number of period commentators in both Russia and France, often to Goncharova’s detriment,

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Fig. 102  Natalia Goncharova, The Savior in Majesty, 1917–18. Gouache on paper, 22 1/5 × 15 1/3 in. (56.5 × 39 cm). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. © ADAGP, Paris, 2017.

who was accused of simply “imitating” the “omelet” of the “young nihilists” on “the cliffs of Montmartre.”49 In addition, as Sharp writes, “a number of [Goncharova’s] religious works added a dimension of

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sacrilege” because “they combined stylistic features and iconographical elements from the Western tradition with the Orthodox Russo-​Byzantine” and drew on a multiplicity of ancient, modernist, and popular sources to produce subversive hybrids that were “profoundly disruptive” both visually and conceptually.50 Thus, for example, while the pleats of fabric around the neck of Tatlin’s sailor recall the painterly folds in medieval representations, the shard-​like highlights on Christ’s robes in Goncharova’s work evoke the graphic aesthetic of the lubok, or popular print. Goncharova’s self-​conscious stylizations and deformations have an almost parodic quality. For instance, the representations of the four apostles, thickly outlined and swathed in pink cotton clouds, verge on caricature and clearly draw on the “low art” of chromolithographed broadsheets, the krasnushka (or peasant icon), and urban signboards, rather than on the “high art” of the “elite” fourteenth-​century Novgorod icons that were already enshrined at that point in a number of national museum collections as exemplars of Russia’s artistic genius—a narrative that Goncharova evidently aimed to subvert in her own art. Tatlin’s engagement with the icon was thus much closer to the iconophile stance of Kandinsky, although he was less interested in the spiritual or transcendental nature of iconic representations and more in their formal structure. This analytical approach is clearly manifested in Tatlin’s Composition-​Analysis from 1913 (fig. 104)—a work that was undoubtedly inspired by the Exhibition of Ancient Russian Art held in the same year.51 Tatlin was in Moscow for the duration of the show and would certainly have had ample opportunity to view it on more than one occasion. He would have also been equally aware of the lively discourse it generated in contemporary art criticism. As its title announces,

Fig. 103  Henri Matisse, Spanish Still Life, 1910. Oil on canvas, 33 3/4 × 45 3/4 in. (85.9 × 116.3 cm). The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. © Succession H. Matisse.

Composition-​Analysis was not an independent and spontaneous composition but rather an intentional deconstruction of the underlying geometry and proportions of an unidentified image of the Virgin and Child. Although there has been considerable scholarly disagreement about the exact source of Tatlin’s work, it would seem—given the immediately recognizable tilt of the Virgin’s head in the center of the composition, which is typical of the umilenie, or “tenderness,” iconographic type frequently found in Byzantine and medieval Russian art—that Tatlin

based his image on an icon of the Virgin and Child.52 Larissa Zhadova suggests the late fourteenth-​century Virgin of the Don, typically attributed to Theophanes the Greek, as a potential source.53 However, the more famous twelfth-​century icon of the Virgin of Vladimir or Andrei Rublev’s fifteenth-​century copy of it (see fig. 28) is another possibility. In this sketch Tatlin entirely eliminated all illusionistic references and associations, reducing the image to its most basic geometrical structure. The Virgin’s body is represented by a large empty triangle,

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Fig. 104  Vladimir Tatlin, Composition-​Analysis, 1913. Pencil, gouache, and watercolor on paper, 19 1/4 × 13 in. (49 × 33 cm). Private collection.

while a black semicircle attached to an ochre semi-​ rectangular shape indicates her head. The Christ Child is likewise reduced to a series of interrelated curves and a spherical form, sliced through by a gray-​and-​blue line, representing the head and eyes respectively. The bleeding of the watercolor in a

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loosely circular formation intimates a halo around the two figures, while the overlaying of different shapes on top of each other, as well as the different tonal intensities and partial shading, contributes to a sense of volume and depth. However, the image simultaneously asserts its two-​dimensionality with wide expanses of white paper left unpainted at the very center of the composition. Despite the reductive minimalism of Tatlin’s work, the structural coherence of the original icon remains intact, so that the image is still identifiable as a representation of a mother embracing her child. Replacing the expressive, painterly quality of Tatlin’s earlier works, Composition-​ Analysis signals a new analytical and systematic approach to art making, one that clearly owes a debt to Analytical Cubism in its deconstructive focus. Significantly, Tatlin began to work on his first Painterly Reliefs in 1913 as well. As Charlotte Douglas and Anatolii Strigalev have convincingly argued, Tatlin would already have been familiar with some of Picasso’s three-​dimensional assemblages, such as the Guitar and Bottle of Bass (1912–13) and Still Life with Violin (1912–13), even before his fateful visit to Picasso’s Parisian studio in 1914; both of these works were reproduced in the 1913 issue of Les soirées de Paris.54 Cobbled together from cardboard, paper, string, sheet metal, and wire, these works unquestionably played an important role in Tatlin’s own move into real space.55 It is telling that in 1928, as part of an official government survey, Tatlin listed Picasso as one of three artists who had exerted the strongest impact on his own artistic development. The other two were Mikhail Larionov and Aleksei Afanasiev (1850–1920) (who will be discussed in more detail later).56 However, despite this direct attribution of influence to the Spanish artist, it appears that Tatlin nevertheless chose to locate the initial gestation

of his “constructive idea” in the Russo-​Byzantine tradition rather than in Cubist sculpture and assemblage—a strategic realignment that allowed him to assert priority over and independence from the French modernist canon.57 Thus, according to the architect Berthold Lubetkin, Tatlin maintained that “if it wasn’t for the icons, [he] should have remained preoccupied with water-​drips, sponges, rags and aquarelles.”58 Consequently, both Tatlin’s contemporaries and subsequent scholars have tended to read in the Painterly Reliefs explicit references to icons. For example, Lubetkin linked Tatlin’s new creative direction to the 1913 Exhibition of Ancient Russian Art, reporting that “inspired by the icons” Tatlin had “started to drill his boards, mounting on them rings, screws, bells, marking and screwing the background, gluing abacus beads, mirrors, tinsels, and arriving at a shimmering dangling and sonorous composition.”59 Similarly, Sergei Isakov asserted that “Tatlin’s reliefs . . . showed him to be an independent, mature artist and not an imitator of Picasso,” while Vsevolod Meyerhold contended that it was “the art of the icon [that] introduced Tatlin to the concept of the culture of materials, to the palpability of materials, in the play of their surfaces and volumes.”60 Andrew Spira continues this line of argument in his Avant-​Garde Icon, writing that Tatlin’s reliefs were “constructed from iconic materials” and were accordingly “strongly evocative” of icons. Describing Tatlin’s Painterly Relief (1913–14) (fig. 105), Spira notes that one of the encrusted metallic sheets on top of the wooden-​panel support is engraved with “undecipherable ornament” reminiscent of text, evoking the Greek and Slavonic lettering on icons. Spira even goes so far as to read the forms of Composition-​Analysis in the spatial arrangement of the Painterly Relief’s metallic elements, implying that

Fig. 105  Vladimir Tatlin, Painterly Relief, 1913–14. Wood, oil, and metal sheet, 24 3/4 × 20 7/8 in. (63 × 53 cm). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

there was a direct link between the 1913 Exhibition of Ancient Russian Art and the genesis of Tatlin’s theory and practice of “constructiveness.”61 Similarly, in his reading of Tatlin’s Month of May (1916), Spira points out that the back of the wooden panel is held together by shponki, or wooden beams traditionally attached to the backs of icons to prevent the wooden support from cracking and warping and thus stabilize the iconic surface. Noting that it was completely unnecessary for Tatlin to use the shponki for reinforcing his Painterly Reliefs, Spira concludes that

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“it is highly unlikely that he would have made this gesture . . . without wanting its iconic resemblance to be communicated.”62 In her seminal article on faktura, Maria Gough articulately analyzes the triangulating synergies between Picasso, Tatlin, and the iconic tradition, maintaining that Picasso’s 1912 and 1913 sculptures “had the most profound impact” on Tatlin precisely because they had powerfully reinforced and even legitimated Tatlin’s own nascent experimentation with three-​dimensional assemblage. This closely parallels the catalyzing effects that Matisse’s comments on icons had exerted on Kandinsky’s own experimentation with the Russo-​Byzantine idiom and throws into relief Aleksei Grishchenko’s prescient claim that there was a “strange” resonance between “twentieth-​century Paris . . . [and] medieval Muscovy.”63 Gough suggests that, before his trip to Paris, Tatlin may have read Vladimir Markov’s contemporaneously written book-​length study of faktura, Principles of Creativity in the Plastic Arts, in which he compared the “authentic” and robust heterogeneity of the icon’s faktura with the “monotonous” homogenization, or “leveling”—both literal and metaphoric—produced by the internationalization of European styles, beginning with neoclassicism and ending with contemporary artistic movements such as Cubism and Futurism.64 Gough hypothesizes that Markov’s argumentation may have encouraged Tatlin to situate his own work within a Russo-​Byzantine genealogy, not least because of the superiority that Markov attributed to the icon’s polysemic hybridity, in contrast to Picasso’s ultimate subordination of “real” materials to a mimetic “pictorial” logic: [Icons] are decorated with venchik haloes and oplech’ye neckpieces, basma repoussé metal sheets, and inlays.

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The painting itself contains gems, metals, etc. So all of this destroys our modern conception of painting.

. . . With the noise of colour, sound of materials and

collation of faktura we summon people to beauty, religion and God.

. . . The real world is introduced into [the icon’s]

creative work only through the collation and inlay of real, effable objects. It is as if there is a struggle between two worlds here: the inner, non-​real world and our outer, tangible one. These two worlds overlap here. . . .

Picasso . . . [and] several Futurists . . . offer a rather

bold collation of materials. . . . However, in their collation of such materials these artists are governed only by the desire to call forth various real associations. They are not concerned with any plastic concept, and hence it is impossible to compare their collations with those of plastic quality that we have inherited from the ancients.65

Here Markov emphasizes a crucial difference between the modern use of material heterogeneity and that of the ancient iconic tradition. While Picasso and the Futurists consciously altered and transformed the identities of their found objects in the service of illusory representation, the Russo-​ Byzantine tradition rejected “virtuality” in favor of simulating divine “presence” through “real” forms in “real space.”66 Gough thus concludes that “the icon was an important precedent not only for Tatlin’s material heterogeneity, but also for his pursuit of an indexical mode of production.”67 In contrast to Picasso’s “semiotic” and “metaphorical” approach to art making, Tatlin adopted a practice of “materialogical determination.” In other words, Tatlin only marginally manipulated his materials, trying to preserve their natural properties as much as possible and developing a mode of production that was “indexical”:

As the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce defined it, the “index” is a sign . . . wherein there exists a “real” or “physical” connection between the sign and its referent. . . .

Although the icon certainly belongs to another

category of sign within Peirce’s tripartite division (that of the “icon” wherein the sign resembles its referent, as in, for example, portraits and onomatopoeias) . . . it nevertheless could be said to share in the indexical modality of vanguard faktura given the indexical relationship posited between the icon and its prototype in the theological writings of the Orthodox Church.68

As already mentioned, one of the most vocal period advocates of Tatlin’s iconic genealogy was Nikolai Punin. In his 1921 monograph, Tatlin (Against Cubism), Punin argued that Tatlin’s artistic innovations were rooted in the ancient iconic tradition and not in contemporary European art.69 According to Punin, Tatlin’s reliefs, on both theoretical and formal levels, radically departed from the precedent set by Parisian Cubism and especially by the works of Picasso. Punin believed that the latter exemplified the final stage of the western European tradition of painting, which stressed individualism, aestheticism, and subjectivity, while Tatlin’s works replaced these qualities with material, objective, and “realist” considerations directly inherited from the Russo-​Byzantine tradition. As discussed in the first chapter, this interpretation was closely aligned with the contemporary ideas of Pavel Florensky, who also emphasized the importance of the icon’s “real” embodied presence in contrast to the “false” virtual reality of the two-​dimensional illusionistic image. According to Florensky, oil painting as a whole expressed the worldview of the Roman Catholic Renaissance; engraving reflected the ethos of

Protestant rationalism; and icon painting was the product of Orthodox metaphysics.70 Consequently, the Painterly Reliefs’ emphasis on their own “objecthood,” rather than on pictorial representation, ensured that they were understood by many of Tatlin’s contemporaries as secular, modernist reconfigurations of an essentially Orthodox image philosophy. Accordingly, Punin provocatively concluded that Picasso’s Cubist works marked the end of an artistic era that had begun with the Italian Renaissance, while Tatlin’s reliefs signaled the dawn of a new epoch in art: Picasso cannot be accepted as the dawn of a new era . . . [he] is on the other side of the divide. . . .

The old school of painting, concluded by Picasso,

accepted form as an element presenting us with color and space. We postulate the primacy of color (material) and space (volume), whose interaction produces form. . . . The French school of painting is dying within its own tradition. . . .

[The Cubists] confined themselves to the same set of

illusions that limited the Naturalists. The sense of depth in Picasso’s canvases is by no means less illusory than in the paintings of a Peredvizhnik. . . .

It became necessary to seek an exit not only from the

canvas but from the whole tradition of European art. This way out has been found by those artists strong enough to study dimensions in real spatial relationships. This principle underlay Tatlin’s first Counter-​Reliefs. . . .

The world of individuality and imagination remains

there [in France]—here [in Russia] begins a collective and realist world.71

Punin contended that Tatlin’s “culture of materials” was predicated on the icon painters’ approach to color and pigment, which was markedly

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different from that of European artists. “Pigment for Cézanne,” wrote Punin, “was no more than color, which he always controlled through chromatic relationships.” By contrast, medieval Russian art “had worked with color as a painting material, as the result of the dye pigment . . . never was color perceived by icon painters as the relationships within a chromatic scale.”72 Punin argued that Tatlin’s experience as an icon painter meant that he had understood color as an attribute of the material, rather than as an expressive medium to be manipulated at will by the artist: “For Tatlin, to color meant above all to study the dyeing pigment; to color in a certain way meant to work a surface by means of paints. Color is given objectively, it is a reality and an element; color relationships are independent of spatial relationships existing in reality . . . surface, like paint, is a kind of material: painted, possessing dimensions, volume, and texture, it can be fluid or hard, brittle or resinous, elastic, dense and heavy, and like any other material it searches for its form.” Punin concluded that by grounding his work in ancient Russian aesthetic traditions, Tatlin was able to make the “inevitable” conceptual leap from “color understood as material” to “work on materials in general” and—by extension— to three-​dimensional construction in real space.73

Table (1914–15), and Olga Rozanova’s Cyclist (Devil’s Panel) (1915) and Automobile (1915). However, the exhibition catalogue listed these works as “Flying Sculptures,” “Sculptures on a Plane,” and “Sculptural Paintings.”74 Consequently, Tatlin’s use of the word “relief ” requires closer examination, especially since it had specific theological implications in the Orthodox belief system. As is well known, the Orthodox Church’s prohibition on “corporeality” and “graven images” precluded any kind of three-​dimensional sculpture.75 However, a major exception to this rule were low reliefs, typically made from precious metals, enamel, ivory, wood, and marble. As such, in the Orthodox tradition, the “relief ” signified an acceptable compromise between the flat image and sculpture in the round. Indeed, as Bissera Pent­ cheva has contended, the “relief icon made of metal acquired a privileged status in Byzantium after Iconoclasm (730–843)”: This move away from painting and toward relief was signaled in the Iconophile treatises of the early ninth century. The writings of Theodore Stoudites in particular defined the icon as an imprint (typos) of likeness (homoiosis) on a material surface. This mechanical reproduction of an intaglio secured the correct and inalterable transmission of homoioma. And since likeness was the true link, binding icon to prototype, its preservation ensured the legitimacy

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of the man-​made image. . . .

It is important to emphasize that Tatlin was not the only Russian artist to experiment with volumetric constructions in the 1910s. At the 0.10 exhibition several other artists displayed a number of works in three dimensions, including Ivan Puni’s White Sphere (1915), Ivan Kliun’s Cubist Woman at Her Dressing

to “material imprint/seal imbued with Spirit”—empsychos

The Icon and the Square



. . . Zographia [or lifelikeness in representation] after

Byzantine Iconoclasm changed from “painting from life” graphe.76

Pentcheva maintains that instead of occupying a minor and inconsequential place within Byzantine artistic production, multimedia relief icons actually

constituted a major industry in Constantinople and emerged as the dominant art form by the ninth century.77 However, due to the continued premium placed on the painted image—the product of a biased, centuries-​old, post-​Renaissance worldview— this substantial corpus of medieval art has largely been overlooked, leading to the erroneous conclusion that the painted panel icon predominated over the bas-​relief in Byzantine and medieval Russian art. Significantly, Kondakov had already challenged this widespread assumption in his seminal 1892 publication on Byzantine enamels, where he observed that “from the time of Constantine Porphyrogennetos (905–959) works in enamel seemed to be very numerous, as much in the treasury of the Emperor as in the treasuries of the churches in the capital.”78 In the same publication he also lamented that the flattening effects of chromolithography reduced “the sparkling surface . . . the effect of relief . . . and the plastic beauty of the ornament” of the original enamel icons to a “matte, dead surface,” which gave readers an inaccurate impression of these objects’ tactile properties.79 Kondakov dated the proliferation of the relief icon in Russia to the fourteenth century, when, under Greek influence, the Russians began to cover even the figures with plates of silver showing in more or less relief the outlines and folds of the clothes and vestments. . . .

The golden nimbus of early times from being flat was

given relief as a halo . . . adorned with . . . filigree of twisted gold wire (skan) sometimes picked out with enamel (finiff); later the halo took the form of an actual crown. . . .

Naturally even more decoration was applied to the

devotional icon in private hands.80

For Tatlin, the term “relief ” evidently connoted similar intermedial and antiplanar properties, and

he first began to apply it to his Painterly Reliefs of 1913, signaling his move away from easel painting and the flat, homogeneous surface of the canvas. He then adopted the term “counter-​relief ” in 1914 to indicate an intensification of the work’s expansion into the surrounding space. Needless to say, a relief also carries important architectural connotations, since it is often attached to a support and is therefore meant to function within a larger spatial register or built environment. Architecture had been of interest to Tatlin long before he designed the Monument to the Third International (1919–20), which is why the Corner Counter-​Reliefs were devised to function in an expanded field and to “ ‘wrap’ inert space around themselves and dominate in it aggressively.”81 That Tatlin intended to enlist the negative space around his Corner Counter-​Reliefs into the structural logic of the works themselves becomes clear from their installation at 0.10. Primarily made from sheets of iron and aluminum, glass, wood, rope, and gesso, the reliefs were three-​dimensional structures suspended in midair. Several of them were constructed along a diagonal axis, which augmented their visual dynamism and created a sense of levity and movement. As figures 94 and 95 demonstrate, the clusters of variously sized metal sheets created a series of rhythmically intersecting planes, which in their turn produced a complex play of light, shadows, and reflections. Contemporary accounts, as well as surviving black-​and-​white photographs, reveal that Tatlin pasted over the gallery walls with large sheets of white paper against which the Corner Counter-​ Reliefs were displayed. This maximized the optical effects of the shadows that were cast on the walls by the protruding forms of the reliefs, so that the adjacent walls were activated as additional planes. Gough points out that the redefinition of empty

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space as “a material integer” constituted a key element in Tatlin’s shift from Painterly Reliefs to Corner Counter-​Reliefs.82 Instead of the rectangular frames and unidirectional picture plane of the former, the Corner Counter-​Reliefs were multidirectional agglomerations of components that collapsed the boundaries between negative and positive space. Unfortunately, only one out of the three Corner Counter-​Reliefs that Tatlin displayed at 0.10 has survived.83 The rest have perished and are only available to us today as grainy, low-​quality black-​and-​white photographs, which were first reproduced in a small brochure that accompanied Tatlin’s section of the 0.10 exhibition. As a result, we are largely left to speculate about the dimensions, colors, and textures of the original reliefs, despite recent attempts to reconstruct them.84 This means that our perception of these complex, volumetric works has been reduced to a single, static viewpoint in an exclusively visual medium. Ironically, as evidenced by Kondakov’s critique of chromolithography, the same “leveling” effect has also distorted the modern reception of Byzantine and medieval Russian art. Thus, for example, Rico Franses asserts that photographs of Byzantine images with a gold ground—whether mosaics, icons, or illuminated manuscripts—tend to produce a fixed and flattening effect, nullifying the gold leaf ’s “chameleon-​like ability to change appearance.”85 As a result, both the work’s visual dynamism and its experiential impact on the viewer are entirely suppressed. Robert Nelson makes a similar observation, contending that “the Byzantine icon exists in space, in the physical presence of the religious beholder, no matter whether that icon was small and portable and held in the believer’s hands, or a large wall mosaic, visually beheld and optically grasped from a distance.”86 For instance, in photographic reproductions of the

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dome mosaic in the twelfth-​century Church of the Dormition in Daphni, the Christ Pantocrator “appears flat and two-​dimensional, a poster-​like image pasted to the gold ceiling of the church.” In reality, however, the dome curves down toward the viewer, which gives the impression that Christ is coming “down from heaven into the actual space and eye of the beholder.”87 In the Middle Ages discourse on vision was dominated by the theory of extramission, which postulated direct physical contact between the subject and object. According to this theory, the eyes of the viewer emitted rays of light that traveled to the thing seen and then back to the perceiver. Nelson therefore concludes that the Byzantines regarded vision as “dynamic, thoroughly embodied, and tactile,” presupposing an active viewer.88 This is precisely the kind of haptic vision that Tatlin aimed to activate in viewers of his Corner Counter-​Reliefs: “[D]istrusting the eye, we place it under the control of touch.”89 Tatlin’s rejection of vision as primarily optical rather than embodied went against the mainstream scientific theories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Instead, it prefigured the later phenomenological philosophy of Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, where the “gaze caresses the things [it encounters], it espouses their contours and their reliefs, between it and them we catch sight of complexity.”90 The idea of the Byzantine image as a “spatial icon” that functions in real space was first advanced by Otto Demus in the 1950s. In his seminal study on Middle Byzantine mosaic decoration, Demus proposed that representations of Christ, the Virgin, disciples, saints, and other figures interacted with each other across the “real” space of a Byzantine Church: To describe these mosaics, encased in cupolas, apsides, squinches, pendentives, vaults and niches, as flat,

or two-​dimensional, would be inappropriate. True, there is no space behind the “picture-​plane” of these mosaics. But there is space, the physical space enclosed by the niche, in front; and this space is included in the picture. The image is not separated from the beholder by the “imaginary glass pane” of the picture plane behind which an illusionistic picture begins: it opens into the real space in front, where the beholder lives and moves. His space and the space in which the holy persons exist and act are identical, just as the icon itself is magically identical with the holy person or the sacred event. The Byzantine church itself is the “picture-​space” of the icons . . . [the viewer] is bodily enclosed in the grand icon of the church. . . .

. . . The icons never cease to be individually framed

spatial units; their connection with one another is established not by crowded contiguity on the surface but by an intricate system of relations in space.91

In the same way that Tatlin had “attributed real spatial relationships to [his] new works of art,” the Byzantine monumental image was essentially experiential, and like the Corner Counter-​Reliefs, it functioned within the “dimensions of lived experience.”92 Formulated nearly four decades after Tatlin’s initial experimentation with his Corner Counter-​Reliefs, neither Demus’s nor Merleau-​Ponty’s theories could have informed the artist’s concept of haptic vision and his shift into real space. However, during his student years at the Penza College of Art (1905–10), Tatlin had closely studied the pictorial techniques of monumental art, and in his short autobiography he mentions that “frescoes very much interested [him] then.”93 He even made copies of ecclesiastical murals in the churches of Novgorod and several other medieval cities, such as his sketch of the apostle Thomas (fig. 106) on the cupola of the Church of St. George in Staraia Ladoga (fig. 107). Although this image is

Fig. 106  Vladimir Tatlin, Study of Apostle Thomas on the Cupola of the Church of St. George, Staraia Ladoga, 1905–10. Watercolor and white paint on paper, 9 1/5 × 6 1/8 in. (24 × 15.5 cm). Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow.

executed in black and white, it still captures all the vitality and dynamism of the original fresco. In particular, Tatlin paid close attention to the expressive linearity and energetic movement of the medieval image, which he faithfully reproduced in his own version. Given Tatlin’s sustained interest in the semantics of Russo-​Byzantine representations— as evidenced by his Composition-​Analysis—it is not implausible to assume that his firsthand experiences

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Fig. 107  Apostle Thomas, twelfth-​century fresco, Church of St. George, Staraia Ladoga.

with the complex spatial dynamics of monumental medieval art would have played a tangible role in his move into construction and real space. This idea is reinforced by the relatively large size of the only surviving Corner Counter-​Relief from the 0.10 exhibition, measuring 71 by 118 centimeters. Its virtually human scale suggests that Tatlin wanted his viewers

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The Icon and the Square

to engage with this work in a direct bodily manner and not only in a detached, retinal way. However, persisting misconceptions about the “flatness” and “stasis” of the Russo-​Byzantine image have led a number of modernist scholars, such as Zhadova, to conclude that it was only “once he overcame the two-​dimensional system of expression of icon painting” that Tatlin “was able to arrive at a realization in space of material constructions built from complicated geometrical shapes.”94 Accordingly, discussions of the iconic tradition’s impact on Tatlin’s oeuvre have tended to be limited to his paintings and early Painterly Reliefs from the 1910s, and little has been written about the different ways in which the dynamic spatiality and experiential modality of monumental Russo-​Byzantine art might have come to bear on his later artistic practice, including his conception of the Monument to the Third International. Indeed, as evidenced by Tatlin’s various statements, the teachings of one of his first art instructors, Aleksei Afanasiev, continued to shape Tatlin’s aesthetic views and theories well into his mature years. As late as 1928 Tatlin continued to name Afanasiev as a major influence on his work, alongside Larionov and Picasso.95 While Tatlin’s relationships with the latter two artists have been extensively examined by a number of scholars, his references to Afanasiev have gone virtually unnoticed. This could be because, unlike Picasso and Larionov, Afanasiev is now a nearly forgotten nineteenth-​century artist, who is mostly known for his realist paintings of genre scenes and his caricatures for the journals Shut, Ogonek, and Oskolki. Ironically, one of his few extant oil paintings depicts an old lady lighting candles in front of rows of icons in the “holy corner” of a domestic interior.96

Like many academically trained artists, Afanasiev was personally involved in several restoration and revivalist projects in the 1880s and 1890s. For example, in 1896 he executed four of the façade mosaics for the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood in St. Petersburg: Saint Paul, Saint Luke the Apostle, Seraphim, and Saints Jacob, Euthymius, and Eustathius. He likewise created eight mosaic designs for the interior of the cathedral: Saints Barlaam of Khutyn and Alexander of Svir, Saints Macarius of Egypt and Moses the Black, Saints Andronicus of Pannonia and Apollos, Martyrs Lucian and Agatodor, Averian and Porphyry, Apostles Nikanor and Phlegon of Marathon, Rodion and Urban of Macedonia, and Saints John the Apostle and James the Great (fig. 108). As a teacher, Afanasiev encouraged all of his students to closely study and copy the frescoes and mosaics of Byzantium, Ravenna, and medieval Rus, either from life or based on high-​quality reproductions. As a result, during his Penza years Tatlin accumulated a large visual archive of religious images—both Byzantine and Russian—which he kept throughout his lifetime.97 Such unexpected connections between nineteenth-​century revivalism and twentieth-​century avant-​gardism clearly demonstrate that the interactions between these ostensibly distinct and antithetical spheres of artistic activity were much more fluid and multifaceted than standard modernist narratives would have us believe. Lastly, as the first chapter of this book contends, theories about medieval visuality and the complexities of iconic space—which anticipated the later studies of scholars such as Demus—were already being actively debated in the mid-1910s by several of Tatlin’s contemporaries. For instance, in his Philosophy of the Icon Tarabukin described

Fig. 108  Aleksei Afanasiev, Saints John the Apostle and James the Great, 1894–97. Mosaic, Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, St. Petersburg.

iconic representations as being turned “inside out.”98 According to him, instead of “absorbing” the viewer into its pictorial space, the iconic depiction projected itself outward from the surface of the image and into the space of the viewer:

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An icon painter does not think in a Euclidean way. He rejects linear perspective as a way of articulating infinite space. The world of icon painting is finite . . . inverting itself in so called reverse perspective, [iconic space] terminates somewhere outside the boundaries of the icon in the eyes of the viewer. . . .

If perspective draws the viewer into its deep

Tatlin’s immediate circle of friends and colleagues. Consequently, Tatlin’s conception of and experimentation with his Corner Counter-​Reliefs would have unfolded within the context of this rich, multivalent discourse on the spatial, theoretical, and ontological complexities of the iconic tradition, undoubtedly informing his own artistic praxis.

expanses, then iconic space, thanks to “reverse perspective,” pushes the viewer out. . . . The corporeal world becomes as if transparent in that it simultaneously turns out all of its planes. . . . A cathedral is [thus] “turned inside out.”99

In addition, Tarabukin argued that, out of all the representational arts, icon painting was the most “architectonic” form because of its rejection of illusionism and imitation in favor of a self-​contained, concrete, and “constructive” treatment of space.100 As such, he concluded that in its philosophical essence, icon painting most closely approached architecture. Like Demus in his later work, Tarabukin conceived of the iconic image as being on a continuum with, rather than as a simulation of, real space. At the time that Tarabukin was writing Philosophy of the Icon, he had become acquainted with Punin, who was then already friends with Tatlin and a regular participant in the theoretical debates and avant-​garde activities of Apartment No. 5, alongside Pavel Florensky, Aleksei Grishchenko, Liubov Popova, Vera Pestel, Nadezhda Udaltsova, and Alexander Vesnin, among others.101 Given that at that point Punin was also working in the Department of Monuments of Russian Icon Painting and Church Relics in the Russian Museum and was writing his lengthy study of Andrei Rublev for Apollon, it is clear that ideas on the spatial dynamics of icon painting and monumental Russo-​Byzantine art were being actively discussed in

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“God Is Not Cast Down”: Toward a New Theology of Art With regard to Malevich and his display at 0.10, the majority of contemporary commentators concluded that Suprematism had unequivocally triumphed over “Tatlinism” at the Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting. For example, Mikhail Matiushin concluded that Malevich had felt “the idea of paint’s independence in painting . . . in a powerful new way,” while Tatlin’s artworks were “weaker” than the ones he had exhibited the previous year.102 Three years after 0.10 Punin similarly lamented: “Suprematism is in full bloom all over Moscow. Street signs, exhibitions, cafés—everything is Suprematism. And this is extremely telling. One can say with conviction that the day of Suprematism is at hand. . . . While Moscow is celebrating the great Suprematist holiday in this manner, there lives in the quietness, nominally recognized, but in fact still remaining outside the sphere of broad influence, another master of the Moscow art world—Vladimir Tatlin.”103 More importantly, in contrast to Tatlin’s Corner Counter-​ Reliefs, Malevich’s Black Square was immediately understood as a new “naked icon.”104 An indignant Alexander Benois singled it out as an “evil hallucination” and an “affirmation of the cult of futility, and gloom, and . . . ‘nothingness.’ ”105 As Sharp

perceptively discerns, Benois did not denigrate the Black Square on aesthetic grounds, but rather on religious ones. He had shifted his typical “critique of vanguard art from accusations of epigonism and eclecticism” to that of “blasphemy.” For Benois, the Black Square did not “merely constitute an analogue to the icon and thereby acquire similar authority as an image; [it] actually replace[d] the icon.” Consequently, the Black Square functioned as an “icon of a cardinal sin: humankind’s arrogant elevation of the self (and the machine) above nature and God.”106 Unlike Tatlin, who had spatially transformed the iconic image into the Corner Counter-​Relief, which transformation ultimately constituted a structural-​ analytical project, Malevich had restaged the Black Square as the materialist “zero of form,” presenting himself as the creator of a “new realism” and—as he would go on to claim in the 1920s—a “new religion.” In other words, Malevich deployed a conceptual-​ ontological strategy in the service of the dialectics of originality. Several years after the 0.10 exhibition he even retroactively theorized a meaningful connection between the transcendental primacy of the corner and the geometric dimensions of the cube, emblematically linking the Black Square to the “holy corner”: I see the justification and true significance of the Orthodox corner in which the image stands, the holy image, as opposed to all other images and representations of sinners. The holiest occupies the center of the corner, the less holy occupy the walls on the sides. The corner symbolizes that there is no other path to perfection except for the path into the corner. This is the final point of movement. All paths, whichever path you were to choose and tread, if you are going towards perfection, will converge into the corner; whether you were to walk in the heights

(the ceiling), down below (the floor), on the sides (the wall), the result of your path will be the cube, as the cubic is the fullness of your comprehension and is perfection.107

Malevich’s claim to a novel “iconicity” was very similar to—and in many ways anticipated—Marcel Duchamp’s “pictorial nominalism,” which radically extended the philosophical boundaries of art.108 Just as the Fountain would do in 1917, the Black Square replaced the question “what is beautiful?,” posed by Kantian aesthetics, with “what constitutes an artwork?”109 As a highly perceptive critic, Benois immediately recognized the threat that Malevich’s “new icon” posed to the existing realm of aesthetic experience: it diagramed “the destruction of one set of values and the installation of a new hierarchy—the dominion of forms over nature.” As a result, Benois tried to discredit the Black Square with “quasi-​religious, quasi-​social/political rhetoric . . . his language clearly indicate[d] a refusal to acknowledge the evolution of Malevich’s art; his concern to expose Malevich’s blasphemous act prevent[ed] him from taking any notice of Suprematism’s own dependence upon the icon.”110 In fact, by invoking the icon, Malevich not only created the myth of the Black Square as the “first” Suprematist painting—rewriting history in the process—but also affirmed his own position as the “originator” or “source” of all geometric abstraction. The Black Square thus simultaneously symbolized the end of an old representational tradition and the beginning of a new one. Malevich’s notorious backdating of the Black Square to 1913 misled scholars for almost seventy years.111 This date was not accidental: it realigned the birth of Suprematism with a number of important historical events and cultural landmarks, including the opening of the Exhibition of Ancient Russian Art

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and the height of the Russo-​Byzantine revival.112 As Aleksandra Shatskikh notes, it is as though Malevich had “a presentiment in predetermining the significance of 1913, [since he] persisted in dating his principal work to it.”113 Despite the artist’s dissimulation, recent scholarship has decisively dated the Black Square to June of 1915, demonstrating that a number of other, polychromatic and multicomponent abstract works preceded it.114 X-​rays of the Black Square have revealed another Suprematist composition underneath, composed of a number of multicolored and diagonally placed elements that the artist subsequently overpainted. Not only was the Black Square not the first Suprematist work to be conceived by Malevich, but it was also not the first Suprematist work to be shown to the public. Malevich had exhibited several complex geometric compositions at the Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art (the first Verbovka exhibition) in Moscow, which was held from November 6 to December 10, 1915.115 However, unlike these works, the starkness, reticence, and powerful minimalism of the Black Square made it a much more momentous modernist milestone, which in turn necessitated some historical omissions and resequencing of events on Male­ vich’s part.116 Consequently, playing on the iconic reference, Malevich positioned the Black Square at 0.10 so as visually to assert its “supremacy” over all the other paintings (fig. 93). It thus adopted the metaphorical function of a “divine prototype,” or “zero of form,” from which all the other Suprematist works derived. Furthermore, as Lodder astutely notes, the irregular placement of the paintings, coupled with the floor-​to-​ceiling hang, produced a “Suprematist mural” that “surrounded the viewer, creating a completely Suprematist space” with the Black Square at its apex.117 In Orthodox churches the images on the

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walls and dome are typically arranged according to a divine hierarchy, with the saints and martyrs at the lowest level, followed by the narratives of Christ’s life on earth; the prophets, apostles, and the Virgin Mary; and finally the archangels and Pantocrator in the highest registers. Simulating this symbolic spiritual order, the Black Square not only assumed the most elevated and important position in Malevich’s display, but it also emblematically equated itself with the image of Christ, simultaneously invoking the Mandylion legend (a targeted and significant conceptual parallel to which I return later). Building on his earlier interest in monumental Russo-​Byzantine art, Malevich, much like Tatlin, was evidently already thinking in three-​dimensional and architectural terms—an interest that would subsequently evolve into his arkhitekton and planit designs in the 1920s. By repeating the 0.10 installation concept again at the Jack of Diamonds Exhibitions in 1916 and 1917, Malevich not only reasserted his totalizing Suprematist vision but also reiterated the Black Square’s “symbolic priority or ‘firstness.’ ”118 Additionally, in 1920 Malevich published his 34 Drawings, a book of lithographs that traced the formation and evolution of Suprematism. In this work he again reinforced the idea of the Black Square as the origin of Suprematism by presenting it as the first in a sequence of different Suprematist images. Malevich even went so far as to invent a number of “miraculous” conception stories for the Black Square in order to amplify the mystification surrounding its creation. For instance, according to Ivan Kliun, Malevich claimed that “when he was painting his Black Square, some kind of ‘fiery lightning flashes’ kept passing over his canvas.”119 Similarly, when his young followers in Vitebsk and Smolensk asked Malevich to describe how he arrived

at the idea of the Black Square, he told them that it occurred “spontaneously” while he was looking out of the window “and was stunned by the contrast between the freshly fallen, blindingly white snow and the black knapsack on the back of a boy leaving the house for school.”120 Lastly, one of his students, Anna Leporskaia, recalled that “he considered Black Square an event of such tremendous significance in his art that he could not eat, drink, or sleep for a full week.”121 This last account in particular recalls the religious fasting rituals practiced by icon painters as part of their sacred production of holy images. Based on these different descriptions, it appears that Malevich deliberately drew on the medieval genre of magical manifestations of icons by presenting the inception of the Black Square as a miraculous phenomenon, inspired by divine intervention, again recalling the Byzantine legend of the Mandylion. In fact, Malevich—much like Kandinsky—intentionally cultivated the image of a “seer” or “visionary” by deploying prophetic language and biblical references in many of his writings. He often invoked the images of a purifying “cosmic flame,” “the desert of the Word,” “the Three Wise Men,” “the Son of God,” and “the Last Judgment,” among others.122 He likewise referred to himself as “the beginning of everything” and attended the Store Exhibition in the spring of 1916 with “ ‘0.10’ drawn on his forehead and a piece of paper on his back with the proclamation— . . . ‘I am the apostle.’ ”123 In doing so, Malevich was most likely following the advice of his correspondent, friend, and Vekhi author, the philosopher and literary scholar Mikhail Gershenzon (1869–1925), who maintained that in order to formulate a novel system of thought that reflects the spirit of a new age, “one must find words equal in their significance to [those of] the Bible.”124

Indeed, many of Malevich’s pronouncements betray his familiarity with the theological writings of Vladimir Soloviev, Sergei Bulgakov, and Pavel Florensky, among others. As Alexei Kurbanovsky notes, a number of Malevich’s ideas about human consciousness, the nature of reality, and modern epistemology closely resemble those of Florensky.125 For instance, in his infamous 1922 essay, “God Is Not Cast Down: Art, Church, and the Factory,” Malevich wrote: “Man has defined the existence of things that were formerly incomprehensible and non-​existent for him . . . ; if we take any of the things . . . and try to investigate it, we see that, under pressure from our tool of investigation, it immediately disintegrates into a large number of component parts which are fully independent.”126 Several years earlier, Florensky had articulated a comparable idea in his Pillar and Ground of the Truth, writing that “whatever we take, we inevitably fragment the object we are considering, split it into incompatible aspects. When we look at one and the same thing from different points of view . . . we can arrive at antinomies.”127 Similarly, Malevich’s notion of mankind’s constant striving “towards the endless path of the non-​objective” as a means of reaching “God or perfection . . . as the absolute end, on which he will act no longer as a man but as God,” recalls Soloviev’s concept of Bogochelovechestvo, or Godmanhood, according to which the dual nature of Christ is also shared by man, whose ultimate purpose is to achieve theosis, or union with God.128 In Soloviev’s theology, this ideal would be attained through the “free unity” of the three main spheres of human life: “free theocracy,” or “integral society”; “free theosophy,” or “integral knowledge”; and “free theurgy,” or “integral creativity.”129 This closely parallels Malevich’s own formulation: “Man has divided his life into

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three paths, the spiritual or religious, the scientific or factory, and that of art. . . . They signify perfection, and man moves along them; he moves himself as a perfected principle towards his final conception, i.e. towards the absolute; they are the three paths along which man moves towards God.”130 By the same token, a number of Malevich’s friends, students, and associates insisted that “he was not religious” and did not believe in a divine principle or “a rational Will that organizes everything,” subscribing instead to a “cosmic Suprematist feeling of the universe.”131 Malevich took a keen interest in theoretical physics and studied astronomy, which he felt confirmed his ideas about the “being” and “nonbeing” of creation.132 He maintained that he was “not much interested in prophecy,” that he understood “all art as an activity free from all economic, practical and religious ideologies,” and that he ultimately “reject[ed] the soul and intuition as unnecessary,” welcoming instead “the new world of things.”133 Moreover, in the years immediately preceding his move to nonobjectivity, Malevich produced a number of alogical paintings such as Cow and Violin (1913) and An Englishman in Moscow (1914), which were meant to attack rationality and to celebrate absurdity.134 On February 19, 1914, at a meeting organized by the Jack of Diamonds group, he delivered a lecture in which he publicly “rejected reason.”135 As a result, unlike Kandinsky’s genuine desire to produce a new transformative spiritual art, Malevich’s flirtation with iconic representation and with religious metaphor should be understood as a calculated avant-​garde gambit, rather than an occult or mystical endeavor. As Kliun has written: Malevich’s attitude toward God was also somewhat peculiar and strange: he did not believe in God, but neither

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The Icon and the Square

was he hostile to Him. His attitude toward God was expressed in one sketch which I happened to see at his home; in this sketch, he drew himself standing on some elevated spot, his arm lifted toward a cloud; he has some kind of vessel in his hand, either a cup or a shot glass. Seated on the cloud is God with a radiance, as befits Him, and he is pouring vodka into Malevich’s glass from a bottle. In that sketch, I didn’t feel any ridicule, mockery, or satire; on the contrary, one sensed a friendly, companionable relationship to God, as if to say—You are a creator, and I am a creator, both of us are creators.136

Although this sketch has not survived, it is obvious from Kliun’s description that Malevich’s allegorical appeal to God as an “equal” or “cocreator” exemplified his own aspiration to be perceived as a visionary mastermind and modernist colossus—a genius artist who had single-​handedly “invented” geometric abstraction in 1913. Instead of simply “imitating” God’s creation by rendering it as illusionistic, representational simulacra, Malevich “implied alignment with the absolute freedom of God” through the creation of entirely novel forms that do not exist in the natural world.137 In a letter to Mikhail Matiushin dated September 24, 1915, Malevich explained that he wanted to use the name “Suprematism” for his new movement because “it means supremacy [gospodstvo]” and because “above all we [Malevich] acknowledge our ego [to be] supreme.”138 In Russian the word gospodstvo carries the dual connotation of domination [gospodstvovat’] on the one hand and God [gospod’ bog] on the other. Malevich likewise provocatively asserted that in “the mysterious face of the Black Square” he saw “what at one point people saw in the face of God.”139 Had the Bolshevik Revolution not taken the course that it did, it is tempting to speculate whether

Malevich’s “icons” would eventually have found their way into actual consecrated ecclesiastical spaces in the same manner that Mark Rothko’s vast abstract canvases came to decorate the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, in the 1970s. Significantly, Shatskikh notes that “after the Suprematist’s [Malevich’s] recognition in the Soviet Union in the late twentieth century at various exhibitions, his gesture at ‘0.10’ was reproduced several times and Black Square was placed in halls’ ‘icon corners’ . . . in museum duplications of the original placement a momentous substitution occurred: ordinary corners became ‘holy’ because an icon was there, Black Square.”140 In other words, by appropriating the sacred position of the icon, the Black Square was able to sanctify by analogy the otherwise secular space of the Soviet and post-​Soviet museum. Malevich had already experimented with this paradox in the early 1920s. For instance, at the GINKhUK exhibition of 1926 in St. Petersburg (called Leningrad between 1924 and 1991), he hung a large cruciform design for an architectural structure between two pillars and flanked it on three sides with the Black Square, a Black Cross, and a Black Circle—Malevich’s Suprematist “Trinity”—which ultimately “resembl[ed] nothing so much as an altarpiece.”141 Consequently, for a brief moment in the Soviet period, the Black Square was ironically able to reverse the sacred-​profane binary of secular and religious representation, intimating the transcendental despite its categorical assertion of nonobjective materialism. In Malevich’s own words, under the Bolshevik regime “the icon can no longer be the same meaning, goal and means that it was formerly: it has already passed on into the museum where it can be preserved under the new meaning of art. But as we go deeper into new creative meaning it loses even that significance and nothing can be

invested in it, for it will be the soulless mannequin of a past spiritual and utilitarian life.”142 As Fabio Rambelli and Eric Reinders have argued in their seminal essay on iconoclasm, the removal of religious objects from a sacred gaze and their recontextualization in museums for the purpose of cultural-​historical preservation often results in “semioclasm,” or the destruction of “meanings, the relations between signifier and signified, and more or less extensive portions of the semiotic system underlying the existence of the sign-​object.”143 Conversely, the Black Square’s ostensible “iconoclasm” can be understood as a tacit acknowledgment of the power of the Russo-​ Byzantine icon, “an affirmation, qua negation.”144 The Black Square thus functioned “as a new amalgam of enchantment and disenchantment, the sacred existing in muted but powerful forms, especially . . . in its ‘negative’ form as desecration.”145 In other words, the Black Square was able to operate on multiple registers as both an icon and an anti-​icon, a secular and a religious object, an act of destruction and simultaneous creation. As Briony Fer notes, “Over time the picture’s iconoclasm has been tempered and transformed; for the picture which served to exemplify modernism’s break with traditions of representation quickly became a sacred image itself within a modernist canon.”146 As a result, the Black Square was paradoxically iconoclastic and iconophillic at the same time, perpetually unmaking and remaking the medieval Russo-​Byzantine icon in its own image. Malevich would go on to dramatize this semantic duality—rather morbidly—during his own wake and funeral by replacing the traditional Orthodox icon with the Black Square (fig. 109). As Kliun writes: In his will Malevich wrote that the coffin should be of a cruciform shape and that he should lie in it with arms

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Fig. 109  Deceased Kazimir Malevich in the funeral hall, May 17, 1935. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

outstretched to the sides . . . and on the upper white side of the [coffin] cover we painted a black square at the head, and a red circle at the feet. . . .

Malevich’s body was laid in the coffin and carried

into the big room, which had been hung with his paintings in various styles; on the middle wall, in a frame, hung the large black square, painted on a white ground. The coffin was placed with its head to the square. . . . The coffin was placed on a large table, covered with white fabric; on one side a black square had been drawn on the fabric, on the other side a red circle. . . . All of this, along with the elegant dress of the deceased, created a very beautiful, stylish, colorful, purely Suprematist spectacle.147

As Kliun’s account suggests, through its prominent display at Malevich’s funeral the Black Square enacted the double role of “a synthesis of painting” and “a mystical symbol,” leading Sharp to conclude: “Painting, body, and coffin were drawn together as

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The Icon and the Square

icon, relic, and reliquary; all appeared as physical extensions of the artist’s absent presence, guaranteeing his creative legacy in the future . . . the funeral became for later artists the quintessential expression of modernist subjectivity—the pathos, and hubris, of which Malevich had been accused in his very first review by Alexander Benois in 1916.”148 Moreover, by transforming his funeral into a “Suprematist spectacle” and his own body into an artwork, Malevich capitalized on the essence of the iconic image as an extension of the incarnate Christ, cosubstantial with the reality of the metaphysical realm that it depicted. In fact, as early as 1915 Malevich had already explicitly equated himself with his principal artwork, the Black Square. At the 0.10 exhibition he included a painting entitled Suprematism: Self-​Portrait in Two Dimensions (fig. 110), composed of a planar white background—which Mudrak compares to the gold ground of an icon—against which Malevich depicted a number of geometric abstract forms. These included a blue quadrilateral on top of an angled black bar in the bottom right corner of the canvas, a yellow rectangle on top of a small reddish-​brown square, flanked by a thick ring of the same color in the left middle ground, and finally a large black square prominently positioned in the upper register of the painting, in the place where one would normally expect to see the face of the sitter.149 To quote Mudrak: “The essentialized features of the figure, condensed by Suprematism, offer a kind of pictorial kenosis—an ‘emptying out’ of the extraneous physical features and attributes of the sitter to arrive at the pure essence of his personhood.”150 Read in this way, the Suprematist Self-​Portrait in Two Dimensions literalized Malevich’s claim that he had “transformed [himself] into the zero of form” and had symbolically assumed the position of God by becoming an

“iconic” image; just as the Mandylion was a self-​ portrait of the incarnated Christ, so the Black Square became a metaphorical incarnation of Malevich. In other words, just as God had created man in his own image as the only creature on earth conceived for its own sake as a testament to God’s eternal goodness, so the Black Square functioned as Malevich’s principle image in a nonobjective universe, created for its own sake as a signifier of the artist’s unprecedented genius. Malevich explicitly articulated this idea in his 1913 poem “I Am the Beginning”:

groundbreaking essay “The Originality of the Avant-​ Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition,” Rosalind Krauss has identified the dual efficacy of locating the mythos of originality within the “self ” and of symbolically reinforcing it through perpetual repetition: For originality becomes an organicist metaphor referring not so much to formal invention as to sources of life. The self as origin is safe from contamination by tradition because it possesses a kind of originary naiveté. . . . Or again, the self as origin has the potential for continual acts of regeneration, a perpetuation of self-​birth. Hence

I am the beginning of everything, for in my consciousness worlds are created.

Malevich’s pronouncement, “Only he is alive who rejects his convictions of yesterday.” The self as origin is the way

I search for God, I search within myself for myself.

an absolute distinction can be made between a present

God is all-​seeing, all-​knowing, all-​powerful.

experienced de novo and a tradition-​laden past. The claims

A future perfection of intuition as the ecumenical world

of the avant-​garde are precisely these claims to originality.

of supra-​reason.



I search for God, I search for my face, I have already drawn its outline

Now, if the very notion of the avant-​garde can be

seen as a function of the discourse of originality, the actual practice of vanguard art tends to reveal that “originality” is

And I strive to incarnate myself.

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a working assumption that itself emerges from a ground of repetition and recurrence.152

Taking the date of this poem into account, it becomes increasingly clear that Malevich insisted on backdating the Black Square specifically to the year 1913 so that it would become synonymous with the person of the artist himself and with the origins of abstract art. In the ensuing decade his strategy proved to be successful. The Black Square came to function both as Malevich’s personal signifier and as the paradigmatic emblem of Suprematism and vanguard art in general. Due to his sophisticated understanding of the Orthodox image and its historical function, Malevich was able to secure a prominent place for the Black Square within the modernist canon by reproducing it multiple times in different formats. In her

According to Charles Barber, this was also the logic of the medieval icon, which likewise drew on the theological doctrine of incarnation, divine origin, and artistic repetition: “[F]or a medieval audience . . . [an] icon could be a copy of a miraculous original and still claim the same status as the original. . . . Its dual nature implicates the object in the representation of its prototype, so that a viewer must both engage in the ‘surface of the panel’ and contemplate its prototype.”153 Malevich produced at least three known copies of the Black Square: in 1923, 1929, and 1932. He also reproduced it in miniature on architectural models and on porcelain and ceramic tableware. During his time in Vitebsk, he incorporated the Black Square into designs for

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Fig. 110  Kazimir Malevich, Suprematism: Self-​Portrait in Two Dimensions, 1915. Oil on canvas, 32 3/4 × 25 1/2 in. (83.5 × 65 cm). Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

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monumental murals, tramway cars, building façades, and agitational posters, many of which—though they have not survived—were realized in the 1920s, as evidenced by a period photograph of the White Barracks building with prominent black squares on its façade. Even when Malevich was increasingly coerced into producing figurative paintings in the late 1920s and early 1930s under mounting political pressure from the Bolshevik regime, he would still sign these works with a diminutive Black Square, defiantly demonstrating his enduring allegiance to abstraction (fig. 111). As Achim Borchardt-​Hume writes, “[I]t is as if the more the political pressures on avant-​garde aesthetics grew and the more he ran the risk of his late work being mistaken for a ‘return to order,’ the more Malevich wanted to make sure that his name became inseparable from that icon of Suprematism, the Black Square.”154 In his unconventional and compelling reading of Malevich’s last self-​portrait, from 1933 (fig. 111), Jean-​Claude Marcadé observes that the artist’s frontal pose, hieratic monumentality, and prominent hand gesture all recall the iconography of the Hodegetria (Greek for “she who shows the way”) icon of the Mother of God (fig. 112), where the Virgin is portrayed pointing to the Christ Child as the only “way” to salvation for all humankind.155 By contrast, in his Self-​Portrait, Malevich points to nothingness, or rather, he points to the emphatic absence of his own “royal infant.” The only trace of the Black Square is its miniature version in the bottom right corner, which stands in for Malevich’s signature. Thus, in a twist of irony, the Black Square becomes palpably present in this painting through its haunting erasure, “an affirmation, qua negation,” leading Marcadé to conclude that Malevich “metonymically appropriated . . . the metaphorical form [of the icon]; . . . the path to which [he] points is that of the nonobjective

world, which he had developed throughout his lifetime.”156 Perhaps even more importantly, the Black Square was adopted by many of Malevich’s students as an avant-​garde leitmotif, which migrated across different media throughout the 1920s. For instance, in 1922 El Lissitzky included the Black Square as a key protagonist in his children’s picture book, A Suprematist Tale About Two Squares in Six Constructions (Suprematicheskii skaz pro dva kvadrata v shesti postroikah). He also depicted the Black Square in the center of his famous 1920 painting Untitled (Rosa Luxemburg), as well as in a number of his Proun designs, such as Proun 99 (1920) and Proun 1E (1919–20). Vera Ermolaeva, Nikolai Suetin, and llia Chashnik all incorporated the Black Square into their designs for textiles, arkhitektons, porcelain tableware, and agitational propaganda throughout the 1920s (e.g., fig. 113). Needless to say, in the Middle Ages iconic representations of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and saints similarly produced a “burden of quantity” by migrating across different media and appearing both in monumental and miniature form on architecture, coins, jewelry, liturgical vestments, and portable reliquaries. Indeed, as Oleg Tarasov notes, the Black Square became the “basic ‘icon’ of UNOVIS,” with members of the organization sewing little black squares onto their sleeves as an outward sign of their adherence to the tenets of Suprematism, leading one contemporary critic to describe them contemptuously as “freak monks” whose “monastery” ought to be deprived of state funding.157 Through saturation of the visual field, not only did the Black Square catalyze a new aesthetic consciousness, but it simultaneously augmented its own power, influence, and recognition with each reproduction and—by extension—those of its creator.

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Fig. 111  Kazimir Malevich, Self-​Portrait, 1933. Oil on canvas, 28 2/3 × 26 in. (73 × 66 cm). State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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For Malevich, dominance in the early Soviet visual-​arts sphere was just the beginning of a larger project of mirostroenia, or world construction, in line with a totalizing Suprematist Weltan­ schauung. During the 1920s Malevich wrote a series of essays and theoretical treatises in which he advanced Suprematism as a new, nonobjective world order—a single, all-​encompassing system of signification that would transform lived experience and human cognition, much as the introduction of Byzantine religion and visual culture had done in medieval Rus, converting pagan beliefs and traditions into new modes of Orthodox thought and perception. However, instead of using art in the service of theology, Malevich envisioned using religion in the service of aesthetics. In a letter written to Gershenzon in 1920, he explained: I no longer view Suprematism as a painter or as a form. . . . I stand before it like an outsider observing a phenomenon. For many years I was occupied with my movement in colors, leaving the religion of spirit aside and twenty-​five years have passed and now I have come back or entered into the religious World. . . . I visit churches, look at the saints and the whole functioning spiritual World and I see in myself, and maybe in the whole world, that the time for a change of religions is approaching. I saw that just as Painting came to its pure form of action, so too the World of religions is coming to the religion of Pure action.158

In other words, Malevich believed that the time had come to replace all religions—Christian and Communist alike—with a new absolute, materialist idiom that would remake the world in its own Suprematist image, the world as nonobjectivity. Although Malevich had initially believed that the Soviet state would provide him with the

Fig. 112  Virgin Hodegetria of Smolensk, ca. 1450. Tempera on fabric, gesso, and wood, 54 1/2 × 41 1/4 in. (139 × 105 cm). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

necessary means and impetus to achieve these lofty ambitions, he soon became disillusioned with what he saw as Bolshevism’s reactionary return to a regressive conception of art’s role in society. Following the death and funeral of Lenin, in 1924, Malevich observed:

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Fig. 113  Nikolai Suetin, Train Car with UNOVIS Symbol en Route to the Exhibition in Moscow, 1920. Watercolor, India ink, and gouache on paper, 10 4/5 × 17 1/5 in. (27.5 × 43.8 cm). State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. © Nikolaj Mihailovic Suetin / BILD-​KUNST, Bonn–SACK, Seoul, 2017.

Every religion is static. We believe in Lenin, we believe in his teaching and in nothing else. . . .

But, by virtue of some law, something has happened

that nobody expected: Lenin was metamorphosed like Christ. . . .

Lenin fought against image, opposed image, i.e. did

not want to reflect images in himself, did not want to be the mirror of ideas or to be reflected in matter. . . . Lenin sought the utilitarian object, attempting to direct historical materialism into the form of Communism to establish his materialism, but not into idea; he wished to make it non-​objective.159

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The Icon and the Square

Lenin’s “disciples,” however, had failed to grasp and implement his “nonobjective” vision of the world and had instead resorted to instituting a socialist “theocracy,” leading Malevich to contend that Communism was fundamentally akin to religion in that both pursued “the same question, the same aim and the same purpose—to seek God.” To Malevich’s great disappointment, the Soviet state had not evolved entirely novel ontological and philosophical paradigms but had simply resurrected the strategies and archetypes of the past, so that the “Factory” and “Church” became essentially “the same in both the deep and

the superficial sense: ritual, pious attitude, worship, faith, hope for the future”: “Just as the church has its leaders, the discoverers of perfect religious systems, so also the industrial technical school has its own which it venerates and honors like the other. Likewise the walls of both are hung with images and portraits, martyrs and heroes in order of worth and rank, and in both cases their names are entered in calendars.”160 Both Marxist materialism and Orthodox theology had relied on “art to adorn them with a cloak of beauty,” since they were “not convinced of their own perfection,” thus betraying their ideological deficiencies and essential incompleteness. Modern art, on the other hand, had become entirely autonomous and self-​sufficient. Suprematism in particular functioned as a self-​contained philosophical and “transmetaphysical” system of thought and visuality that sought “a new relationship” with both God and nature. Accordingly, Malevich could be said to have developed a new “theology of art,” maintaining throughout his lifetime that only through “the mysterious face of the Black Square” could humanity hope to attain the “absolute,” for “in art God is conceived as beauty simply because in beauty there is God.”161 To sum up, then, both Tatlin and Malevich were keenly aware of the discourse surrounding the Russo-​Byzantine revival and had mobilized it to advance their own artistic goals. Despite their antithetical approaches to and citations of the medieval icon, they nevertheless shared an interest in its unique ontological status and deployed it in their respective formulations of a “new realism” in art. While Tatlin explored the perceptual complexities inherent in Russo-​Byzantine representations and reconstituted them into a new phenomenology of the modern artwork, Malevich translated their

image philosophy into a novel system of contemporary iconicity. Through their corner placement at 0.10: The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting, both the Corner Counter-​Reliefs and the Black Square invoked a specifically Russo-​Byzantine artistic genealogy, rhetorically breaking with the pictorial traditions of the western European avant-​gardes. However, in contrast to the subsequent Productivist platform, Malevich and Tatlin never fully embraced the call for the complete dissolution of art in technology. Thus, Tarabukin claimed in From the Easel to the Machine that Tatlin remained in essence a “handicraftsman” who refused to adopt the mechanistic nature of the later movement, so that “any work created [by him was] harmoniously worked with his hands and constitute[d] a unique object.”162 Similarly, Alexander Rodchenko dismissed Malevich’s art as being excessively theoretical and not materialist enough: “[W]hat Malevich has is not painting; it is the philosophy of painting.”163 In other words, although both artists claimed to have moved into completely unchartered artistic territory, they nonetheless remained dedicated to the individual artwork and its transformative possibilities. Just as the icon had operated for centuries as the locus of spiritual consciousness and theological instruction, so Tatlin’s and Malevich’s artworks had aspired to reeducate the populace and to forge a new visual and philosophical cognition. Accordingly, as much as Tatlin and Malevich have been understood to represent the dawn of a new age of nonobjective art, they simultaneously marked the culmination and terminus of another era—one that had begun with the reappraisal of the Russo-​Byzantine representational tradition in the mid-​nineteenth century and had dramatically ended with the onset of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.

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EPILOGUE

On February 21, 2012, five members of the feminist collective Pussy Riot performed their “Punk Prayer: Mother of God, Drive Putin Away!” on the sanctuary platform of the revivalist Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow (fig. 114). The prayer was based on Sergei Rachmaninoff’s well-​known 1915 hymn to the Mother of God “Rejoice, O Virgin” from his All-​Night Vigil (Opus 37) and was interspersed with segments of punk-​rock music. Members of the collective accompanied their performance with a mixture of aggressive kicking and punching and traditional Orthodox ritual actions such as prostrations and making signs of the cross. A video montage of their performance was subsequently posted online, where it was viewed by several million people.1 The explosive public response and controversial arrest and incarceration of the young women received extensive coverage both in the Russian and international press, and “Punk Prayer” has since been enshrined as an enduring piece of political activism and feminist performance art.2 As discussed in the first chapter, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior (see fig. 17) was originally designed in a Russo-​Byzantine style in the 1830s by

the revivalist architect Constantine Thon. Its cycle of frescoes and icons was meant to extol “Holy Russia” as the descendant and rightful heir of early Christian Rome and Byzantium with Tsar Nicholas I portrayed as the guarantor of the Orthodox faith in modernity. Although it took half a century to build, the cathedral’s life span was short, and in December of 1931 it was demolished by the Soviet government. After the fall of the USSR, the cathedral was reconstructed in the mid-1990s as an exact replica of the original nineteenth-​century building.3 As such, it was a “doubly” revivalist monument. The chosen venue for the Pussy Riot performance was therefore not only a sacred site but also a multivalent dialectical space charged with various connotations and denotations that invoked Russia’s complex political, religious, and artistic past, alongside its troubled and indeterminate present. Thus, for example, many Orthodox believers understood Pussy Riot’s performance as a deeply disturbing iconoclastic act that harked back to “the fierce anti-​religious campaigns of the 1920s–1930s, which saw the mass destruction of churches and the brutal massacre of millions of faithful.”4 At the same time,

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Fig. 114  Pussy Riot performing “Punk Prayer: Mother of God, Drive Putin Away!,” February 21, 2012, Moscow. Photo: ITAR-TASS.

numerous Pussy Riot supporters argued that “Punk Prayer” should be understood as genuinely Christian—a sincere supplication in the face of a repressive political regime and a “hypocritical . . . commercial surrogate of Orthodoxy,” whose spiritual leader, the patriarch of Moscow and all Rus Kirill, notoriously described Vladimir Putin’s presidency as a “miracle of God.”5 Still others understood the collective’s action as primarily operating in the secular realm of political, artistic, and feminist discourse—a powerful critique by the progressive, liberal elite of Putin’s increasingly authoritarian rule and the rise of a corrosive, reactionary Orthodox neo-​religiosity.

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Just as Malevich’s “evil hallucination” had blurred the boundaries between the secular sphere of the museum and the sacrosanct domain of the church, so Pussy Riot’s intrusion into a revivalist religious space subversively breached the sacred/ profane binary, eliciting as much public indignation in the twenty-​first century as the Black Square had done in the twentieth.6 In fact, it would even be fair to say that the polemics surrounding questions of faith, power, national identity, and radical forms of artistic expression have only intensified in present-​ day Russia. After all, Malevich’s modernist masterpiece did not cost the artist his freedom in 1915 as it

did members of Pussy Riot in 2012. Consequently, as this book has attempted to show, rather than a passing trend or an isolated episode in Russia’s history, the dense and multifaceted intersections between vanguard art, revivalism, and religious modalities not only were a crucial marker of Russia’s modernity but continue to resonate in postmodern culture and political life in Russia to this day. Following the reestablishment of Orthodoxy as the principal religion of the Russian Federation in the 1990s, a second wave of Russo-​Byzantine revivalism has swept through the country and its neighboring regions. Between 1990 and 2015 thousands of new churches and cathedrals were either restored or built anew.7 According to official statistics, in 1905 there were 48,375 churches in the Russian Empire.8 Following seventy years of Soviet rule, that number had fallen to 6,800 by 1986, but by 2006 it had increased almost fourfold to approximately 27,000.9 The Surikov Art Institute in Moscow and the Ilia Repin Institute for Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in St. Petersburg have once again reintroduced classes on icon painting and monumental fresco design in order to train a new generation of artists in the art of ecclesiastical image making. Academic publishing in Russia has likewise seen a resurgence in monographs, anthologies, and articles on the subject of religious art and the place of revivalist architecture in contemporary society.10 As evidenced by Patriarch Kirill’s adulatory comments on Putin’s leadership, the Orthodox Church has again formally allied itself with the state in a shared project of post-​Soviet nation building, much as it had done in imperial Russia. Indeed, as a number of contemporary commentators have observed, many of Vladimir Putin’s policies seem to hark back to Tsar Nicholas I’s ideology of

“Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.”11 Accordingly, through the systematized construction and reconstruction of cathedrals in the Russo-​Byzantine style, as well as the active promotion of icon painting and the deliberate “saturation” of the “public sphere with Orthodox imagery, symbols, rituals and discourse,” the ecclesiastical establishment has once more adopted a prominent role in expanding Russia’s cultural and political influence in former Soviet territories under the banner of a shared history, religion, and aesthetic system.12 Thus, for example, under the auspices of the Moscow Patriarchate, the State Tretyakov Gallery organized a major exhibition of Russo-​Byzantine art in 2008 titled The Orthodox Icon: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, an ostensibly apolitical cultural event whose implicit imperialist subtext now looks increasingly ominous following the annexation of Crimea. At the same time that the government and church have adopted the iconic tradition as a means of fashioning post-​Soviet consciousness and religious and social cohesion, a new generation of vanguard artists has equally embraced it as an intervention strategy and a mode of political protest and institutional critique. In addition to the Pussy Riot collective, artists such as Alexander Kosolapov, Igor Makarevich, Elena Elagina, Avdei Ter-​Oganian, Dmitrii Gutov, and the Blue Noses have all tested the boundaries of the public sphere by deploying the transgressive, revelatory, and critical possibilities of an Orthodox-​inflected art. For example, Kosolapov’s infamous Caviar Icon (1996) (fig. 115), which uses a grainy black surface resembling sturgeon caviar set within the gilded revetment of an icon to depict a silhouette of the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child, explicitly equates faith with power, luxury, and conspicuous consumption. Much like “Punk

Epilogue

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Fig. 115  Alexander Kosolapov, Caviar Icon, 1996. Galvanized copper, silver, wood board, and bits of black glass, 43 1/4 × 34 × 3 in. (110 × 87 × 8 cm). Private collection, Moscow. © 2017, Alexander Kosolapov / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Prayer,” it implies that the Orthodox Church is distorted by excess, corruption, and hypocrisy. More specifically, it critiques the ways in which the ecclesiastical establishment has strategically profited from its partnership with the state and has augmented its influence and material wealth at a time when other public institutions such as schools and hospitals are in a state of sharp decline and degradation. The artist Avdei Ter-​Oganian adopted an even more radical

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strategy in his 1998 performance piece entitled Young Atheist, in which he installed cheap, mass-​produced reproductions of icons in the Manege Art Center and invited members of the audience to deface them in exchange for a small fee. The performance culminated with the artist’s attacking the images with an axe and encouraging his spectators to follow suit. Akin to Pussy Riot’s 2012 performance, Kosolapov’s and Ter-​Oganian’s works generated widespread offense in clerical circles, leading to formal charges of “incitement of national and religious hatred,” hefty fines, and, in the case of the latter, exile from the Russian Federation. Ironically, the same federal judge presided both over Ter-​Oganian’s and Pussy Riot’s cases. Under the banner of “blasphemy,” “hooliganism,” and “moral outrage,” authorities have successfully censored, repressed, and ultimately silenced a number of dissenting and critical voices in the Russian art world to the general detriment of civil society and healthy public discourse. Consequently, as these and other examples clearly manifest, from the iconoclastic controversies in medieval Byzantium to present-​day Russia, the icon continues to raise thorny issues about the nature of tradition and innovation, the sacred and the profane, presence and representation, and—by extension—poses difficult questions about legitimacy, authenticity, individual agency, and the dynamics of power. That said, the scholarly ambitions of this book extend beyond the charting of a prehistory for the current debates on the triangulating forces of contemporary Russian art, politics, and religion. Rather, The Icon and the Square contends that a rigorous reassessment of the conventional modernist narrative through the lens of historicist revivals and indigenous reimaginings allows for a much more nuanced and intricate picture of the multiple artistic

crosscurrents that swept through Europe in the early twentieth century. More importantly, it illuminates the extraordinary breadth and variation of modernism itself across different spatio-​temporal contexts. Instead of plotting a succession of “isms,” The Icon and the Square highlights the complexity and symbiotic nature of the relationship between the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth, producing a circular rather than a linear art-​historical narrative. In particular, it draws attention to Russia’s deliberate and self-​conscious construction of an entire artistic tradition for itself in the space of only a few decades, which ultimately contributed to the trajectory of international modernism in a number of important and far-​reaching ways. Instead of being masterminded by a handful of enlightened visionaries and like-​minded progressives, the foundations of Russian modernism were laid by a multitude of people from different echelons of society and with conflicting values and diverging goals, including the tsar, the church, the scholarly establishment, official and unofficial artistic institutions, collectors, critics, and numerous artists of different stylistic persuasions. Fueled by nationalism, but also by a strong desire to participate in pan-​European artistic culture, artists and critics alike attempted to renegotiate the different modalities of signification between Russia’s century-​old native artistic tradition and the most cutting-​edge modernist experimentation of the Parisian avant-​garde. The result was a series of highly innovative, hybrid artworks that synthesized the local and the global into paradigm-​shifting new modes of artistic expression. The icon thus functioned as both a versatile catalyst for formal change and a dynamic mediator between regional difference and international relevance. Vrubel’s unrealized monumental

designs, Kandinsky’s nonobjective paintings, Tatlin’s three-​dimensional constructions, and Malevich’s epochal Black Square—all aimed to move beyond the hermeticism of modernist aesthetics, aspiring instead to penetrate daily life and to engage questions of national identity, religious belief, cultural hegemony, and politics in a sustained violation of modernism’s central tenet: complete artistic autonomy. This book therefore proposes that the dominant accounts of the inception and proliferation of transnational modernism be revised to include questions of revivalism, religion, regionalism, and romantic utilitarianism both within and across different national schools. For example, it might prove instructive to analyze Otto Wagner’s and Maurice Denis’s revivalist, Neo-​Byzantine designs for the St. Leopold am Steinhof Church (1905–7) in Vienna and the St. Esprit Church (1928–35) in Paris alongside Le Corbusier’s architectural projects, especially since the latter actively admired the Church of Hagia Sophia as a paradigm of protomodernist aesthetics, recalling Roger Fry’s and Alexander Benois’s earlier definition of modernism as a return to Byzantine forms.13 As demonstrated by the theoretical writings of Pavel Florensky, Nikolai Punin, and Nikolai Tarabukin, appeals to the past need not be considered reactionary or antithetical to robust formal innovation and progressive ideals. Instead, they can serve to enrich and diversify our understanding of the numerous and variable modes of modernist production that transpired in the heart of Paris as much as on the European periphery. Accordingly, it is the author’s hope that such a strategic refiguration of both the mainstream modernist canon and its theorization can facilitate the development of a much more expansive and inclusive model of a genuinely global history of modern art.

Epilogue

223

Notes

Introduction 1.  Alexander Benois, “Khudozhestvennye pisma—salon i shkola Baskta,” Rech’, no. 117 (May 1910), repr. in Khudozhestvennye pisma, 1908–1917: Gazeta “Rech’,” Peterburg, vol. 1, 1908–1910, ed. Iu. N. Podkopaeva et al. (St. Petersburg: Sad iskusstv, 2006), 431. 2.  Roger Fry, letter to the Burlington Magazine, March 1908, repr. in A Roger Fry Reader, ed. Christopher Reed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 73. 3.  Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” Arts Yearbook, 4 (1961): 101–8, repr. in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, vol. 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 86. 4.  Nikolai Punin, Tatlin (protiv kubizma) (St. Petersburg: Gos. izdatel’stvo, 1921), repr. in Tatlin, ed. Larissa Zhadova (New York: Rizzoli, 1988), 392. 5.  Nikolai Punin, “Puti sovremennogo iskusstva,” Apollon, no. 9 (November 1913): 55–56. 6.  Martha M. F. Kelly, Unorthodox Beauty: Russian Modernism and Its New Religious Aesthetic (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 17–20. See also Jefferson J. A. Gatrall, introduction to Alter Icons: The Russian Icon and Modernity, ed. Jefferson J. A. Gatrall and Douglas Greenfield (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ed., Alternative Modernities (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). 7. Kelly, Unorthodox Beauty, 17–18. 8.  Alison Hilton, “Matisse in Moscow,” Art Journal 29, no. 2 (Winter 1969–70): 166–73, and Iurii Rusakov, “Matisse in Russia in the Autumn of 1911,” trans. John E. Bowlt, Burlington Magazine 117, no. 866, special issue devoted to twentieth-​century art (May 1975): 284–91. 9.  Nikodim Kondakov, The Russian Icon, trans. Ellis Minns (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), 77. 10.  For a detailed overview of this topic, see Wendy Salmond and Cynthia Hyla Whittaker, introduction to Visualizing Russia: Fedor Solntsev and Crafting a National Past, ed. Cynthia Whittaker (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 1–16. 11.  Viktor Lazarev, Drevnerusskie mozaiki i freski xi–xv vv (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1973); William Craft Brumfield, A History of Russian Architecture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 394–99; Anna Kornilova, “Istoki

russko-​vizantiiskogo stilia: Teoreticheskii aspect,” Trudy Sankt-​Peterburgskogo gosudarstvennogo instituta kulturi, no. 186 (2009): 126–30; Vladimir Lisovskii, “Natsionalnyi stil’” v arkhitekture rossii (Moscow: Sovpadenie, 2000); Iurii Savel’ev, “Vizantiiskii stil’” v arkhitekture rossii: Vtoraia polovina xix– nachalo xx veka (St. Petersburg: Liki rossii, proekt-2003, 2005); Iurii Savel’ev, Iskusstvo istorizma i gosudarstvennyi zakaz: Vtoroia polovina xix–nachala xx veka (Moscow: Sovpadenie, 2008). 12.  Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863–1922, ed. Marian Burleigh-​Motley (London: Thames & Hudson, 1986), 100; Jane Ashton Sharp, Russian Modernism Between East and West: Natal’ia Goncharova and the Moscow Avant-​ Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 187. 13.  For a detailed discussion of this issue, see Olenka Pevny, “In Solntsev’s Footsteps: Adrian Prakhov and the Representation of Kievan Rus,” in Whittaker, Visualizing Russia, 85–108. 14.  Judith E. Kalb, Russia’s Rome: Imperial Visions, Messianic Dreams, 1890–1940 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008); Lada Panova, Russkii Egipet: Aleksandriiskaia poetika Mikhaila Kuzmina (Moscow: Vodolei Progress-​ Pleiada, 2006); Michael Kunichika, “Our Native Antiquity”: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Culture of Russian Modernism (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2015); Irina Sevelenko, “Modernizm kak arkhaizm: Natsionalizm, russkij stil’ i arkhaiziruiushiaia estetika v russkom modernizme,” Wiener slawistischer Almanach 56 (2005): 141–83; Nils Ǻke Nilsson, “Arkhaizm kak modernizm,” in Poeziia zhivopis’: Sbornik trudov pamiati N. I. Khardzhieva, ed. Dmitrii Sarabianov and Mikhail Meilakh (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 2000), 75–82. 15. Panova, Russkii Egipet, 39. 16.  Ibid., 438–50. 17. Kalb, Russia’s Rome, 15–18. 18.  Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 6. 19.  The same distinction applies in the original Greek from which the Russian derives. “Iconography” literally means “icon writing.” For a detailed discussion of this, see Robin Cormack, Writing in Gold: Byzantine Society and Its Icons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

225

20.  David Peters Corbett, The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England, 1848–1914 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 9–10. 21.  Pavel Florensky, “The Stratification of Aegean Culture,” in Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art, ed. Nicoletta Misler, trans. Wendy Salmond (London: Reaktion, 2002), 142–43. This is a translation from Pavel Florensky, “Naplastovaniia egeiskoi kul’tury,” Bogoslavskii vestnik 11, no. 6 (1913): 33–75. 22.  In their seminal publications, Gray, Bowlt, and Sarabianov have challenged the prevailing assumption that the most significant modernist artists were those who adopted an exclusively future-​oriented worldview, liberating themselves from the past and its representational traditions. Instead, these scholars have persuasively demonstrated that Russia’s modernist program was deeply indebted to the rich cultural and intellectual milieu of the so-called Silver Age, the art, literature, and philosophy of which continued to shape avant-​ garde polemics well into the 1920s. Gray, Russian Experiment in Art; John E. Bowlt, Moscow and St. Petersburg, 1900–1920: Art, Life, and Culture of the Russian Silver Age (New York: Vendome Press, 2008); Bowlt, ed., Painting Revolution: Kandinsky, Malevich, and the Russian Avant-​Garde (Bethesda, Md.: Foundation for International Arts and Education, 2000); Bowlt, The Silver Age: Russian Art of the Early Twentieth Century and the “World of Art” Group (Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1979); Bowlt, Russian Art, 1875–1975: A Collection of Essays (New York: MSS Information, 1976); Dmitrii Sarabianov, Modern: Istoriia stilia (Moscow: Galart, 2001); Sarabianov, Russian Art: From Neoclassicism to the Avant-​Garde, 1800–1917; Painting—Sculpture—Architecture (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990); Sarabianov, Russkaia zhivopis’ kontsa 1900-kh–nachala 1910-kh godov: Ocherki (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1971); Sarabianov, Russkie zhivopistsy nachala xx v.: Novye napravleniia (Leningrad: Avrora, 1973). 23. Sharp, Russian Modernism; Sarah Warren, Mikhail Larionov and the Cultural Politics of Late Imperial Russia (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2013). 24. Sharp, Russian Modernism, 3. 25.  Sergei Makovsky, “Vystavka drevne-​russkogo iskusstva,” Apollon, no. 5 (May 1913): 38. 26.  VKhUTEMAS was the Soviet acronym for the Higher Art and Technical Studios (Vysshie khudozhestvenno-​tekhnicheskie masterskie) in Moscow, while RAKhN stood for the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences (Rossiiskaia akademiia khudozhestvennykh nauk), also located in Moscow.

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notes to pages 6–21

27.  Nikolai Berdiaev et al., Vekhi: Sbornik statei o russkoi intelligentsii N. A. Berdiaeva, S. N. Bulgakova, M. O. Gershen­ zona, A. S. Izgoieva, B. A. Kistiakovskogo, P. B. Struve, S. L. Franka, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Tipo-​lit. T-​va I. N. Kushnerev, 1909). 28.  Briony Fer, “Imagining a Point of Origin: Malevich and Suprematism,” in Fer, On Abstract Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 7. Chapter 1 1.  Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-​ Wetzor, trans. and eds., The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text (Cambridge, Mass.: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953), 111. 2.  Avvakum Petrovich (protopope), “Beseda Chetvertaia: Ob ikonnom pisanii,” in Zhitie protopopa Avvakuma (Moscow: Eksmo, 2017). 3.  My chief sources here are Pavel Krasnotsvetov, Kazanskii sobor: Istoricheskii ocherk stroitelstva i tserkovnoi zhizni (St. Petersburg: Artdeko, 2001); Valerii Turchin, Aleksandr I i neoklassitsizm v Rossii: Stil’ imperii ili imperiia kak stil’ (Moscow: Zhiraf, 2001); Ia. I. Shurygin, Kazanskii sobor (St. Petersburg: Lenizdat, 1964); Andrei Aplaksin, Kazanskii sobor: Istoricheskoe issledovanie o sobore i ego opisanie (St. Petersburg: Izdano na sredstva Kazanskogo sobora, 1911). 4.  Natalia Tolmacheva, “Isaakievskii sobor: Strukturno-​ istoricheskii analiz architekturnogo pamiatnika” (Ph.D. diss., Russian Institute of Art History, St. Petersburg, 2004), 85. 5.  Fedor Chizhov, “O ikonopochitanii,” Moskvitianin, no. 7 (1846): 117–19. 6.  Leonid Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, trans. Anthony Gythiel (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992), 2:362–68. 7.  For a detailed analysis of the multiple internal and external challenges faced by official Orthodoxy in Russia during the late imperial period, see Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy. 8.  Charles de Secondat Montesquieu, Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (Amsterdam: Jacques Desbordes, 1734), 238. Voltaire [François-​Marie Arouet], Le Pyrrhonisme de l’histoire (Stuttgart: L’expédition de l’histoire de notre temps, 1829), 54. 9.  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1900), 353. 10.  As early as 1790 Nikolai Karamzin had already cited Edward Gibbon as his model for historical writing, and he

based his own twelve-​volume History of the Russian State from 1816 to 1826 on the former’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “It is painful, but in all fairness necessary, to say that at this time we still do not possess a good Russian History, that is, one written with noble eloquence, critically, by a philosophical mind. Tacitus, Hume, Robertson, Gibbon—they are models!” Nikolai Karamzin, Letters of a Russian Traveller, 1789–90 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), 252, quoted in Andrew Wachtel, An Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 46. Likewise, in 1823 Alexander Pushkin referred to Gibbon’s work in the eighth chapter of his Eugene Onegin: Once more he turned to books, unchoosing, devouring Gibbon and Rousseau, Manzoni and Chamfort, perusing Madame de Staël, Bichat, Tissot, Herder, and even at times a Russian— nothing was barred beyond discussion— he read of course the sceptic Bayle and all the works of Fontanelle— almanacs, journals of reflection, where admonitions are pronounced, where nowadays I’m soundly trounced, but where such hymns in my direction were chanted, I remember when— e sempre bene, gentlemen.

Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, trans. Charles Johnston (New York: Viking Press, 1977), chap. 8, stanza 35. 11.  Nikodim Kondakov, Vizantiiskie tserkvi i pamiatniki Konstantinopolia (Moscow: Indrik, 2006), 26, 30, 70, and Kondakov, Arkheologicheskoe puteshestvie po Sirii i Palestinie (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Imperatorskoi akademii nauk, 1904), 45–46. 12.  Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury, vol. 7 (New York: Fred de Fau, 1907), 53–56. 13.  For more details on the St. Sophia Cathedral, see Anthony Cutler, “Recovering St. Sophia: Cameron, Catherine II, and the Idea of Constantinople in Late Eighteenth-​ Century Russia,” in An Architectural Progress in the Renaissance and Baroque: Sojourns In and Out of Italy; Essays in Architectural History Presented to Hellmut Hager on His Sixty-​Sixth Birthday, ed. Henry A. Millon and Susan Scott Munshower (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 888–909.

14.  Ibid., 893. 15.  Petr Chaadaev, “Philosophicheskie pisma: Pismo pervoe,” quoted in A. F. Zamaleev, Rossiia glazami russkogo: Chaadaev, Leont’ev, Solov’ev (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1991), 30. 16.  My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Knopf, 1973), 614–15. 17.  Robert S. Nelson, Hagia Sophia, 1850–1950: Holy Wisdom Modern Monument (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), and J. B. Bullen, Byzantium Rediscovered (London; New York: Phaidon, 2003). 18. Nelson, Hagia Sophia, 6. 19.  Félix de Verneilh, L’architecture byzantine en France: Saint-​Front de Périgueux et les églises à coupoles de l’Aquitaine (Paris: V. Didron, 1851). 20.  For an in-​depth discussion of these views, see Maria Taroutina, “Second Rome or Seat of Savagery: The Case of Byzantium in Nineteenth-​Century European Imaginaries,” in Civilisation and Nineteenth-​Century Art: A European Concept in Global Context, ed. David O’Brien (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 150–77. 21.  John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. 2 (London: Smith, Elder, 1853), 92. 22.  Edward Freeman, A History of Architecture (London: J. Masters, 1849), 164–65. 23.  Ibid., 165–66. 24.  William Edward Hartpole Lecky, History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (New York: D. Appleton, 1870), 13–14. 25.  Taroutina, “Second Rome or Seat of Savagery.” 26.  In 1884 Smirnov was selected by the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Arts to travel to Italy as an academic pensioner, where he lived and studied for three years. See Ia. V. Bruk and L. I. Iovleva, eds., Gosudarstvennaia Tretiakovskaia galereia: Katalog sobraniia, ser. 2, Zhivopis xvii–xx vekov, vol. 4, bk. 2, Zhivopisi vtoroi polovini xix veka (Moscow: Krasnaia ploshchad’, 2006), 312–15. 27.  Paul Stephenson argues that it is impossible to understand the Byzantine revival in Europe without examining the tensions and contradictions inherent in the “Eastern Question.” See Paul Stephenson, “Pioneers of Popular Byzantine History: Freeman, Gregorovius, Schlumberger,” in The Byzantine World, ed. Paul Stephenson (New York: Routledge, 2010), 462–80. 28.  See the first two chapters of Andrzej Walicki’s Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-​Century Russian Thought, trans. Hilda

notes to pages 22–31

227

Andrews-​Rusiecka (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), and Marcus C. Levitt, Early Modern Russian Letters: Texts and Contexts (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009). 29.  Nikolai Karamzin, Karamzin’s Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia, trans. and ed. Richard Pipes (New York: Atheneum, 1959), 124. 30. Walicki, Slavophile Controversy, 22. 31.  Timofei Granovskii, Sochineniya, 4th ed. (Moscow, 1900), 378–79. 32.  Aleksei Khomiakov, “Golos greka v zashchitu Vizantii,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii Alekseia Stepanovicha Khomiakova, vol. 3 (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1900), 366. 33.  For a detailed discussion of this subject, see Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy from Peter the Great to the Abdication of Nicholas II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 120–42. 34.  Svod zakonov rossiiskoi imperii 12 (St. Petersburg, 1857), 49. The provision is article 218 of the Stroitel’nyi ustav, quoted in Richard Wortman, “The ‘Russian Style’ in Church Architecture as Imperial Symbol After 1881,” in Architectures of Russian Identity, 1500 to the Present, ed. James Cracraft and Daniel Rowland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 102. 35. Savel’ev, “Vizantiiskii stil’,” 28. 36.  For an in-​depth account of the cathedral’s history and construction, see Konstantin Akinsha and Grigorii Kozlov, The Holy Place: Architecture, Ideology, and History in Russia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 37.  Since it took more than four decades to complete the construction and decoration of the cathedral, several important changes that departed from what Thon and Nicholas I had initially envisioned were made during Alexander II’s reign. 38.  After Nicholas I’s death, in 1855, his successor, Alexander II, turned the commission over to a younger generation of Realist artists known as the Peredvizhniki, who executed the murals in a more naturalistic European style than Nicholas I had originally intended. 39.  As cited in Akinsha and Kozlov, Holy Place, 76. 40.  Nikolai Danilevskii, Rossiia i Evropa, 4th ed. (St. Petersburg: Izdanie N. Strakhova, 1889), 398–473. 41.  Sergei Zhigarev, Russkaia politika v Vostochnom voprosie: Ee istoriia v xvi–xix viekakh, kriticheskaia otsenka i budushchiia zadachi (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1896), 1:49. 42.  Wortman, “ ‘Russian Style,’ ” 103. 43.  “Po voprosu o postroike sobora v g. Revele, Estliand­ skoi gubernii,” Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv,

228

notes to pages 31–39

fol. 797, op. 91, no. 6, quoted in Wortman, “ ‘Russian Style,’ ” 110. 44.  Wortman, “ ‘Russian Style,’ ” 110. 45.  The Nikonian Chronicle, ed. and trans. Serge A. Zenkovsky and Betty Jean Zenkovsky, vol. 3, From the Year 1241 to the Year 1381 (Princeton, N.J.: Kingston Press, 1986), 241–42. 46.  Viktor Lazarev, Moskovskaia shkola ikonopisi (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1971), 66. 47. Savel’ev, “Vizantiiskii stil’,” 30. 48.  Grigorii Gagarin, Le Caucase pittoresque dessiné d’après nature (Paris: Imprime par Plon frères, 1847). 49.  Anna Kornilova, Grigorii Gagarin: Tvorcheskii put’ (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 2001), 193. 50.  For a detailed account of Sevastianov’s expeditions to Mount Athos and his collection of Byzantine art, see Iurii Piatnitskii, “P. I. Sevastianov i ego sobranie,” in Vizantinovedenie v Ermitazhe, ed. V. S. Shandrovskaia (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennyi Ermitazh, 1991), 14–19. 51.  Izilla Pleshanova and Liudmila Likhacheva, Drevnerusskoe dekorativno-​prikladnoe iskusstvo v sobranii Gosudarstvennogo russkogo muzeia (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, Leningradskoe otd-​nie, 1985), 200. 52.  Irina Shalina, “Etapy formirovania otdeleniia khristianskih drevnostei Russkogo muzeia Imperatora Aleksandra III,” in Kollektsii i kollekstionery: Sbornik statei po materialam nauchnoi konferentsii; Russkii muzei Sankt-​Peterburg 2008, ed. Evgenia Petrova (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2009), 10–11. 53.  Khristianskie drevnosti i arkheologiia, Gerold Vzdornov, Istoriia otkrytiia i izucheniia russkoi srednevekovoi zhivopisi: xix vek (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1986), 119. 54. Kornilova, Grigorii Gagarin, 193. 55.  Grigorii Gagarin, Kratkaia khronologicheskaia tablitsa v posobie istorii vizantiiskogo iskusstva (Tiflis, 1856), iv–v. 56.  Vladimir Stasov, “Vasilii Aleksandrovich Prokhorov,” Vestnik izyashnikh iskusstv 3, no. 4 (1885): 320–60, repr. in Stasov, Sobranie sochinenii V. V. Stasova, 1847–1886, vol. 2, pt. 4 (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1894), 428. 57.  Shalina, “Etapy formirovania,” 12. 58. Vzdornov, Istoriia otkrytiia, 132. 59.  Adrian Prakhov, Otrkrytie fresok Kievo-​Kirillevskoi tserkvi, xii-ogo veka (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia V. S. Balasheva, 1883), 1. 60.  Ibid., 7. 61.  Ibid., 9. 62. Vzdornov, Istoriia otkrytiia, 134.

63. Prakhov, Otrkrytie fresok, 5. 64.  Adrian Prakhov, Katalog vystavki kopii s pamiatnikov iskusstva v Kieve x, xi i xii vekov ispolnennykh A. V. Prakhovym vtechenii 1880, 1881 i 1882 (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Imperatorskoi akademii nauk, 1882). 65.  For information on the decoration of the St. Vladimir Cathedral, see Viktor Kyrkevych, Volodymyrskyi sobor u Kyievi (Kiev: Tekhnika, 2004), 26–177. 66.  For more information about the link between revivalist architecture, icon painting, and the advent of the stil modern, see Oleg Tarasov, “The Russian Icon and the Culture of the Modern: The Renaissance of Popular Icon Painting in the Reign of Nicholas II,” Experiment 7 (2001): 73–101; Wendy R. Salmond, introduction to Experiment 7 (2001): xvii–xxi; and Salmond, “Moscow Modern,” in Art Nouveau, 1890–1914, ed. Paul Greenhalgh (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000), 388–97. 67.  My chief sources here are Nikodim Kondakov, Vospominaniia i dumy, ed. Irina Leonidovna Kyzlasova (Moscow: Indrik, 2002); Irina Leonidovna Kyzlasova, ed., Mir Kondakova: Publikatsii, stat’i, katalog vystavki (Moscow: Russkii put’, 2004); Kyzlasova, Istoriia izucheniia vizantiiskogo i drevnerusskogo iskusstva v Rossii: F. I. Buslaev, N. P. Kondakov; Metody, idei, teorii (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo universiteta, 1985); and Vzdornov, Istoriia otkrytiia. 68.  Nikodim Kondakov, Istoriia vizantiiskogo iskusstva i ikonografii po miniatiuram grecheskikh rukopisei (Odessa: Tip. Ul’rikha & Shul’tse, 1876); Kondakov, Histoire de l’art byzantin considéré principalement dans les miniatures, trans. M. Trawinski, 2 vols. (Paris: Librairie de l’art, 1886–91). 69.  Nikodim Kondakov, Vizantiiskie tserkvi i pamiatniki Konstantinopolia (Odessa: Tip. A. Schultz, 1886), 77. 70.  Drevniaia arkhitektura Gruzii (1876), Miniatiury grecheskoi rukopisi Psaltiri ix vieka (1878), Mozaiki mecheti Kakhrie-​Dzhamisi: Mone tes Khoras v Konstantinopole (1881), and Puteshestvie na Sinai v 1881 godu: Iz putevykh vpechatlenii; Drevnosti Sinaiskogo monastyria (1882). 71.  Nikodim Kondakov, Histoire et monuments des émaux byzantins (Frankfurt am Mein, 1892); Kondakov, Geschichte und Denkmäler des byzantinischen Emails (Frankfurt am Main, 1892). 72.  Svetlana Savina, “N. P. Kondakov,” in Shandrovskaia, Vizantinovedenie v Ermitazhe, 34–38. 73.  Iurii Piatnitskii, “Russkii arkheologicheskii institut v Konstantinopole (RAIK),” in Shandrovskaia, Vizantinovedenie v Ermitazhe, 28. 74.  Ibid., 31.

75.  Fedor Solntsev, Drevnosti rossiiskogo gosudarstva (Moscow: Tipografiia A. Semena, 1849–53), Ivan Sakharov, Issledovaniia o russkom ikonopisanii (St. Petersburg: Tipo­ grafiia Iakova Treia, 1849), and Dmitrii Rovinskii, Istoriia russkikh shkol ikonopisaniia do kontsa xvii veka (Moscow: Tipografiia vtorogo otdeleniia sobstvennoi E. I. V. kantseliarii, 1856). 76.  Nikodim Kondakov, “O freskah lestnitsy Kievo-​ Sofiiskogo sobora,” Zapiski Imperatorskogo russkogo arkheologicheskogo obshchestva 3, nos. 3–4 (St. Petersburg, 1888): 287–306; Kondakov, “Soobshenie o pamiatnikakh vizantiiskoi drevnosti v Feodosii i o starinnykh russkikh obrazakh,” Zapiski Imperatorskogo russkogo arkheologicheskogo obshchestva 3, nos. 3–4 (St. Petersburg, 1888): 102–3. 77.  Nikodim Kondakov, Russkie klady: Issledovanie drevnostei velikokniazheskogo perioda (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Imperatorskoi arkheologicheskoi komissii, 1896); Nikodim Kondakov and Ivan Tolstoy, Russkie drevnosti v pamiatnikakh iskusstva, 6 vols. (St. Petersburg: A. Benke, 1889–99). 78.  Nikodim Kondakov and Ivan Tolstoy, Antiquités de la Russie méridionale, trans. Salomon Reinach (Paris: E. Leroux, 1891). 79.  Iurii Savel’ev, “Iskusstvo ‘istorizma’ v systeme gosudarstvennogo zakaza vtoroi poloviny xix–nachala xx veka: Na primere vizantiiskogo i russkogo stilei” (Ph.D. diss., St. Petersburg State University, 2006), 36–37. 80.  Dmitrii Ainalov and Egor Redin, Kievsko-​Sofiiskii sobor: Issledovanie drevnei zhivopisi, mozaik i fresok sobora (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Imperatorskoi akademii nauk, 1889); Dmitrii Ainalov, Drevnie pamiatniki iskusstva Kïeva: Sofiiskii sobor, Zlatoverkho-​Mikhailovskii i Kirillovskii monastyri (Kharkov: Tipografiia pechatnoe delo K. N. Gagarina, 1899); Dmitrii Trenev, Ikonostas Smolenskogo sobora Moskovskogo Novodievich’ego monastyria (Moscow: Izd. pri Tserkovno-​arkheologicheskogo otd. Obshchestva liubitelei dukhovnogo prosveshcheniia, 1902); Aleksandr Uspenskii, Istoriia stenopisi Uspenskogo sobora v Moskve (Moscow: Tipografiia A. I. Mamontova, 1902). 81.  Savel’ev, “Iskusstvo ‘istorizma,’ ” 146. 82.  Ibid., 147. 83.  For an in-​depth discussion of the formation and activities of the Committee for the Encouragement of Icon Painting, see Tarasov, “Russian Icon,” 73–101. 84.  Pavel Muratov, “Otkrytie drevnego russkogo iskusstva,” in Drevnerusskaia zhivopis’ (Moscow: Airis Press, 2005), 28. 85.  Ibid., 27.

notes to pages 39–45

229

86.  Pavel Muratov, “Blizhaishye zadachi v dele izucheniia ikonopisi,” Russkaia ikona, no. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1914): 8. 87.  Punin, “Puti sovremennogo iskusstva,” 55. 88.  Aleksei Grishchenko, O sviaziakh russkoi zhivopisi s Vizantiei i Zapadom xiii–xx vv (Moscow: Izd. A. Grishchenko, 1913), 69. 89.  Ibid., 7. 90.  Ibid., 89. 91.  Nikolai Tarabukin, Smysl ikony (Moscow: Izd. Pravoslavnogo Bratstva Sviatitelia filareta Moskovskogo, 1999), 41. Although the original manuscript was completed in 1916, it was first published only in 1999. 92.  Punin, “Puti sovremennogo iskusstva i russkaia ikonopis’,” 50. 93.  Rusakov, “Matisse in Russia,” 286. 94.  Hilton, “Matisse in Moscow,” 166. 95.  Benois, “Khudozhestvennye pisma,” 430–31. 96.  Ya Shik, “U Matissa,” Rannee utro, October 26, 1911, quoted in Rusakov, “Matisse in Russia,” 287. 97.  “Matiss v Moskve: V Tretyakovskoi galeree,” Utro rossii, October 28, 1911, quoted in Rusakov, “Matisse in Russia,” 289. 98.  Ibid., 288–89. 99.  For a discussion of Matisse’s interest in Byzantine art, see Mark Antliff, “The Rhythms of Duration: Bergson and the Art of Matisse,” in The New Bergson, ed. John Mullarkey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 184–208, and Robert S. Nelson, “Modernism’s Byzantium Byzantium’s Modernism,” in Betancourt and Taroutina, Byzantium/Modernism, 24–27. 100.  Aleksei Grishchenko, Russkaia ikona kak iskusstvo zhivopisi (Moscow: Izdanie Avtora, 1917), 242. 101.  Pavel Muratov, “Vystavka drevnerusskogo iskusstva v Moskve,” Starye gody, April 1913, 32. 102.  For a discussion of this publication, see Florensky, Beyond Vision, 58–62. 103.  Nikoai Berdiaev, “Picasso,” Sofia, no. 3 (March 1914): 60. 104.  Pavel Florensky, Smysl idealizma (Sergiev Posad: Tipografiia Sviato-​Troitskoi Sergievoi Lavry, 1914), 45, quoted in Florensky, Beyond Vision, 59. 105.  Sergei Bulgakov, “Trup krasoty,” Russkaia mysl’, no. 8 (1915): 91–106. 106. Grishchenko, O sviaziakh russkoi zhivopisi, 17, 26. 107.  Alexander Benois, “Khudozhestvennye pisma: Ikony i novoe iskusstvo,” Rech’, no. 93 (1913): 2, as translated by Andrew Spira in Avant-​Garde Icon: Russian Avant-​Garde Art

230

notes to pages 46–51

and the Icon Painting Tradition (Aldershot, Hampshire; Burlington, Vt.: Humphries, 2008), 120–23. 108.  This phrase was originally coined by Nicolas Zernov, who explored the phenomenon in his seminal book The Russian Religious Renaissance of the Twentieth Century (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1963). In this study Zernov traced a widespread rebirth of interest in Christian Orthodox thought and philosophy among the Russian intelligentsia in the first decade of the twentieth century. 109.  For more information on Soloviev’s beliefs, see Oliver Smith, Vladimir Soloviev and the Spiritualization of Matter (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011). 110.  Vladimir Soloviev, Sobranie sochinenii V. S. Solov’eva, 12 vols. (Brussels: Foyer oriental chretien, 1966). 111.  Vladimir Soloviev, The Crisis of Western Philosophy: Against the Positivists, trans. and ed. Boris Jakim (Hudson, N.Y.: Lindisfarne Press, 1996), 93–94; Soloviev, The Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge, trans. Valeria Z. Nollan (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008), 52. 112. Soloviev, Philosophical Principles, 69. 113.  Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Marxism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979), 392. 114.  Viacheslav Ivanov quotes Soloviev’s “Three Speeches in Memory of Dostoyevsky” in “Dve stikhii v sovremennom simbolizme,” in Rodnoe i vselenskoe (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Respublika,” 1994), 160, trans. in Kelly, Unorthodox Beauty, 14. 115. Walicki, History of Russian Thought, 392. 116.  Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 104. 117. Walicki, Slavophile Controversy, 578. 118.  Nikolai Berdiaev, The Russian Idea (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 177. 119.  Maria Gough, “Faktura: The Making of the Russian Avant-​Garde,” Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 36 (Autumn 1999): 38. 120.  Nicoletta Misler, “Pavel Florensky as Art Historian,” in Florensky, Beyond Vision, 31. 121.  Ibid., 23–24. 122.  Ibid., 72. 123.  Pavel Florensky, “Reverse Perspective” (1920), in Florensky, Beyond Vision, 218. 124.  Ibid., 217. 125.  Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis, trans. Donald Sheehan and Olga Andrejev (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), 88.

126.  Pavel Florensky, “On Realism” (1923), in Florensky, Beyond Vision, 180–82. 127.  Although “Iconostasis” was completed over the summer of 1922, it was first published posthumously, many years after Florensky’s death. The first incomplete publication appeared in the theological journal Bogoslovskie trudy 17 (Moscow, 1977). The first full English translation, by Donald Sheehan and Olga Andrejev, was published by St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press in 1996. 128. Florensky, Iconostasis, 67. 129.  Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” 253–54. 130.  Erwin Panofsky, “Die Perspektive als ‘symbolische Form,’ ” in Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg 1924/25 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1927), 258–330. 131.  Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” 202. 132.  Ibid., 204. 133. Florensky, Iconostasis, 69. 134.  Saint John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, trans. Andrew Louth (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 22, 43, 108. 135.  Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” 258. 136. Tarabukin, Smysl ikony, 125–37. 137.  Nikolai Punin, “K probleme vizantiiskogo iskusstva,” Apollon, no. 3 (March 1913): 17–25; Punin, “Puti sovremennogo iskusstva”; Punin, “Puti sovremennogo iskusstva i russkaia ikonopis’’.” 138.  Punin, “K probleme vizantiiskogo iskusstva,” 25; Punin, “Puti sovremennogo iskusstva,” 56; Punin, “Puti sovremennogo iskusstva i russkaia ikonopis’,” 50. 139.  Punin, “K probleme vizantiiskogo iskusstva,” 17; Punin, “Puti sovremennogo iskusstva i russkaia ikonopis’,” 46. 140.  Punin, “K probleme vizantiiskogo iskusstva,” 23. 141.  Punin, “Puti sovremennogo iskusstva i russkaia ikonopis’,” 47. 142. Ibid. 143.  Gerold Vzdornov and Aleksei Dunaev, “Nikolai Mikhailovich Tarabukin i ego kniga Philosofia ikony,” in Tarabukin, Smysl ikony, 9. 144. Tarabukin, Smysl ikony, 43, 49. 145.  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 83. 146. Tarabukin, Smysl ikony, 44–45. 147.  Ibid., 44. 148.  Ibid., 131. 149.  Ibid., 136. 150.  Ibid., 131–32.

151. Tarabukin, Proiskhozhdenie i razvitie ikonostasa (1918). Tarabukin, “O sovremennoi zhivopisi: Iazyk form,” Ponedel’nik, no. 16 ( June 1918): 3; Nikolai Tarabukin, Opyt teorii zhivopisi (Moscow: Vserossiiskii proletkul’t, 1923); Tarabukin, Ot mol’berta k mashine (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Rabotnik prosveshcheniia,” 1923); Tarabukin, Iskusstvo dnia (Moscow: Vserossiiskii proletkul’t, 1925). 152.  For a discussion of the various ways in which the Bolsheviks drew on iconic images and ecclesiastical architecture as models for Communist political propaganda, see Andrew Spira, “Icons and Propaganda,” in Avant-​Garde Icon, 168–208; Katerina Clark, “Socialist Realism and the Sacralizing of Space,” in The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 3–18; and Victoria E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters Under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 1–19, 20–35. For a broader discussion of the sacralization of politics in Soviet Russia, see A. James Gregor, “Leninism: Revolution as Religion,” in Totalitarianism and Political Religion: An Intellectual History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 87–114, and Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion, trans. George Staunton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 45–68. Chapter 2 1. The Exhibition of Ancient Russian Art was organized in February of 1913 by the Imperial Archaeological Institute in Moscow in celebration of the three-hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty. 2. Vzdornov, Istoriia otkrytiia, 204–5. 3.  Nikolai Sychev, Drevlekhranilishche pamiatnikov russkoi ikonopisi i tserkovnoi stariny imeni Imperatora Nikolaia II pri Russkom muzee Imperatora Aleksandra III (St. Petersburg: Izd. zhurnala Starye gody, 1916), 4. 4.  Iakov Tugenkhold, “Vystavka drevnei ikonopisi v Moskve,” Severnye zapiski, nos. 5–6 (May–June 1913): 217–18; Muratov, “Vystavka drevnerusskogo iskusstva,” 34–35; Alexander Benois, “Russkie ikony i Zapad,” Rech’, no. 97 (April 1913): 2; Nikolai Punin, “Vystavka drevne-​russkogo iskusstva,” Apollon, no. 5 (May 1913): 40. 5.  For an analysis of the “Third Rome” doctrine, see Nina Sinitsyna, Tretii Rim: Istoki i evoliutsiia russkoi srednevekovoi kontseptsii, xv–xvii vv (Moscow: Izd-​vo Indrik, 1998). 6.  Cited in Robert Lee Wolf, “The Three Romes: The Migration of an Ideology and the Making of an Autocrat,” Daedalus 88, no. 2 (1959): 291.

notes to pages 51–60

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7.  For a good summary of the ties that bound Byzantium and medieval Russia, see Olga Popova, “Medieval Russian Painting and Byzantium,” in Gates of Mystery: The Art of Holy Russia, ed. Roderick Grieson (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 1992), 45–59. 8.  Robin Cormack, Byzantine Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 181. 9.  Popova, “Medieval Russian Painting,” 45. 10. Cormack, Byzantine Art, 181, and John Lowden, Early Christian and Byzantine Art (London: Phaidon, 1997), 418. 11. Lowden, Early Christian and Byzantine Art, 420. 12.  Gatrall, introduction to Alter Icons, 4. 13. Sychev, Drevlekhranilishche pamiatnikov, 4. 14.  Nikolai Punin worked in the Department of Monuments of Russian Icon Painting and Church Relics at the Russian Museum of His Imperial Majesty Alexander III in St. Petersburg from 1913 to 1916; Pavel Muratov worked as a curatorial assistant to Nikolai Romanov in the Moscow Public and Rumiantsev Museum from 1910 to 1913. 15. Sychev, Drevlekhranilishche pamiatnikov, 7. 16.  For information on the cameo collection at the Hermitage, see A. V. Bank, “Neskol’ko vizantiiskikh kamei iz sobraniia Ermitazha,” Vizantiiskii vremennik 16, no. 41 (1959): 206–15; N. A. Zakharova, “Nachalo sozdaniia vizantiiskoi kollektsii Ermitazha,” in Shandrovskaia, Vizantinovedenie v Ermitazhe, 5–7. 17.  Catherine II to Friedrich Melchior Grimm, 1795, in Sbornik Imperatorskogo russkogo istoricheskogo obshchestva, vol. 23, Pis’ma Imperatritsi Ekaterini II k Grimmu (1774–1796) (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Imperatorksoi akademii nauk, 1878), 637. 18.  Zakharova, “Nachalo sozdaniia,” 6; Iurii Piatnitskii et al., eds., Sinai, Byzantium, Russia: Orthodox Art from the Sixth to the Twentieth Century (London: Saint Catherine Foundation, 2000), cat. no. B12, p. 54; cat. nos. B55, B56, p. 81. 19.  Zakharova, “Nachalo sozdaniia,” 5. 20.  V. N. Zalesskaia, “Russkoe arkheologicheskoe obshchestvo, pravoslavnoe palestinskoe obshchestvo, arkheologicheskaia komissiia,” in Shandrovskaia, Vizantinovedenie v Ermitazhe, 25. 21.  Alfred Darcel and Alexander Basilewsky, Collection Basilewsky: Catalogue raisonné (Paris: Vve A. Morel, 1874). 22.  Piatnitskii et al., Sinai, Byzantium, Russia, cat. no. B64, p. 89; cat. no. B123, p. 145. 23.  V. N. Zalesskaia, “Vizantiiskie pamiatniki v kollektsii A. P. Bazilevskogo,” in Shandrovskaia, Vizantinovedenie v Ermitazhe, 12.

232

notes to pages 60–71

24.  Nikodim Kondakov to Count Sergei Trubetskoi, quoted by Svetlana Savina in “N. P. Kondakov,” in Shandrovskaia, Vizantinovedenie v Ermitazhe, 35–36. 25.  Ibid., 36. 26. Kondakov, Vizantiiskie tserkvi (2006), 16. 27.  Nikodim Kondakov, Imperatorskii Ermitazh: Ukazatel’ otdeleniia srednikh vekhov i epohi vozrozhdeniia (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Ministerstva putei Soobshcheniia [A. Benke], 1891), 19. 28.  Ibid., 5. 29.  Piatnitskii et al., Sinai, Byzantium, Russia, cat. no. B6, p. 51; cat. no. B13, pp. 55–56; cat. no. B32, p. 67; cat. no. B63, p. 88; cat. no. B67, p. 91; cat. no. B82, p. 100. 30.  Decree no. 11532, April 13, 1895, in Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii, sobranie tretie, vol. 15 (St. Petersburg: Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1899), 189. 31.  V. A. Gusev, introduction to Iz istorii muzeia: Sbornik statei i publikatsii, ed. I. N. Karasik and E. N. Petrova (St. Petersburg: Gos. Russkii muzei, 1995), 8. 32.  E. V. Basner, “Nachalo,” in Karasik and Petrova, Iz istorii muzeia, 32. 33.  Anatolii Polovtsov, Progulka po Russkomu muzeiu Imperatora Aleksandra III v Sankt Peterburge (Moscow: Tipografiia I. N. Kushnerev, 1900), 26. 34.  Birzhevye vedomosti, no. 66 (March 1898), quoted in Basner, “Nachalo,” 33. 35.  Konstantin Voenskii, Russkii muzei Imperatora Aleksandra III (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Ministerstva vnutrennikh del, 1898), 19. 36.  Gusev, introduction to Karasik and Petrova, Iz istorii muzeia, 8; Iu. A. Aseev, “Russkii muzei, 1908–1922,” in ibid., 38. 37.  Nikodim Kondakov, “Report of the Russian Museum of His Imperial Majesty Alexander III for the Year 1913,” 16, Vedomstvennyi arkhiv gosudarstvennogo russkogo muzeia, op. 1, d. 310, p. 100, cited by Shalina in “Etapy formirovania,” in Petrova, Kollektsii i kollekstionery, 17. 38.  Piatnitskii et al., Sinai, Byzantium, Russia, cat. no. B85, p. 101; cat. no. B87, pp. 104–5; cat. no. B89, pp. 108–9; cat. no. B113, p. 137; cat. no. B117, pp. 140–41; cat. no. B125, pp. 148–49. 39.  E. Petrova and J. Kiblitskii, eds., “Prechistomu obrazu tvoemu pokloniaemsia—”: Obraz Bogomateri v proizvedeniiakh iz sobraniia Russkogo muzeia (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 1995), cat. no. 85, pp. 152–53; cat. no. 239, p. 348; Petrova, Kollektsii i kollekstionery, fig. 1, p. 57; fig. 4, p. 59; fig. 9, p. 12; Pleshanova and Likhacheva, Drevnerusskoe dekorativno-​ prikladnoe iskusstvo, cat. no. 36, pp. 196–97; D. Solovieva and V. A. Bulkin, eds., Sviatoi Nikolai Mirlikiiskii v proizvedeniiakh

xii–xix stoletii iz sobraniia Russkogo muzeia (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2006), cat. no. 40, pp. 118–19; cat. no. 71, p. 180; cat. no. 76, pp. 190–91. 40.  Shalina, “Etapy formirovania,” 17. 41.  Viktor Lazarev, Russkaia ikonopis’, ot istokov do nachala xvi veka (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 2000), cat. no. 84, pp. 82–83; cat. no. 74, p. 77; A. O. Bolshakov and L. G. Klimanov, eds., Iz kollektsii akademika N. P. Likhacheva: Katalog vystavki (St. Petersburg: Izd-​vo Seda-​S, 1993), cat. no. 339, pp. 134–35; Piatnitskii et al., Sinai, Byzantium, Russia, cat. no. B91, pp. 112–13; cat. no. B92, pp. 113–14; cat. no. B132, pp. 158– 59; cat. no. B142, pp. 168–69; cat. no. B147, pp. 173–74; cat. no. B164, pp. 184–85; cat. no. B168, p. 188. 42.  Aseev, “Russkii muzei, 1908–1922,” 34. 43. Sychev, Drevlekhranilishche pamiatnikov, 7. 44.  Ibid., 11. 45.  Gerold Vzdornov, Restavratsiia i nauka: Ocherki po istorii otkrytiia i izucheniia drevnerusskoi zhivopisi (Moscow: Indrik, 2006), 299. 46.  Aseev, “Russkii muzei, 1908–1922,” 35–36. 47.  Ibid., 40–41. 48.  Ibid., 39. 49.  Shalina, “Etapy formirovania,” 18. 50.  My principle sources here are Karl Kestner, Sbornik materialov dlia istorii Rumiantsevskogo muzeia (Moscow: Tipografiia E. Lissner & Iu. Roman, 1882); Piatidesiateletie Rumiantsevskogo muzeia v Moskve 1862–1912: Istoricheskii ocherk (Moscow: Skoropech. A. A. Levenson, 1913); Otchety Moskovskogo publichnogo i Rumiantsevskogo muzeev (Moscow: Tipografiia Rogal’skogo, 1864–1917); and Elena Ivanova, “Moskovskii publichnyi i Rumiantsevskii muzei,” in Era Rumiantsevskogo muzeia: Iz istorii formirovaniia sobraniia GMII im A. S. Pushkina, vol. 1, Kartinnaia galereia, ed. Ksenia Bogemskaia and Gerold Vzdornov (Moscow: Izd. Krasnaia ploshchad’, 2010), 11–80. 51.  Piatidesiateletie Rumiantsevskogo muzeia, 45; Gerold Vzdornov, Iskusstvo knigi v drevnei Rusi: Rukopisnaia kniga severo-​vostochnoi Rusi xii–nachala xv vekov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1980), cat. no. 50, p. 328. 52.  Piatidesiateletie Rumiantsevskogo muzeia, 184–85; Ivanova, “Moskovskii publichnyi i Rumiantsevskii muzei,” 22–23. 53.  Ivanova, “Moskovskii publichnyi i Rumiantsevskii muzei,” 17. 54.  Piatidesiateletie Rumiantsevskogo muzeia, 11. 55.  Ivanova, “Moskovskii publichnyi i Rumiantsevskii muzei,” 28.

56.  Piatidesiateletie Rumiantsevskogo muzeia, 12–13. 57.  Ibid., 12–17. 58.  Alexander Shkurko, E. M. Yukhimenko, and Vadim Egorov, eds. The State Historical Museum, trans. P. A. Aleinikov, V. N. Eiler, S. A. Khomutov, E. V. Kurdyukova, and A. A. Timofeyev (Moscow: Interbook Business Publishers, 2006), pp. 133, 136; cat. no. 3, p. 140; cat. no. 26, p. 157. 59.  Materialy dlia proekta novogo ustava i shtata Moskov­ skogo publichnogo i Rumiantsevskogo muzeia (Moscow, 1872), 15. 60.  M. A. Vazhskaia, “P. I. Sevastianov,” in Bogemskaia and Vzdornov, Era rumiantsevskogo muzeia, 421. 61.  Otchet Moskovskogo publichnogo i Rumiantsevskogo muzeev za 1873–1875 god (1877), 99. 62.  Otchet Moskovskogo publichnogo i Rumiantsevskogo muzeev za 1864 god (1865), 174. 63.  Irina Leonidovna Kyzlasova, Russkaia ikona xiv–xvi vekov (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Avrora, 1988), cat. no. 94, p. 164; cat. no. 95, p. 165; cat. no. 96, p. 166; Bogemskaia and Vzdornov, Era Rumiantsevskogo muzeia, vol. 1, inv. 2857, p. 422; inv. 2700, p. 423; inv. 2852 and inv. 2861, p. 424. 64.  Piatidesiateletie Rumiantsevskogo muzeia, 20. 65.  Ibid., 21. 66.  Aleksei Viktorov, Katalog slaviano-russkikh rukopisei, priobretennykh Moskovskim publichnym i Rumiantsevskim muzeiami, v 1868 g, posle D. V. Piskareva (Moscow: Tipografiia V. Gotie, 1871); Sobranie rukopisei V. I. Grigorovicha (Moscow: Tipografiia M. N. Lavrova, 1879); Sobranie rukopisei P. I. Sevastianova (Moscow: Tipografiia E. Lissner & Iu. Roman, 1881); Sobranie rukopisei I. D. Beliaeva (Moscow: Tipografiia E. Lissner & Iu. Roman, 1881); Vukol Undolskii, Slaviano-​ russkie rukopisi V. M. Undolskogo opisannye samim sostavitelem i byvshim vladel’tsem sobraniia (Moscow: Izd. Moskovskogo publichnogo i Rumiantsevskogo muzeev, 1870). 67.  Piatidesiateletie Rumiantsevskogo muzeia, 21, xxxv–xlii. 68.  Ibid., 193. 69.  Ustav Obshchestva drevnerusskogo iskusstva pri Moskovskom publichnom muzeume, vysochaishe utverzhdennom v 22-oi den’ maia, 1864 goda (Moscow, 1864). 70.  Georgii Filimonov, Simon Ushakov i sovremennaia emu epokha russkoi ikonopisi (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, izdannyi Obshchestvom drevnerusskogo iskusstva pri Moskovskom publichnom muzee, 1873). 71.  Ksenia Muratova and Gerold Vzdornov, eds. Vozvrashchenie Muratova: Ot “Obrazov Italii” do “Istorii kavkaz­ skikh voin”; Po materialam vystavki “Pavel Muratov—chelovek Serebrianogo veka” v Gosudarstvennom muzee izobrazitelnykh

notes to pages 71–77

233

iskusstv imeni A. S. Pushkina, 3 marta–20 aprelia 2008 goda (Moscow: Indrik, 2008), 19. 72.  Igor Grabar, Istoriia russkogo iskusstva, 6 vols. (Moscow: Izd. I. Knebel’, 1909–14). Muratov’s volume 6 is entitled Istoriia zhivopisi: Dopetrovskaia epokha. 73.  See, by Pavel Muratov, “Pismo iz Londona: khudozhestvennye vystavki,” Vesy, no. 7 (1906): 47–51; “Parizh­skie vesennie vystavki,” Zori, nos. 9–14 (1906); “O nashei khudozhestvennoi kulture,” Moskovskii ezhenedel’nik, no. 38 (1906): 32–36; “Vystavki ‘Soiuza’ i ‘Peredvizhanaia’ v Moskve,” Vesy, no. 2 (1907): 109–11; “Vystavki Moskovskogo tovarishestva i nezavisimykh,” Vesy, no. 6 (1907): 99–100; “Staroe i molodoe na poslednikh vystavkakh,” Zolotoe runo, no. 1 (1908): 87–90; “Vystavka kartin ‘Stefanos,’ ” Russkoe slovo, no. 3 (1908): 4; “Vystavka kartin ‘Salon Zolotogo Runa,’ ” Russkoe slovo, no. 81 (1908): 5. 74.  Piatidesiateletie Rumiantsevskogo muzeia, 18. 75.  “Pismo iz Moskvi,” Russkii invalid, no. 112 (St. Petersburg, 1862): 378. 76.  Otchet Moskovskogo publichnogo i Rumiantsevskogo muzeev za 1911 god (1912), 11; Piatidesiateletie Rumiantsevskogo muzeia, 19. 77.  Otchet Moskovskogo publichnogo i Rumiantsevskogo muzeev za 1903 god (1904), 20–22. 78.  Ivanova, “Moskovskii publichnyi i Rumiantsevskii muzei,” 35. 79.  Otchet Moskovskogo publichnogo i Rumiantsevskogo muzeev za 1901 god (1902), 65. 80.  Ibid., 69. 81.  Otchet Moskovskogo publichnogo i Rumiantsevskogo muzeev za 1879–1882g (1884), 23. 82.  Aleksei Uvarov, “Ustav muzeia imeni ego imperatorskogo vysochestva gosudaria naslednika tsesarevicha,” in Otchet Imperatorskogo rossiiskogo istoricheskogo muzeia imeni Imperatora Aleksandra III v Moskve za xxv let (1883– 1908) (Moscow: Sinodal’naia tipografiia, 1916), 187–88. 83.  For a detailed account of the construction, layout, and interior decoration of the museum, see Natalia Datieva, “O stroitel’stve zdania istoricheskogo muzeia,” in Istoricheskomu muzeiu—125 let: Materialy iubileinoi nauchnoi konferentsii, ed. Vadim Egorov and Alexander Shkurko (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii muzei, 1998), 323–43. 84.  Vadim Egorov and Elena Yukhimenko, “The State Historical Museum: Treasures of History and Culture,” in Shkurko, Yukhimenko, and Egorov, State Historical Museum, 11. 85.  Ibid., 16, 27.

234

notes to pages 78–87

86.  Datieva, “O stroitel’stve zdania,” 338. 87.  Ibid., 339. 88. Nelson, Hagia Sophia, 30–33. 89.  Vladimir Sizov, “Istoricheskii muzei v Moskve,” Iskusstvo i khudozhestvennaia promyshlennost’, no. 8 (May 1899): 625–27. 90.  Although originally created in the thirteenth century, the Radzivill Chronicle survives only as a later fifteenth-​ century copy, which is held by the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. Written in Old Slavonic, it documents the history of the formation and ascendance of Kievan Rus and its relationship with its neighbors. 91.  Sizov, “Istoricheskii muzei,” 628. 92.  Datieva, “O stroitel’stve zdania,” 342. 93.  Sizov, “Istoricheskii muzei,” 629. 94.  Ibid., 630–31. 95.  F. I. Schmidt to A. V. Prakhov, June 25, 1900, cited in Vzdornov, Istoriia otkrytiia, 171. 96.  Egorov and Yukhimenko, “State Historical Museum,” 38. 97. Vzdornov, Istoriia otkrytiia, 159. 98.  Egorov and Yukhimenko, “State Historical Museum,” 34. 99.  Shkurko, Yukhimenko, and Egorov, State Historical Museum, 168. 100.  Helen C. Evans and William D. Wixom, eds., The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, a.d. 843–1261 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997), cat. no. 140, pp. 203–4; Bruk and Iovleva, Gosudarstvennaia Tretiakovskaia galereia, ser. 1, Drevnerusskoe iskusstvo x–xvii vekov: Ikonopis xviii–xx vekov (Moscow: Krasnaia ploshchad’, 1995), cat. no. 23, pp. 83–84; cat. no. 24, pp. 84–85; Shkurko, Yukhimenko, and Egorov, State Historical Museum, cat. no. 6, pp. 178–79; cat. no. 7, pp. 180–81; cat. no. 20, p. 191. 101.  Shkurko, Yukhimenko, and Egorov, State Historical Museum, cat. no. 1, pp. 138–39; cat. no. 4, p. 141; cat. no. 6, p. 142. 102.  Evans and Wixom, Glory of Byzantium, cat. no. 122, pp. 171–72; Shkurko, Yukhimenko, and Egorov, State Historical Museum, cat. no. 2, pp. 390–91. 103.  Datieva, “O stroitel’stve zdania,” 341. 104.  Egorov and Yukhimenko, “State Historical Museum,” 40. 105.  Ibid., 41. 106.  Dmitrii Postnikov had a large collection of icons, enamels, and applied-​art objects dating from the fifteenth

to the nineteenth centuries. Natalia Shabelskaia’s collection contained more than four thousand pieces of folk and applied art, which included articles of clothing, embroidery, lace, and carved objects made of ivory, metal, and wood. 107.  Egorov and Yukhimenko, “State Historical Museum,” 42. 108.  Andrei Nakov, Malevich: Painting the Absolute (Farnham, Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2010), 4:283. 109.  Egorov and Yukhimenko, “State Historical Museum,” 43. 110.  Fedor Petrov and N. B. Strizhova, “U istokov sozda­ niia istoricheskogo muzeia: N. I. Chepelevskii,” in Istoricheskii muzei—entsiklopediia otechestvennoi istorii i kultury (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii muzei, 2003), 6. 111.  For a detailed discussion of Russian provincial museums in the context of the Russo-​Byzantine revival, see Vzdornov, Istoriia otkrytiia, 172–94. 112.  V. I. Antonova amd N. E. Mneva, eds., Katalog drev­ nerusskoi zhivopisi xi–nachala xviii v.v. (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1963), vol. 1, cat. no. 180, pp. 221–22; Ivan Bogo­slovskii, Opi­ sanie ikon khraniashikhsia v Rostovskom muzee tserkovnykh drevnostei (Rostov-​Iaroslavskii: Tipografiia S. P. Sorokina, 1909), cat. no. 204, p. 83; cat. no. 224, p. 91. 113. Vzdornov, Istoriia otkrytiia, 140. 114.  Alexander Anisimov, ed., Katalog vystavki xv Vserossiiskogo arkheologicheskogo s’ezda v Novgorode: Otdel 2 (tserkovnyi) (Novgorod: Tipografiia M. O. Selivanova, 1911); Anisimov, ed., Dopolnenie k katalogu vystavki xv Vserossiiskogo arkheologicheskogo s’ezda v Novgorode: Otdel 2 (tserkovnyi) (Novgorod: Tipografiia M. O. Selivanova, 1911). 115. Anisimov, Katalog vystavki, cat. no. 1, p. 1; Anisimov, Dopolnenie k katalogu vystavki, cat. no. 251, p. 23; cat. no. 377, p. 28; cat. no. 428, p. 36; cat. no. 430, p. 36; Lazarev, Russkaia ikonopis’, cat. no. 51, p. 65; Olga Vasilieva, Ikony Pskova (Moscow: Severnyi palomnik, 2006), cat. no. 122, pp. 388–95. 116.  “K predstoiashchei arkheologicheskoi vystavke,” Novgorodskaia zhizn, no. 259 ( July 17, 1911), 16. 117.  Katalog vystavki xi-go arkheologicheskogo s’ezda v Kieve (Kiev: Tipografiia I. N. Kushnerev, 1899); N. Beliashevskii, “Arkheologicheskii s’ezd v Kieve,” Kievskaia starina, no. 10 (1899): 116–20. 118.  N. Beliashevskii, “Arkheologicheskii s’ezd v Khar­ kove,” Kievskaia starina, no. 11 (1902): 330–31. 119.  Katalog vystavki xii arkheologicheskogo s’ezda v Kharkove (Kharkov: Tipografiia gubernskogo pravleniia, 1902). 120.  Beliashevskii, “Arkheologicheskii s’ezd v Kharkove,” 334.

121.  Katalog vystavki viii arkheologicheskogo s’ezda v Moskve (Moscow: Tipografiia L. & A. Snegirevykh, 1890). 122.  Ibid., cat. no. 8, p. 15; cat. no. 137, p. 20; cat. no. 2, pp. 45–46; cat. nos. 695–98, 701, 800, 821, 871–73, 3120, p. 33; cat. nos. 3121, 3122, p. 34; cat. nos. 1, 2, p. 71; O. E. Etingof, Vizantiiskie ikony vi–pervoi poloviny xiii veka v Rossii (Moscow: Indrik, 2005), cat. no. 4, p. 553; cat. no. 29, pp. 650–53; Shkurko, Yukhimenko, and Egorov, State Historical Museum, cat. no. 4, p. 392; Antonova and Mneva, Katalog drevnerusskoi zhivopisi, vol. 2, cat. no. 909, pp. 408–9; Vzdornov, Istoriia otkrytiia, 207. 123.  For a detailed review of this exhibition, see A. Malm­ gren, “Vystavka Arkheologicheskogo instituta v St. Peterburge,”Arkheologicheskie izvestiia i zametki 7, nos. 1–2 (1899): 21–26, and Malmgren, “Vystavka tserkovnykh drevnostei v Arkheologicheskom institute,” Arkheologicheskie izvestiia i zametki 6, nos. 11–12 (1898): 389–90. 124.  Malmgren, “Vystavka Arkheologicheskogo instituta,” 21. 125.  Perechen’ predmetov drevnosti na vystavke v Arkheologicheskom institute (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Lopukhina, 1898), 3. 126.  Malmgren, “Vystavka Arkheologicheskogo instituta,” 24–25. 127. Vzdornov, Istoriia otkrytiia, 209. 128.  Katalog vystavki tipov Khrista (Moscow: Tipografiia A. I. Mamontova, 1896); S. S., “Moskovskaia vystavka izobrazhenii Khrista,” Arkheologicheskie izvestiia i zametki 4, nos. 7–8 (1896): 213. 129.  Ibid., 214–15. 130. Vzdornov, Istoriia otkrytiia, 209. 131.  Tugenkhold, “Vystavka drevnei ikonopisi,” 217; Makovsky, “Vystavka drevne-​russkogo iskusstva,” 38. 132.  For a detailed overview of these collections, see Vzdornov, Restavratsiia i nauka, 217–36; E. V. Stepanova, “Kollektsia N. P. Likhacheva,” in Shandrovskaia, Vizantinovedenie v Ermitazhe, 54–62; Pavel Muratov, Drevnerusskaia ikonopis’ v sobranii I. S. Ostroukhova (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo K. F. Nekrasova, 1914); Nikolai Punin, “Zametki ob ikonakh iz sobraniia N. P. Likhacheva,” Russkaia ikona, no. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1914): 21–47; Punin, “Elinizm i Vostok v ikonopisi (po povodu sobraniia ikon I. S. Ostroukhova i S. P. Riabushinskogo),” Russkaia ikona, no. 3 (St. Petersburg, 1914): 181–97. 133.  Vystavka drevnerusskogo iskusstva ustroennaia v 1913 godu v oznamenovanie chestvovaniia 300-letiia tsarstvovaniia doma Romanovykh (Moscow: Imperatorskii Moskovskii arkheologicheskii institut imeni Imperatora Nikolaia II, 1913),

notes to pages 87–92

235

cat. no. 4, p. 6; cat. no. 14, p. 9; cat. no. 17, p. 10; cat. nos. 20, 21, 22, p. 11; cat. no. 43, p. 15; cat. no. 45, p. 16; cat. no. 50, p. 17; cat. no. 109, p. 33; Lazarev, Russkaia ikonopis’, cat. no. 49, p. 61; cat. no. 135, p. 129; cat. no. 142, p. 130; Antonova and Mneva, Katalog drevnerusskoi zhivopisi, vol. 1, cat. no. 76, pp. 132–33; cat. no. 43, pp. 106–7; cat. no. 45, pp. 108–9; cat. no. 199, pp. 233–35; cat. no. 126, p. 172; cat. no. 67, pp. 125–27. 134.  Pavel Muratov, introduction to Vystavka drevnerusskogo iskusstva ustroennaia v 1913, 3. 135.  The exhibition contained more than one hundred icons and five hundred photographs, revetments, embroideries, wooden carvings, and other liturgical items and was accompanied by a short overview and catalogue written by Vasilii Georgievskii. See Vasilii Georgievskii, “Obzor vystavki drenerusskoi ikonipisi i khudozhestvennoi stariny” and “Katalog vystavki drenerusskoi ikonipisi i khudozhestvennoi stariny,” in Trudy Vserossiiskogo s’ezda khudozhnikov v Petrograde, dekabr 1911–ianvar 1912, vol. 3 (St. Petersburg: T-​vo R. Golike & A. Vilborg, 1914), 163–68, 169–75. 136.  For more information on the congress, see Trudy Vserossiiskogo s’ezda khudozhnikov v Petrograde, dekabr 1911– ianvar 1912, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg: T-​vo R. Golike & A. Vilborg, 1914–15), and John E. Bowlt, “Vasilii Kandinsky: The Russian Connection,” in The Life of Vasilii Kandinsky in Russian Art: A Study of “On the Spiritual in Art,” ed. John E. Bowlt and Rose-​Carol Washton Long, trans. John E. Bowlt (Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1980), 22–25. 137.  Dmitrii Ainalov, “O znachenii i zadache nastoiashchego s’ezda,” in Trudy Vserossiiskogo s’ezda khudozhnikov, 1:xvi. 138.  Dmitrii Ainalov, “O nekotorykh sovremennykh techeniiakh v russkoi zhivopisi,” in Trudy Vserossiiskogo s’ezda khudozhnikov, 1:6. 139.  Georgievskii, “Obzor vystavki,” 163. 140.  Georgievskii, “Katalog vystavki,” cat. nos. 11, 14, 21, 22, p. 169; cat. no. 72, p. 170; Antonova and Mneva, Katalog drevnerusskoi zhivopisi, vol. 1, cat. no. 47, pp. 109–10; cat. no. 101, p. 151; Lazarev, Russkaia ikonopis’, cat. no. 105, p. 111; Bolshakov and Klimanov, Iz kollektsii akademika N. P. Likhacheva, cat. no. 3049, p. 275. 141.  Georgievskii, “Obzor vystavki,” 166. 142.  Makovsky, “Vystavka drevne-​russkogo iskusstva,” 38. 143.  The Act of Toleration was passed by Tsar Nicholas II on April 30, 1905, and granted legal status to religions other than the official Russian Orthodox Church, religions that included schismatics and sectarians such as the Old Believers, among others.

236

notes to pages 92–103



144.  Tugenkhold, “Vystavka drevnei ikonopisi,” 215–16. 145.  Makovsky, “Vystavka drevne-​russkogo iskusstva,” 39. 146.  Punin, “Vystavka drevne-​russkogo iskusstva,” 40. 147. Kondakov, Russian Icon, 10. 148.  Pavel Muratov, Drevnerusskaia zhivopis’, 61, 64.

Chapter 3 1.  Stepan Iaremich, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel’: Zhizn i tvorchestvo (Moscow: Knebel’, 1911), 55. 2.  Nikolai Punin, “K risunkam M. A. Vrubelia,” Apollon, no. 5 (May 1913): 7. 3.  Some notable exceptions include Aline Isdebsky-​ Pritchard, The Art of Mikhail Vrubel (1856–1910) (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), 67–90; Nina Dmitrieva, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel’ (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1984), 32–56; Mikhail Alpatov and Grigorii Anisimov, Zhivopisnoe masterstvo Vrubelia (Moscow: Lira, 2000), 87–112; and Viktoriia Gusakova, Viktor Vasnetsov i religiozno-​natsional’noe napravlenie v russkoi zhivopisi kontsa xix–nachala xx veka (St. Petersburg: Avrora, 2008), 121–49. 4.  For example, see Dmitrieva’s discussion of Vrubel’s late religious works in Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel’, 82–84. 5.  See Kelly, Unorthodox Beauty, and Bowlt, Moscow and St. Petersburg, 67–99. 6.  Anna Vrubel, “Vospominaniia o khudozhnike,” in Vrubel’: Perepiska, vospominaniia o khudozhnike, ed. E. P. Gomberg-​Verzhbinskaia, Iu. N. Podkopaeva, and Iu. N. Novikov, 2nd ed. (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1976), 154. 7. Iaremich, Vrubel’, 22. 8.  Anna Kornilova, “Iz istorii ikonopisnogo klassa Akademii khudozhestv,” Problemy razvitia zarubezhnogo i russkogo iskusstva: Sbornik nauchnykh trudov, ed. Vera Razdolskaia (St. Petersburg: Institut imeni I. E. Repina, 1995), 76. 9.  For a recent edition in English, see Paul Hetherington, ed., The “Painter’s Manual” of Dionysius of Fourna: An English Translation [from the Greek] with Commentary of Cod. Gr. 708 in the Saltykov-​Shchedrin State Public Library, Leningrad (London: Sagittarius Press, 1974). 10.  In 1881 Nikodim Kondakov published a photographic album containing one hundred images of mosaics and miniatures from the illuminated manuscripts in the collections of the St. Catherine Monastery on Mount Sinai: Vues et antiquités du Sinai par M. le professeur Kandakoff et photographe J. Raoult (Odessa, 1883). However, it remains unclear whether Vrubel would have had access to it and whether he might otherwise have been able to see these reproductions. 11. Gusakova, Viktor Vasnetsov, 123.

12.  There is some disagreement over the original source for these angels. Iaremich claims that Vrubel based the composition on photographs of the Torcello mosaics in Adrian Prakhov’s collection. However, Nikolai Prakhov recounts that Vrubel produced the design after he had returned from his trip to Italy, where he had seen the Torcello mosaics in person. See Iaremich, Vrubel’, 54, and Nikolai Prakhov, Stranitsy proshlogo: Ocherki-​vospominaniia o khudozhnikakh (Kiev: Obrazotvorchogo-​mistetstva i muzichnoi literaturi U.S.S.R., 1958), 284. 13.  Mikhail Vrubel to Adrian Prakhov, summer 1884, repr. in Gomberg-​Verzhbinskaia, Podkopaeva, and Novikov, Vrubel’: Perepiska, 71. 14.  Nelson, “Modernism’s Byzantium,” 34–36. 15.  In 1899 a court inquiry was launched against Savva Mamontov for having allegedly misappropriated the stock shares of the Moscow-​Iaroslavl-​Arkhangelsk Railroad. Mamontov’s property was sealed; he was imprisoned for five months and subsequently declared bankrupt. 16.  Alpatov and Anisimov, Zhivopisnoe masterstvo Vrubelia, 113. 17.  Naum Gabo, Of Divers Arts (New York: Pantheon Books, 1962), 156. 18.  Ibid., 156, 168–69. 19. Iaremich, Vrubel’, 52. 20.  Pavel Muratov, “Vrubel’,” Moskovskii ezhenedel’nik, no. 15 (April 10, 1910): 45–50. 21.  Ibid., 48. 22. Ibid. 23.  Isdebsky-​Pritchard, Art of Mikhail Vrubel, 86. 24.  Ibid., 257n51. For Russian collections of modern French art, see Beverly Whitney Kean, All the Empty Palaces: The Great Merchant Patrons of Modern Art in Pre-​Revolutionary Russia (New York: Universe Books, 1983); Albert Kostene­ vich, Hidden Treasures Revealed: Impressionist Masterpieces and Other Important French Paintings Preserved by the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, trans. Elena Kolesnikova, Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, and Stas Rabinovich (Moscow: Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation; St. Petersburg: State Hermitage Museum; New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995); Morozov, Shchukin: The Collectors; Monet to Picasso; 120 Masterpieces from the Hermitage, St. Petersburg, and the Pushkin Museum, Moscow (Bonn: Bild-​Kunst, 1993). 25. Dmitrieva, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel’, 34. 26.  For a detailed discussion of the cultural role and conceptual evolution of the picture frame and its ever-​changing functions in Russian art, see Oleg Tarasov, Framing Russian

Art: From Early Icons to Malevich, trans. Robin Milner-​ Gulland and Antony Wood (London: Reaktion, 2011). 27. Florensky, Iconostasis, 79–82. 28.  For a detailed discussion of this subject, see Sharp, Russian Modernism, 238–53. 29.  For a good overview of this topic, see Jefferson J. A. Gatrall, “Pictorial Blasphemy,” in The Real and the Sacred: Picturing Jesus In Nineteenth-​Century Fiction (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 62–89. 30.  Viktor Vasnetsov to Adrian Prakhov, spring 1885, repr. in Viktor Vasnetsov: Pis’ma, novye materialy, ed. Liudmila Korotkina (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo “ARS,” 2004), 58. 31.  V. Svechnikov, “Tvorchestvo V. M. Vasnetsova i ego znachenie dlia russkoi religioznoi zhivopisi,” Svetil’nik: Religioznoe iskusstvo v proshlom i nastoiashchem 67 (Moscow 1913): 5. 32. Sharp, Russian Modernism, 239. 33.  Rosa Newmarch, The Russian Arts (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1916), 224. 34.  Artist, no. 16 (1891): 133, quoted in Sergei Durylin, “Vrubel’ i Lermontov,” Literaturnoye nasledstvo 45–46 (1948): 580. 35.  Vladimir Stasov, Sobranie sochinenii V. V. Stasova, vol. 4 (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1906), 181. 36.  Vladimir Stasov, “Vystavki,” Novosti i birzhevaia gazeta, no. 27 (1898), quoted in Durylin, “Vrubel’ i Lermontov,” 584. 37.  Nikolai Tarabukin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel’ (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1974), 16–17. 38.  Adrian Prakhov, Kievskii Vladimirskii sobor: K istorii ego postroiki (Kiev, 1896), 2–3. 39.  Adrian Prakhov quoted in Nikolai Prakhov, “Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel’,” repr. in Gomberg-​Verzhbinskaia, Podkopaeva, and Novikov, Vrubel’: Perepiska, 187. 40.  This particular version of the Lamentation was designed as a triptych with Christ and the Virgin occupying the central panel. The left panel depicts John the Apostle and Joseph of Arimathea, while the right one shows Mary Magdalene and Mary of Clopas. 41.  For an in-​depth study of Vrubel’s sustained interest in Nietzsche, see Aline Isdebsky-Pritchard, “Art for Philosophy’s Sake: Vrubel Against ‘the Herd,’ ” in Nietzsche in Russia, ed. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 219–48. For an illuminating analysis of the multiple and fascinating affinities between Nietzsche’s ideas and Russian Orthodoxy, see Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, “A New Spirituality: The Confluence of Nietzsche and

notes to pages 103–116

237

Orthodoxy in Russian Religious Thought,” in Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia, ed. Mark D. Steinberg and Heather J. Coleman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 330–57. 42.  Alexander Benois, Moi vospominaniia, vols. 4 and 5 (in one vol.) (Moscow: Nauka, 1980), 275. 43.  Ibid., 276–77. 44.  Alexander Benois, “Vrubel’,” Mir iskusstva, nos. 10–11 (1903): 179. 45.  Vsevolod Dmitriev, “Zavety Vrubelia,” Apollon, no. 5 (May 1913): 18. 46.  Ibid., 15. 47. Tarabukin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel’, 135. 48. Sharp, Russian Modernism, 240. 49.  Alexander Vrubel to Anna Vrubel, September 11, 1886, repr. in Gomberg-​Verzhbinskaia, Podkopaeva, and Novikov, Vrubel’: Perepiska, 118. 50. Tarabukin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel’, 21. 51. Iaremich, Vrubel’, 54. 52.  Nina Dmitrieva dates the work to 1887 and calls it Head of an Angel. Dmitrieva, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel’, 52. Petr Suzdalev also identifies this work as Head of an Angel but dates it to 1889. P. K. Suzdalev, Vrubel’ (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1991), 158. Meanwhile, Irina Shumanova and Evgeniia Iliukhina identify the same drawing as Head of the Demon and date it to 1890. Shumanova and Iliukhina, “ ‘Prorok i mechtatel’: M. A. Vrubel’ i V. E. Borisov-​ Musatov,” Nashe nasledie 77 (2006): 140–57. 53.  The drawing was titled The Demon in the journal Apollon, no. 5 (May 1913), pages not numbered. However, the same work was also labeled The Seraph in the 1957 State Tretyakov Gallery Vrubel exhibition catalogue, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel’: Vystavka proizvedennii, ed. O. A. Zhivova (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1957), 160, and in the 1976 exhibition catalogue Le symbolisme en Europe: Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-​van Beuningen (Paris: Éditions des musées nationaux), 240. The State Russian Museum, where the work is currently kept, captions it “The Standing Demon (also known as Seraph).” 54.  Janet Kennedy, “Lermontov’s Legacy: Mikhail Vrubel’s Seated Demon and Demon Downcast,” Transactions of the Association of Russian-​American Scholars in the U.S.A. 15 (1982): 176. 55.  Konstantin Bogaevskii to Sergei Durylin, January 12, 1941, quoted in Durylin, “Vrubel’ i Lermontov,” 594. 56.  Isdebsky-​Pritchard, Art of Mikhail Vrubel, 100; Mikhail Allenov, Mikhail Vrubel’ (Moscow: Slovo, 1996), 87. 57.  Isdebsky-​Pritchard, Art of Mikhail Vrubel, 97.

238

notes to pages 117–133

58.  Ibid., 77. 59.  Alexander Blok, “Pamiati Vrubelia,” Iskusstvo i pechatnoe delo, nos. 8–9 (1910): 307–9; Blok, “O sovremennom sostoianii russkogo simvolizma,” Apollon, no. 8 (1910): 21–30; Pavel Muratov, “O vysokom khudozhestve,” Zolotoe runo, no. 12 (1901): 75–84. 60.  Alexander Benois, “Vrubel’,” Rech’, no. 91 (April, 1910), repr. in Khudozhestvennye pisma, 1908–1917: Gazeta “Rech’,” Peterburg, vol. 1, 1908–1910, ed. Iu. N. Podkopaeva et al. (St. Petersburg: Sad iskusstv, 2006), 411. 61.  Isdebsky-​Pritchard, Art of Mikhail Vrubel, 88. 62.  Dmitriev, “Zavety Vrubelia,” 15. 63. Tarabukin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel’, 31. 64.  Ibid., 106. 65.  Nikolai Kulbin, “Kubizm,” Strelets 1 (1915): 204. 66.  Sergei Sudeikin, “Dve vstrechi s Vrubelem: Vospo­ minaniia o khudozhnike,” Novosel’e, no. 19 (1945): 29–38, repr. in Gomberg-​Verzhbinskaia, Podkopaeva, and Novikov, Vrubel’: Perepiska, 295. 67.  Alpatov and Anisimov, Zhivopisnoe masterstvo Vrubelia, 196. 68.  Dmitrii Sarabianov and Natalia Adaskina, Popova, trans. Marian Schwartz (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 14. 69.  German Karginov, Rodchenko (London: Thames & Hudson, 1979), 10; Liubov Rudneva, “Vladimir Tatlin— tritsatye gody,” in Vladimir Tatlin: Leben, Werk, Wirkung; Ein internationales Symposium, ed. Jürgen Harten (Cologne: DuMont, 1993), 462. 70. Gabo, Of Divers Arts, 155–56. 71.  John E. Bowlt, “Rodchenko and Chaikov,” Art and Artists 11 (October 1976): 28. 72. Tarabukin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel’, 40–41. 73.  For further discussion of this subject, see Andrei Kovalev, “Samosoznanie kritiki: Iz istorii sovetskogo iskusstvoznaniia 1920-kh godov,” Sovetskoe iskusstvoznanie, no. 26 (1990): 344–80. 74. Tarabukin, Smysl ikony, 14. 75.  Nikolai Punin to Anna Arens, July 24, 1914, repr. in Mir svetel liuboviu: Dnevniki, pisma, ed. L. A. Zykov (Moscow: Artist, 2000), 63. 76.  Nikolai Punin, “V zashchitu zhivopisi,” Apollon, no. 1 ( January 1917): 60–63. 77.  The Diaries of Nikolay Punin, 1904–1953, ed. Sidney Monas and Jennifer Greene Krupala, trans. Jennifer Greene Krupala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 29–30. 78. Punin, Mir svetel liuboviu, 16.

79. Tarabukin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel’, 31. 80.  Ibid., 32. 81.  Ibid., 37. 82.  Ibid., 131. 83.  Diaries of Nikolay Punin, 207. Chapter 4 1.  Viktor Ufimtsev, Govoria o sebe (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1973), 40, quoted in Kazimir Malevich: Letters, Documents, Memoirs, Criticism, ed. Irina Vakar, Tatiana Mikhienko, and Charlotte Douglas (London: Tate Publishing, 2015), 2:211. 2.  Nina Kandinsky, Kandinsky und ich (Munich: Kindler, 1976), 87, quoted in Bowlt, “Vasilii Kandinsky: The Russian Connection,” 33. 3.  Vasily Kandinsky, Rückblicke (Berlin: Der Sturm, 1913), trans. as Reminiscences in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 355–88. 4.  Vasily Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Munich: R. Piper, 1912), trans. as On the Spiritual in Art in Kandinsky: Complete Writings, 177. 5.  Nikolai Punin, “Mera iskusstva,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 9 (February 2, 1919): 2. 6.  Punin, “V zashchitu zhivopisi,” 62. 7.  Punin, “Puti sovremennogo iskusstva i russkaia ikonopis’,” 47. 8.  Nina Kandinsky quoted in Kandinsky in Paris, 1934– 1944 (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1985), 24. 9. Kandinsky, Reminiscences, 369. 10.  Vasily Kandinsky quoted in Dmitrii Sarabianov, “Kandinskii i russkaia ikona,” in Mnogogrannyi mir Kandinskogo, ed. Dmitrii Sarabianov, Natalia Avtonomova, and Valerii Turchin (Moscow: Nauka, 1998), 42. 11.  Vasily Kandinsky, “Interview with Karl Nierendorf ” (1937), in Kandinsky: Complete Writings, 806. 12. Grishchenko, O sviaziakh russkoi zhivopisi, 26; Benois, “Khudozhestvennye pisma,” 2. 13. Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, 151. 14.  Ya Shik, “U Matissa,” Rannee utro, October 26, 1911, quoted in Rusakov, “Matisse in Russia, 287. 15.  Vasily Kandinsky, “Content and Form” (“Soderzhanie i forma,” 1910), in Kandinsky: Complete Writings, 87–90; “Whither the ‘New’ Art?” (“Kuda idet ‘novoe’ iskusstvo,” 1911), in ibid., 98–104; and On the Spiritual in Art, in ibid., 119–219.

16. Kandinsky, Reminiscences, 377. 17.  Reinhold Heller, “Kandinsky and Traditions Apocalyptic,” Art Journal 43, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 20–21. 18.  Ibid., 19. 19.  Klaus Lankheit, “A History of the Almanac,” in The Blaue Reiter Almanac, ed. Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, trans. H. Falkenstein (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 32. 20.  Kandinsky’s paper was read by Nikolai Kulbin in the first section, on the “problems of aesthetics and art history,” of the Second All-​Russian Congress of Artists, since Kandinsky had to be back in Munich for the opening of the first Blaue Reiter exhibition and therefore was unable to attend the congress himself. Kandinsky’s presentation was generally well received and was especially commended by Dmitrii Ainalov. 21.  Other papers presented in the same section include A. P. Eissner’s “Ancient Monuments of the Southwest Caucuses,” A. S. Slavtsev’s “Restoration of the ancient Georgian Monastery in Zarzma,” and L. A. Matsulevich’s “Frescoes in the Church of Zarzma.” 22.  Bowlt, “Vasilii Kandinsky: The Russian Connection,” 1–5. 23.  Johan Tikkanen, Die Genesismosaiken von S. Marco in Venedig und ihr Verhältniss zu den Miniaturen der Cottonbibel, nebst einer Untersuchung über den Ursprung der mittelalterlichen Genesisdarstellung besonders in der byzantinischen und italienischen Kunst (Helsinki: Druckerei der finnischen Litteratur-​gesellschaft, 1891); Robert Forrer, Die Zeugdrucke der byzantinischen, romanischen, gothischen und späteren Kunstepochen (Strassburg, 1894); Oskar Wulff, Die Koimesiskirche in Nicäa und ihre Mosaiken nebst den verwandten kirchlichen Baudenkmälern: Eine Untersuchung zur Geschichte der byzantinischen Kunst im i. Jahrtausend (Strassburg: Heitz & Mündel, 1903); Friedrich Wilhelm Unger, Quellen der byzantinischen Kunstgeschichte (Vienna: W. Braumüller, 1878). 24.  In his discussion of color, Kandinsky observes that blue is reserved for the holiest figures in icon painting and is therefore the most spiritual color, citing Kondakov’s Histoire de l’art byzantin, 2:38: “les nimbes . . . sont dorés pour l’empereur et les prophètes (i.e., for human beings) et bleu de ciel pour les personnages symboliques (i.e., for those beings which have only spiritual existence).” Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, 182. 25. Kondakov, Histoire de l’art byzantin, 2:37. 26.  Vasily Kandinsky quoted in Lankheit, “History of the Almanac,” 30. 27.  Julius Meier-​Graefe, Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst: Vergleichende Betrachtung der bildenden Künste, als

notes to pages 133–142

239

Beitrag zu einer neuen Aesthetik, 3 vols. (Stuttgart: Verlag Julius Hoffmann, 1904). 28.  Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpyschologie (Munich: R. Piper, 1908), 93–95, trans. Michael Bullock, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997), 97–99. 29.  Susanna Partsch, Franz Marc, 1880–1916, trans. Karen Williams (Cologne: Taschen, 2001), 94. 30.  Lankheit, “History of the Almanac,” 30. 31.  Peg Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich: The Formative Jugendstil Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 262. 32.  The kokoshnik was a variety of traditional Russian headdress worn by women and girls in the northern regions of Russia during the twelfth to seventeenth centuries. 33.  Johannes Eichner, Kandinsky und Gabriele Münter: Von Ursprüngen moderner Kunst (Munich: Bruckmann, 1957), 118. 34.  Will Grohmann, Wassily Kandinsky: Life and Work (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1958), 50. 35. Eichner, Kandinsky und Gabriele Münter, 83–84. 36. Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, 125. 37.  Jonathan David Fineberg, Kandinsky in Paris, 1906– 1907 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984). 38.  Sjeng Scheijen, Diaghilev: A Life, trans. Jane Hedley-Próle and S. J. Leinbach (London: Profile, 2009). 39.  Ibid., 151. 40. Fineberg, Kandinsky in Paris, 53. 41.  For more information on Tenisheva’s activities in Paris, see Wendy R. Salmond, Arts and Crafts in Late Imperial Russia: Reviving the Kustar Art Industries, 1870–1917 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 140. 42. Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, 128. 43.  Ibid., 194. 44.  Ibid., 151. 45. Spira, Avant-​Garde Icon, 129. For an in-​depth study of Kandinsky’s interest in shamanism, folk culture, and ethnography, see Peg Weiss, Kandinsky and Old Russia: The Artist as Ethnographer and Shaman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). 46.  Kandinsky, “Content and Form,” 87. 47.  Much of the scholarship that has addressed Kandinsky’s interest in medieval and religious art has tended to fall into one of two categories. The first relies on a Theosophical explanation first theorized by Sixten Ringbom in his seminal publication The Sounding Cosmos: A Study in The Spiritualism

240

notes to pages 142–147

of Kandinsky and the Genesis of Abstract Painting (Åbo: Åbo Akademi, 1970). This theory attributes a pivotal role to Kandinsky’s interest in mysticism and the occult, and especially to Theosophy and the writings of Rudolf Steiner and Helena Blavatsky. However, Kandinsky himself was never a member of the Theosophical Society, and it seems that he had largely lost interest in the movement by 1910—the exact moment when he began to incorporate religious motifs into his paintings. Although Kandinsky wrote in a letter to Franz Marc that Theosophy should be mentioned “briefly” in the Blaue Reiter Almanac, any references to Theosophy were entirely omitted from the final version of the publication. Likewise, the Russian edition of On the Spiritual in Art, published in 1914, has no references to Blavatsky, Steiner, or Theosophy. Moreover, as Kenneth Lindsay and Peter Vergo convincingly demonstrate, even the part of the German version of On the Spiritual in Art in which Kandinsky cites Blavatsky’s Key to Theosophy “is nothing other than an extended review of contemporary intellectual and artistic trends, in the course of which the author refers to figures as diverse as Boecklin and Skriabin, Karl Marx and Edgar Allan Poe.” See Kandinsky: Complete Writings, 117. Apart from this one exception, none of Kandinsky’s other publications makes any reference to Theosophy. In fact, Kandinsky himself, in a 1926 letter to his friend Galka Scheyer, who had inquired about his connection with the movement, vehemently denounced attempts to associate him with Theosophy: “All this absolutely does not imply that I am a Theosophist! Nor have I ever been one. . . . After many, really many years of these misunderstandings and misconceptions I sometimes begin to get a little angry about it all!” Quoted by Peg Weiss in her review of Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style, by Rose-​Carol Washton Long, Art Journal 44, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 93. Scholarship in the second category has largely focused on Kandinsky’s connections with Russian fin de siècle literary culture and its preoccupation with apocalyptic and eschatological themes, which were prevalent in Russian Symbolist thought at this time. Both John E. Bowlt and Rose-​Carol Washton Long have presented convincing accounts of Kandinsky’s ongoing intellectual exchanges with turn-​of-​the-​century Russian intellectuals; see Bowlt and Washton Long, Life of Vasilii Kandinsky in Russian Art, and Washton Long, Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). Although certainly persuasive, these studies tend to limit their analyses to Kandinsky’s interest in religious imagery and themes more broadly, instead of focusing specifically on Russo-​Byzantine art. The few accounts

that have considered Kandinsky’s engagement with iconic representations, such as Dimitrii Sarabianov’s essay “Kandinsky and the Russian Icon” (Kandinskii i russkaia ikona), have tended to discuss it in purely formal and iconographic terms and have neglected to consider how icons might have influenced the artist conceptually. For the most part, however, any references to icons in scholarship on Kandinsky have inclined toward generalizations and oversimplification, limiting his interest in iconic forms to the Neoprimitivist impulse typically attributed to the Russian avant-​garde more broadly. 48.  Vasily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, in Bowlt and Washton Long, Life of Vasilii Kandinsky in Russian Art, 64. 49. Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, in Kandinsky: Complete Writings, 131. 50.  John E. Bowlt, “A Brazen Can-​Can in the Temple of Art: The Russian Avant-​Garde and Popular Culture,” in Modern Art and Popular Culture: Readings in High and Low, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik (New York: Museum of Modern Art; Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 143; John Malm­ stad, “The Sacred Profaned: Image and Word in the Paintings of Mikhail Larionov,” in Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-​Garde and Cultural Experiment, ed. John E. Bowlt and Olga Matich (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 157. 51.  Malmstad, “Sacred Profaned,” 169. 52.  Mikhail Larionov, foreword to Pervaia vystavka lubkov, organizovannaia D. N. Vinogradovym 19–24 fevralia (Moscow: Pechatnoe delo, 1913), in Sharp, Russian Modernism, 274. 53. Sharp, Russian Modernism, 242. 54.  Goncharova was repeatedly fined on the charges of obscenity and blasphemy, and several of her paintings treating religious themes were confiscated and removed from the opening of the Donkey’s Tail Exhibition in 1912 and then again from her retrospective exhibition in St. Petersburg in 1914. For a full discussion of this topic, see Sharp, Russian Modernism, 238–53. 55.  David Burliuk et al., Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu (Moscow: G. L. Kuz’min, 1912). This infamous manifesto was first published in the Futurist collection of the same name and has been translated and republished numerous times. See Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 45–46, and Carl Proffer et al., eds., Russian Literature of the Twenties: An Anthology (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1987), 542. 56.  Iakov Tugenkhold, “Sovremennoe iskusstvo i narod­ nost’,” Severnye zapiski, no. 11 (November 1913): 157; Alexander Benois, “Povorot k Lubku,” Rech’, no. 75 (March 18, 1909): 2.

57. Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, in Bowlt and Washton Long, Life of Vasilii Kandinsky in Russian Art, 64. 58.  Vasily Kandinsky, “Franz Marc,” Cahiers d’art 11 (1936), trans. in Kandinsky: Complete Writings, 796. 59.  Muratov, “Vystavka drevnerusskogo iskusstva,” 36. 60. Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, in Kandinsky: Complete Writings, 131. 61.  Ibid., 213. 62.  B. Kozlov, “Khudozhestvennyi sezon v Ekaterinoslave,” Apollon, no. 11 (1910): 39. 63.  Vasily Kandinsky, letter to the editor, Russkoe slovo, no. 102 (May 4, 1913), quoted in Bowlt and Washton Long, Life of Vasilii Kandinsky in Russian Art, 21. 64.  Kandinsky, “Franz Marc,” 796. 65.  Viktor Bychkov, The Aesthetic Face of Being: Art in the Theology of Pavel Florensky, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993). 66.  Caryl Emerson, “Russian Orthodoxy and the Early Bakhtin,” in “Religious Thought and Contemporary Critical Theory,” special issue, Religion and Literature 22, nos. 2–3 (Summer–Autumn 1990): 115. 67.  Anthony Ugolnik, The Illuminating Icon (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1989), 49, 50, and 52. 68. Bychkov, Aesthetic Face, 29–30. 69.  Eckart von Sydow, Die deutsche expressionistische Kultur und Malerei (Berlin: Furche-​Verlag, 1920), 143. 70. Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, in Kandinsky: Complete Writings, 166. 71.  Washton Long, Kandinsky, 66. 72.  For more information on Kandinsky’s activities at the RAKhN, see Nicoletta Misler, “Vasilii Kandinsky and the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences,” Experiment 8, no. 1 (2002): 173–85. 73.  Clemena Antonova, Space, Time, and Presence in the Icon: Seeing the World with the Eyes of God (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2010), 18. 74.  Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 8, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, ed. Michael Fordham, trans. R. F. C. Hull, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 325–42. 75. Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, in Kandinsky: Complete Writings, 209. 76.  Vasily Kandinsky to Will Grohmann, November 21, 1925, cited in Weiss, Kandinsky and Old Russia, xv; Vasily Kandinsky, “Abstract and Concrete Art,” London Bulletin (1939), in Kandinsky: Complete Writings, 841.

notes to pages 147–154

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77. Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, in Kandinsky: Complete Writings, 197. 78. Bychkov, Aesthetic Face, 71. 79.  For an in-​depth analysis of the different Russo-​ Byzantine iconographic types that Kandinsky employed during these years, see Sarabianov, “Kandinskii i russkaia ikona,” in Sarabianov, Avtonomova, and Turchin, Mnogogrannyi mir Kandinskogo, 42–49. 80. Weiss, Kandinsky and Old Russia, 148–50. 81.  Washton Long cites the extremely long lance as the identifying feature of Saint George, pointing out that it is the single most dominant characteristic of Kandinsky’s three oil paintings and three glass paintings (all from 1911) that were specifically titled Saint George. See Washton Long, “Vasilii Kandinsky, 1909–1913: Painting and Theory,” in Bowlt and Washton Long, Life of Vasilii Kandinsky In Russian Art, 217–20. 82.  Washton Long provides an exhaustive analysis of Kandinsky’s pre–World War I paintings on the subjects of All Saints Day (1911), the Sound of Trumpets, and the Deluge (1913) in Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style. Washton Long argues that Kandinsky’s interest in these motifs derived primarily from Theosophy and were especially stimulated by Rudolf Steiner’s exegesis of the Revelation of Saint John. Attributing what she considers to be Kandinsky’s eschatological tendencies toward fin de siècle apocalypticism, Washton Long almost exclusively relies on iconographic analysis to support her argument. Similarly, in his essay “Kandinskii i russkaia ikona,” Sarabianov offers an in-​depth overview of all the possible Russo-​Byzantine sources that may have influenced Kandinsky’s work in the years 1909–13. My own analyses are largely informed by his findings. 83.  Vasily Kandinsky, “Komposition 6,” in Kandinsky, 1901–1913 (Berlin: Verlag Der Sturm, 1913), xxxv–xxxviii, trans. in Kandinsky: Complete Writings, 385. 84.  Ibid., 389. 85.  Clement Greenberg, “Obituary and Review of an Exhibition of Kandinsky,” The Nation, January 13, 1945, repr. in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 3–4. 86.  Ibid., 5. 87. Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, in Kandinsky: Complete Writings, 194–95. 88.  Ibid., 195. 89. Tarabukin, Smysl ikony, 131. 90. Antonova, Space, Time, and Presence in the Icon, 141. 91.  Ibid., 107.

242

notes to pages 154–172

92. Bychkov, Aesthetic Face, 61. 93.  For more information on medieval theories of vision, see Robert S. Nelson, ed., Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 94. Antonova, Space, Time, and Presence in the Icon, 2. 95.  Cornelia Tsakiridou, Icons in Time, Persons in Eternity: Orthodox Theology and the Aesthetics of the Christian Image (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 255–58. 96.  A. Vasiliev, “Andrei Rublev i Gregorii Palama,” Zhurnal Moskovskoi patriarkhii, no. 10 (1960): 33–44; Popova, “Medieval Russian Painting,” 54–58. 97.  Florensky, “Reverse Perspevtive” (1920), in Beyond Vision, 201–72. 98.  See Zernov, Russian Religious Renaissance. 99.  Berdiaev et al., Vekhi. 100.  For an in-​depth discussion of the Vekhi group, see Leonard Schapiro, “The Vekhi Group and the Mystique of Revolution,” Slavonic and East European Review 34, no. 82 (1955): 56–76. 101.  Semen Frank, Biografiia P. B. Struve (New York: Izd-​ vo im. Chekhova, 1956), 81. 102.  Schapiro, “Vekhi Group,” 78. 103.  Nikolai Berdiaev, Freedom and the Spirit (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1935). 104.  Vasily Kandinsky to Franz Marc, September 1, 1911, cited in Lankheit, “History of the Almanac,” 17. 105.  Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner, Die transcendentale Physik und die sogenannte Philosophie; Henri Bergson, Introduction à la métaphysique; Rudolph Steiner, Theosophie: Einführung in übersinnliche Welterkenntnis und Menschenbestimmung. Misler, “Pavel Florensky as Art Historian,” 61. 106.  The philosopher Pavel Popov, brother of the avant-​ garde painter Liubov Popova, hosted weekly gatherings in their Moscow home from 1912 to 1914. Among the regular attendants were artists Aleksei Grishchenko, Vera Pestel, Vladimir Tatlin, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Alexander Vesnin, and critics and philosophers Fedor Stepun, Boris Ternovets, Alexander Toporkov, Boris Vipper, and Pavel Florensky. 107.  Kandinsky taught at the VKhUTEMAS from 1920 through the end of 1921, and Florensky taught there from 1921 through 1924. 108.  Misler, “Pavel Florensky as Art Historian,” 24. 109.  It was only in the early 2000s that scholars finally began to examine Kandinsky’s activities in early and postrevolutionary Russia. For example, see Experiment 8, no. 1 (2002), and Experiment 9, no. 1 (2003).

110.  See Bychkov, Aesthetic Face, 43, and Nicoletta Misler, “Toward an Exact Aesthetics: Pavel Florensky and the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences,” in Bowlt and Matich, Laboratory of Dreams, 118–34. 111.  Lev Zhegin, “Vospominaniia o P. A. Florenskom,” in Makovets, 1922–1926: Sbornik materialov po istorii ob’edineniia, ed. Mira Nemirovskaia and Evgen’ia Iliukhina (Moscow: Gos. Tret’iakovskaia galereia, 1994), 99, quoted in Misler, “Pavel Florensky as Art Historian,” 75. 112.  Misler, “Pavel Florensky as Art Historian,” 73–75. 113.  Douglas Greenfield, “Florensky and the Binocular Body,” in Gatrall and Greenfield, Alter Icons, 198. 114.  Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” 216. 115.  Pavel Florensky, Sochineniia, ed. Igumen Andronik (A. S. Trubachev), P. V. Florensky, and M. S. Trubacheva, vol. 3 [1] (Moscow: Mysl’, 1999), 365, quoted in Greenfield, “Florensky and the Binocular Body,” 195. 116.  Pavel Florensky, Stat’i i isledovaia po istorii i filosofii iskusstva i arkheologii, ed. Igumen Andronik (A. S. Trubachev) (Moscow: Mysl’, 2000), 252, quoted in Greenfield, “Florensky and the Binocular Body,” 195. 117.  Greenfield, “Florensky and the Binocular Body,” 199. 118.  Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” 258. 119.  Pavel Florensky, Analiz prostranstvennosti i vremeni v khudozhestvenno-​izobrazitel’nykh proizvedeniiakh, ed. Oleg Genisaretskii and M. S. Trubacheva (Moscow: Izdatel’skaia gruppa “Progress,” 1993), 127–28, cited in Florensky, Beyond Vision, 62. 120.  Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” 271. 121.  Kandinsky, “Content and Form,” 87. 122.  Misler, “Pavel Florensky as Art Historian,” 82. 123. Florensky, Analiz prostranstvennosti, 126. 124.  Ibid., 126–28. 125.  Greenfield, “Florensky and the Binocular Body,” 197–98. 126.  Pavel Florensky, The Trinity–St. Sergius Lavra and Russia, trans. Robert Bird (New Haven: Variable Press, 1995), 7, 29 (orginally published as “Troitse-​Sergieva Lavra i Rossiia,” in Troitse-​Sergieva Lavra, ed. Pavel Florensky, Pavel Kapterev, and Yurii Olsuf ’ev [Sergiev Posad: Tipografiia I. Ivanov, 1919], 3–29). 127.  Greenfield, “Florensky and the Binocular Body,” 198. 128. Kandinsky, Reminiscences, 382. 129.  See Marit Werenskiold, “Kandinsky’s Moscow,” Art in America 77 (March 1989): 96–111. 130. Kandinsky, Reminiscences, 382. 131.  Florensky, “The Church Ritual as a Synthesis of the Arts,” in Beyond Vision, 101.

132.  Kandinsky, “Content and Form,” 88. 133.  Alexander Rodchenko, “Slogans” (December 12, 1920), in Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003), 340. 134.  Varvara Stepanova, Diary (1920), quoted in Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 31–32. 135.  Misler, “Pavel Florensky as Art Historian,” 79. 136. “VKhUTEMAS,” Lef 2 (April–May 1923): 174, quoted in Misler, “Pavel Florensky as Art Historian,” 78. Chapter 5 1.  0.10: The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting was opened on December 19, 1915, and ran until January 19, 1916. It was held in the private art gallery of Nadezhda Dobychina, which was located in the nineteenth-​century Adamini House on the Field of Mars in St. Petersburg. The exhibition showcased 155 works by Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, Liubov Popova, Olga Rozanova, Nadezhda Udalstova, Ksenia Boguslavskaia, Ivan Puni, Ivan Kliun, Vasilii Kamenskii, Nathan Altman, Vera Pestel, Mikhail Menkov, Maria Vasilieva, and Anna Kirillova. For a detailed analysis of the 0.10 exhibition, see Linda S. Boersma, 0.10: The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1994); Anatolii Strigalev, “O Poslednei futuristicheskoi vystavke kartin ‘0,10 (Nol’-Desiat’),’ ” Nauchno-​analiticheskii informatsionnyi biulleten’ Fonda K. S. Malevicha (2001): 12–38; Aleksandra Shatskikh, “0.10: The Last Futurist Exhibition,” in Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism, trans. Marian Schwartz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 101–23; and Matthew Drutt, ed., In Search of 0,10: The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting (Riehen, Basel: Fondation Beyeler, 2015). 2.  Vecher Petrograda, January 20, 1916, quoted in Boersma, 0.10, 46. 3.  Golos Rossii, January 21, 1916, quoted in Boersma, 0.10, 65. 4. Shatskikh, Black Square, 101. 5.  Vasilii Rakitin, “The Artisan and the Prophet: Marginal Notes on Two Artistic Careers,” in The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-​Garde, 1915–1932 (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1992), 32. 6.  In most English-​language scholarship Posledniaia futuristicheskaia vystavka kartin has been translated as The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting. However, it is important to note that the Russian word “poslednii” can be translated on the one hand as the “last,” or “final,” or on the other as the “latest,” or “most recent.”

notes to pages 172–179

243

7. Sychev, Drevlekhranilishche pamiatnikov, 7; Birzhevye vedomosti, quoted in Basner, “Nachalo,” 33. 8.  Punin, “Puti sovremennogo iskusstva i russkaia ikonopis’,” 46; Tarabukin, Smysl ikony, 43. 9.  Alexander Benois, “Posledniaia futuristskaia vystavka,” Rech’, no. 8 ( January 9, 1916), quoted in Kazimir Malevich: Letters, Documents, Memoirs, Criticism, 2:517. 10.  Nikolai Punin, Tatlin (protiv kubizma) (St. Petersburg: Gos. izdatel’stvo, 1921). For a recent edition, see Punin, O Tatline, ed. Irina Punina and Vasilii Rakitin (Moscow: Literaturno-​ khudozhestvennoe agenstvo “RA,” 1994), 27–42. For an abridged version in English, see Zhadova, Tatlin, 347–93. 11.  Aleksei Lidov, Spatial Icons: Performativity in Byzantium and Medieval Russia (Moscow: Indrik, 2011), 19; Bissera Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 2–3. 12. Lidov, Spatial Icons, 42; Pentcheva, Sensual Icon, 8. 13. Pentcheva, Sensual Icon, 210. 14.  Ibid., 205, 210. 15.  Strigalev, “O Poslednei futuristicheskoi vystavke,” 12; Boersma, 0.10, 74; Masha Chlenova, “0.10,” in Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art, ed. Leah Dickerman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 206–8. Shatskikh observes that Tatlin had already exhibited his “painterly reliefs” a year and a half earlier at the Tramway V Exhibition and that the artist’s volumetric constructions did not create “a separate and integral ‘counter-​ relief ’ trend . . . in the Russian avant-​garde.” However, she also concedes that Tatlin’s reliefs “served as a point of departure for the movement toward Constructivism.” Shatskikh, Black Square, 104. Indeed, Tatlin himself subsequently claimed that he was “the founder of Constructivism,” and while there are certainly marked differences between his artistic project and that of the Obmokhu artists such as Alexander Rodchenko, Karl Ioganson, and Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg, Tatlin’s move into three-​dimensional construction and his use of industrial materials nonetheless made a considerable impact on the later Constructivists. 16.  See Strigalev, “O Poslednei futuristicheskoi vystavke,”12–24; Aleksandra Shatskikh, Kazimir Malevich i obshchestvo Supremus (Moscow: Tri kvadrata, 2009), 103–20; and Boersma, 0.10, 38, 50–51. Charlotte Douglas, “Tatlin i Malevich: Istoriia i teoriia, 1914–15,” in Harten, Vladimir Tatlin, 428–37. 17.  Boris Arvatov, “Dve gruppirovki,” Zrelishcha 8 (1922): 9; Nikolai Punin, “Pervye futuristicheskie boi: Glava iz

244

notes to pages 179–183

memuarov Iskusstvo i revolutsiia (1930–1932),” ed. Leonid Zykov, Russkaia mysl’, nos. 4268–70 (May 6–12, 1999), translated as “The First Futurist Battles: Chapter from the Memoir Art and Revolution (1930–1932),” in Kazimir Malevich: Letters, Documents, Memoirs, Criticism, 2:145. 18.  Ivan Kliun, Moi put’ v iskusstve: Vospominaniia, stat’i, dnevniki (Moscow: Russkii avangard, 1999), 139. 19.  Tatlin and Malevich had exhibited their works together at the following exhibitions: Exhibition of Paintings of the Union of Youth Society of Artists in St. Petersburg, 1911; Exhibition of Paintings of the Union of Youth Society of Artists in St. Petersburg, 1912; Exhibition of Paintings of the Donkey’s Tail Group of Artists in Moscow, 1912; Contemporary-​Painting Exhibition of Paintings in Moscow, 1912–13; Exhibition of Paintings of the Union of Youth Society of Artists in St. Petersburg, 1913–14; Second Free-​Painting Exhibition of Paintings in Moscow, 1913–14; Exhibition of Paintings by Artists for Comrade Warriors in Moscow, 1914–15; Paintings of the Moscow Society of Women Artists for the Casualties of War in Moscow, 1914–15; Exhibition Works of Russian Theater from the Collection of Levkii Zheverzheev in Petrograd, 1915. In addition, a photograph from 1914 shows the two artists sitting together in Malevich’s country house, or dacha, in Nemchinovka. 20.  Vera Pestel, “Fragmenty dnevnika: Vospominaniia; ‘O khudozhestvennom proizvedenii,’ ” in Amazonki avangarda, ed. G. F. Kovalenko (Moscow: Nauka, 2001), 246. 21.  Anatolii Strigalev, “From Painting to the Construction of Matter,” in Zhadova, Tatlin, 42n105. 22.  Kazimir Malevich, “The Constructive Painting of Russian Artists and Constructivism,” in Essays on Art, 1915–1933, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Glowacki-​Prus and Arnold McMillin (London: Rapp & Whiting; Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour Editions, 1969), 2:75. 23.  For a contemporary account of the tensions surrounding the 0.10 exhibition, see Varvara Stepanova, “Diary: 1919–1921,” in Kazimir Malevich: Letters, Documents, Memoirs, Criticism, 2:172–74. For additional accounts, see Vladimir Vejdle, “Art Under Soviet Power,” in Kazimir Malevich: Letters, Documents, Memoirs, Criticism, 2:155, and Charlotte Douglas, “Malevich and Western European Art Theory,” in Malevich: Artist and Theoretician, ed. Charlotte Douglas and Evgeniia Petrova (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), 56. 24.  Strigalev, Boersma, and Alan C. Birnholz all suggest that this shared preoccupation with the corner both provoked and exacerbated the latent rivalry between the two artists. See Boersma, 0.10, 67–69; Anatolii Strigalev and Jürgen Harten, eds., Vladimir Tatlin: Retrospektive (Cologne:

Dumont, 1993), 250n352; and Alan C. Birnholz, “Forms, Angles, and Corners: On Meaning in Russian Avant-​Garde Art,” Arts Magazine 51 (February 1977): 105. By contrast, Shatskikh challenges this hypothesis, arguing that Tatlin only installed his Corner Counter-​Reliefs a few hours before the exhibition opened to the public, by which point all of Malevich’s works, including the Black Square, were already on display; see Shatskikh, Black Square, 108–9. 25.  Jane Ashton Sharp, “The Critical Reception of the 0.10 Exhibition: Malevich and Benua,” in Great Utopia, 49. 26.  Ironically, under the influence of Matthew Stewart Prichard, in the early 1910s Matisse became increasingly interested in Byzantine art as a precursor to modernist aesthetics. See Nelson, “Modernism’s Byzantium,” 24–28, and Antliff, “Rhythms of Duration.” 27.  Sharp, “Critical Reception of 0.10,” 49. 28.  For further discussion of the various meanings of the corner installation, see Birnholz, “Forms, Angles, and Corners.” 29. Kondakov, Russian Icon, 26–30. 30.  Because the Mandylion was an acheiropoieton, or an image “not made by human hands,” it was not only viewed as a direct embodiment of the Incarnation, which provided an archetypal representation of Christ, but was also understood as granting divine sanction to the practice of icon painting in general. See Sherwin Simmons, “Kasimir Malevich’s ‘Black Square’: The Transformed Self, Part Three; The Icon Unmasked,” Arts Magazine 53 (December 1978): 129. 31.  For more recent discussions of the Edessa legend and the origins of the Mandylion in Eastern Orthodoxy, see Averil Cameron, “The History of the Image of Edessa: The Telling of a Story,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 7 (1983): 80–94; Aleksei Lidov, “Sviatoi Mandilion: Istoriia relikvii,” in Spas Nerukotvornyi v russkoi ikone, ed. L. M. Evseeva, A. M. Lidov, and N. N. Chugreeva (Moscow: Moskovskie uchebniki i kartolitografiia, 2005), 12–39; Lidov, “Holy Face—Holy Script— Holy Gate: An Image-​Paradigm of the ‘Blessed City’ in Christian Hierotopy,” in Hierotopy: Comparative Studies of Sacred Spaces, ed. Aleksei Lidov (Moscow: Indrik, 2009), 110–43. 32.  For a discussion of Malevich’s persistent use of Christian iconography, see Jean-​Claude Marcadé, “Malevich i pravoslavnaia ikonografiia,” in Poeziia i zhivopis’: Sbornik trudov pamiati N. I. Khardzhieva, ed. Dmitrii Sarabianov and Mikhail Meilakh (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 2000), 167–73. For Tatlin’s interest in Russo-​Byzantine art, see Anatolii Strigalev, “Znachenie traditsii drevenerusskogo i narodnogo iskusstva v tvorchestve Tatlina,” in Harten, Vladimir Tatlin, 368–72.

33.  For a discussion of Malevich’s activities at Fedor Rerberg’s Art Institute, see John E. Bowlt, “Kazimir Malevich and Fedor Rerberg,” in Rethinking Malevich: Proceedings of a Conference in Celebration of the 125th Anniversary of Kazimir Malevich’s Birth, ed. Charlotte Douglas and Christina Lodder (London: Pindar Press, 2007), 1–26. 34.  For a detailed analysis of these works, see Myroslava M. Mudrak, “Kazimir Malevich and the Liturgical Tradition of Eastern Christianity,” in Betancourt and Taroutina, Byzantium/Modernism, 37–72. 35.  Mikhail Vrubel to Anna Vrubel, June 7, 1887, in Gomberg-​Verzhbinskaia, Podkopaeva, and Novikov, Vrubel’: Perepiska, 49. 36.  Kazimir Malevich, “Chapters from an Artist’s Autobiography,” in Kazimir Malevich: Letters, Documents, Memoirs, Criticism, 1:20. 37.  Ibid., 21. 38.  Mudrak, “Malevich and the Liturgical Tradition,” 69, 70. 39.  Larissa Zhadova writes that from 1895 to 1902 Tatlin worked in an icon-​painting studio with two young artists, Levenets and Kharchenko, whom he considered his first two teachers of art. See Zhadova, Tatlin, 445. 40.  Vladimir Tatlin, “Brief Survey” (1952–53), in Zhadova, Tatlin, 322. 41.  Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 11. 42.  For further discussion of liturgical lighting and depictions of light in Byzantium, see Robert S. Nelson, “Where God Walked and Monks Pray,” in Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Kristen M. Collins (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2006), 1–38. 43.  For a detailed analysis of Byzantine painting techniques, see David C. Winfield, “Middle and Later Byzantine Wall Painting Methods: A Comparative Study,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 22 (1968): 61–139. 44.  Strigalev, “Znachenie traditsii,” 370. 45.  Magdalena Dabrowski, “Tatlin and Cubism,” Notes in the History of Art 11, nos. 3–4 (Spring–Summer 1992): 40. 46.  Alexander Shevchenko, Neoprimitivizm: Ego teoriia, ego vozmozhnosti, ego dostizheniia (Moscow: Tipografiia 1-i Moskovskoi trudovoi arteli, 1913), quoted in translation in John E. Bowlt, ed., Russian Art of the Avant-​Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902–1934 (New York: Viking Press, 1976), 45, 47. 47.  Dmitrii Sarabianov, “Tatlin’s Painting,” in Zhadova, Tatlin, 49, 53. 48.  All four of these works were acquired by Sergei Shchukin for his collection shortly after they were painted,

notes to pages 183–191

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and would have been directly available to Goncharova in the early 1910s. 49.  Eugène-​Melchior de Vogüé, “Peintres russes,” Figaro, no. 308 (November 4, 1906): 1; C. de Danilowicz, “L’exposition russe,” L’art et les artistes 4 (October 1906–March 1907): 320. 50. Sharp, Russian Modernism, 186–87. 51.  Strigalev and Harten catalogue this as a work on paper (cat. 237, plate 64) and also mention an oil painting with the same name and possibly the same design, shown by Tatlin in the Union of Youth Exhibition in Petersburg at the end of 1913, together with three ink drawings (cat. 235). See Strigalev and Harten, Vladimir Tatlin: Retrospektive, 228–29. 52.  Based on some of Tatlin’s statements, Zhadova proposes several versions of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Madonna and Child as possible sources. She also suggests that Composition-​Analysis might have been a synthesis of both Russian iconic and Renaissance sources. See Zhadova, “Composition-​Analysis, or a New Synthesis?,” in Tatlin, 63–66, and plates 99–102. By contrast, Sarabianov argues for an anonymous Italian Madonna dating from the end of the sixteenth to the beginning of the seventeenth centuries. See Sarabianov, “Tatlin’s Painting,” 56. Finally, Strigalev dismisses both attributions, simply proposing an “Old Master” source. See Anatolii Strigalev, “Tatlin i Pikasso,” in Pikasso i okrestnosti: Sbornik statei, ed. M. A. Busev (Moscow: Progress-​ Traditsiia, 2006), 128n59, 141. 53.  Zhadova, “Composition-​Analysis,” 66. 54.  Copies of this and other European journals were kept in the personal collection of Vladimir Lebedev, a close friend and associate of Tatlin. See Strigalev, “Tatlin i Pikasso,”138n21, and Douglas, “Tatlin i Malevich,” 433. 55.  For a long time it was believed that Tatlin’s now-legendary visit to Picasso’s studio at 242 Boulevard de Raspail in Paris took place in the early summer of 1913. Margit Rowell, John Milner, and Christina Lodder all list this date. See Margit Rowell, “Vladimir Tatlin: Form/Faktura,” in “Soviet Revolutionary Culture,” special issue, October 7 (Winter 1978): 88n9; John Milner, Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-​Garde (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 70; and Lodder, Russian Constructivism, 9. However, Strigalev has challenged this dating by demonstrating that Tatlin’s trip to the West took place in the spring of 1914. Tatlin was in Berlin for the opening of the Russian Folk Art Exhibition on February 14, 1914. This exhibition closed on March 19, and on April 7 or 8 Tatlin was in Paris, only returning to Russia around April 14. See Anatolii Strigalev, “O poezdke Tatlina v Berlin i Parizh,” Iskusstvo, nos. 2 and 3 (1989): 39–44 and 26–31. There are also conflicting

246

notes to pages 192–198

accounts about the nature of the visit. Some imply repeated visits, while others describe only one. See Milner, Vladimir Tatlin, 70, and Nobert Lynton, Tatlin’s Tower: Monument to Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 33. 56.  Questionnaire, TsGALI, fond 1938, inventory 1, unit 59, p. 1, in Zhadova, Tatlin, 262. 57.  Anatolii Strigalev, “Universitety khudozhnika Tatlina,” Voprosy iskusstvoznaniia 9, pt. 2 (1996): 429. 58.  B. Lubetkin, “The Origins of Constructivism” (lecture given to Cambridge University School of Architecture, May 1, 1969), tape recording, cited in Lodder, Russian Constructivism, 12. 59. Ibid. 60.  S. K. Isakov, “K ‘kontrreliefam’ Tatlina,” Novyi zhurnal dlia vseh (Petrograd), no. 12 (1915): 46–50, quoted in Zhadova, Tatlin, 334; V. E. Meierkhol’d and V. M. Bebutov, “K postanovke Zor” (1920), quoted in D. I. Zolotnitskii, Zori teatral’nogo Oktiabria (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1976), 103. 61. Spira, Avant-​Garde Icon, 110. 62.  Ibid., 111. 63.  Gough, “Faktura,” 44–45; Grishchenko, O sviaziakh russkoi zhivopisi, 26. 64.  Gough, “Faktura,” 40. 65.  Vladimir Markov, Printsipy tvorchestva v plasticheskikh iskusstvakh: Faktura (St. Petersburg: Soiuz molodezhi, 1914), as translated in Vladimir Markov and Russian Primitivism: A Charter for the Avant-​Garde, ed. Jeremy Howard, Irena Bužinska, and Z. S. Strother (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2015), 207–11. 66.  For a rigorous theoretical discussion of the construction of virtual spaces versus real spaces in the history of art, see David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (New York: Phaidon Press, 2003). 67.  Gough, “Faktura,” 52. 68.  Ibid., 49–52. 69. Punin, Tatlin (protiv kubizma), as edited in O Tatline, 27–42. The majority of the English translations are my own, although in some passages I have relied on Eugenia Lockwood’s translations in Zhadova’s Tatlin. 70. Florensky, Iconostasis, cited in Bychkov, Aesthetic Face, 53. 71. Punin, O Tatline, 28, 32–34, 41. 72.  Ibid., 31. 73.  Ibid., 32. 74.  Strigalev, “O Poslednei futuristicheskoi vystavke,” 24. 75.  As discussed in the first chapter, some of these ecclesiastical prohibitions were overruled during the reigns of

Catherine II and Alexander I in order to accommodate the royal preference for Baroque and neoclassical aesthetics. 76. Pentcheva, Sensual Icon, 11, 14. 77.  Ibid., 11–12. 78. Kondakov, Histoire et monuments des émaux byzantins, 84. 79.  Ibid., 302. 80. Kondakov, Russian Icon, 28–30. 81. Shatskikh, Black Square, 108. 82.  Gough, “Faktura,” 45. 83.  This work is a 1925 reconstruction by Tatlin of the original 1915 Corner Counter-​Relief and incorporates some of the original materials. It is now housed at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. 84.  A number of Tatlin’s reliefs were reconstructed in 1993–96 by Dmitrii Dimakov, Elena Lapshina, and Igor Fedotov under the direction of Anatolii Strigalev. They are currently housed in the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. 85.  Rico Franses, “Lacan and Byzantine Art: In the Beginning Was the Image,” in Betancourt and Taroutina, Byzantium/Modernism, 312. 86.  Robert S. Nelson, “To Say and to See: Ekphrasis and Vision in Byzantium,” in Nelson, Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance, 158. See also Lidov, Spatial Icons, 5–51; Pent­ cheva, Sensual Icon, 5–9; and Liz James, “Sense and Sensibility in Byzantium,” Art History 27, no. 4 (2004): 523–37. 87.  Nelson, “To Say and to See,” 156. 88.  Ibid., 155. 89.  Vladimir Tatlin et al., “Nasha predstoiashchaia rabota,” VIII s’ezd sovetov: Ezhednevnyi biulleten’ s’ezda, no. 13 ( January 1921): 11, trans. as “The Work Ahead of Us,” in Zhadova, Tatlin, 239. 90.  Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 76. 91.  Otto Demus, Byzantine Mosaic Decoration: Aspects of Monumental Art in Byzantium (Boston: Boston Book & Art Shop, 1955), 13–14. 92. Punin, O Tatline, 33. 93.  Tatlin, “Brief Survey,” 322. 94.  Zhadova, “Composition-​Analysis,” 66. 95.  Questionnaire, TsGALI, fond 1938, inventory 1, unit 59, p. 1, in Zhadova, Tatlin, 262. 96.  For more information on Aleksei Afanasiev, see Gosudarstvennaia Tretiakovskaia galereia, ser. 2, vol. 4, bk. 1, 52. 97.  Strigalev, “Znachenie traditsii,” 369. 98. Tarabukin, Smysl ikony, 125.

99.  Ibid., 124–25. 100.  Ibid., 48. 101.  Vzdornov and Dunaev, “Nikolai Mikhailovich Tarabukin i ego kniga Philosofia ikony,” in Tarabukin, Smysl ikony, 9; Strigalev, “Universitety khudozhnika Tatlina,” 428. 102.  Mikhail Matiushin, “O vystavke ‘Poslednikh futuristov,’ ” Ocharovannyi strannik (Petrograd), Spring 1916, 17–18. 103.  Nikolai Punin, “V Moskve: O novykh khudozhestvennykh gruppirovkakh,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 10 (February 9, 1919), quoted in Kazimir Malevich: Letters, Documents, Memoirs, Criticism, 2:150. 104.  Kazimir Malevich to Alexander Benois, May 1916, in Kazimir Malevich: Letters, Documents, Memoirs, Criticism, 1:82–86. 105.  Benois, “Last Futurist Exhibition,” 514–17. 106.  Sharp, “Critical Reception of 0.10,” 42. 107.  Kazimir Malevich, The World as Non-​Objectivity: Unpublished Writings 1922–25, vol. 3 of Essays on Art, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Glowacki-​Prus and Edmund T. Litte (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1976), 354. Malevich’s Mir kak bezpredmetnost’ was written between 1924 and 1925 but was first published in 1927 under the German title Die gegenstandslose Welt as the eleventh book in the Bauhaus Book series under the editorship of Walter Gropius and Laszlo Moholy-​Nagy. 108.  See Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 109.  Ibid., xx–xxii. 110.  Sharp, “Critical Reception of 0.10,” 42. 111.  The dating of the Black Square to 1913 persisted well into the 1980s. 112.  The year 1913 witnessed a number of important historical and cultural milestones, including the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty, the successful resolution of the Balkan Wars, and the premieres of Diaghilev’s Rite of Spring and the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun in Paris and St. Petersburg respectively. See John E. Bowlt, “The Year 1913: Crossroads of Past and Future,” in Moscow and St. Petersburg, 319–46. 113. Shatskikh, Black Square, 2. 114.  Ibid., 37–53. 115.  See ibid., 85–98, and Charlotte Douglas, “The Art of Pure Design: The Move to Abstraction in Russian and English Art and Textiles; A Meditation,” in Russian Art and the West: A Century of Dialogue in Painting, Architecture, and the Decorative Arts, ed. Rosalind P. Blakesley and Susan E. Reid (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), 99–101. 116. Shatskikh, Black Square, 47.

notes to pages 198–206

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117.  Christina Lodder, “Malevich as Exhibition Maker,” in Malevich, ed. Achim Borchardt-​Hume (London: Tate Publishing, 2015), 94. 118.  Fer, “Imagining a Point of Origin,” 7. 119.  Ivan Kliun, “Kazimir Malevich: Memoirs,” in Kazimir Malevich: Letters, Documents, Memoirs, Criticism, 2:79. 120.  Rakitin, “Artisan and the Prophet,” 30. 121. Shatskikh, Black Square, 45. 122.  For example, see Kazimir Malevich, “I Am the Beginning” in The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism: Unpublished Writings, 1913–1933, vol. 4 of Essays on Art, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Hoffmann (Copenhagen: Borgen Verlag, 1978), 12–26; and the following letters: Kazimir Malevich to Mikhail Matiushin, April 12, 1916; to Pavel Ettinger, April 3, 1920; to Mikhail Gershenzon, December 21, 1919, and April 11, 1920, all in Kazimir Malevich: Letters, Documents, Memoirs, Criticism, 1:80–81, 127–28, 116–20, 128–30. 123.  Varvara Stepanova, Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda: Pisma, poeticheskie opyty, zapiski khudozhnitsy, ed. A. N. Lavrentiev and V. A. Rodchenko (Moscow: Sfera, 1994), 61, cited in Shatskikh, Black Square, 127. 124.  N. M. Gershenzon-​Chegodaeva, Pervye shagi zhiznennogo puti: Vospominaniia docheri Mikhaila Gershenzona (Moscow: Zakharov, 2000), 127, cited in Kazimir Male­ vich: Letters, Documents, Memoirs, Criticism, 1:109. 125.  Alexei Kurbanovsky, “Malevich’s Mystic Signs: From Iconoclasm to New Theology,” in Steinberg and Coleman, Sacred Stories, 363–64. 126.  Kazimir Malevich, “God Is Not Cast Down: Art, Church, and the Factory” (1920–22), in Essays on Art, 1:188–223. 127.  Pavel Florensky, Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny (Moscow: Put’, 1914), trans. Boris Jakim, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 118. 128.  Malevich, “God Is Not Cast Down,” 196–97; Vladimir Soloviev, Lectures on Godmanhood, trans. Peter Zouboff (London: Dennis Dobson, 1948). 129. Soloviev, Philosophical Principles, 53–54. For a good overview of these concepts, see Randall A. Poole, “Vladimir Solov’ev’s Philosophical Anthropology: Autonomy, Dignity, Perfectibility,” in A History of Russian Philosophy, 1830–1930: Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity, ed. G. M. Hamburg and Randall A. Poole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 131–49. 130.  Malevich, “God Is Not Cast Down,” 216. 131.  Konstantin Rozhdestvensky, “Malevich Is an Inexhaustible Topic,” in Kazimir Malevich: Letters, Documents, Memoirs, Criticism, 2:292, 300.

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notes to pages 206–210

132.  Kazimir Malevich to Mikhail Gershenzon, January 1, 1921, in Kazimir Malevich: Letters, Documents, Memoirs, Criticism, 1:135. 133.  Kazimir Malevich to El Lissitzky, September 6, 1924, in Kazimir Malevich: Letters, Documents, Memoirs, Criticism, 1:171; Malevich, “From ‘Secret Vices of the Academicians’ ” and “The Question of Imitative Art,” in Essays on Art, 1:17 and 182; Malevich, “Notes on Architecture,” in Artist, Infinity, Suprematism, 102. 134.  See John E. Bowlt, “The Cow and the Violin: Toward a History of Russian Dada,” in The Eastern Dada Orbit: Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Central Europe, and Japan, ed. Stephen C. Foster (New York: Hall, 1998), 137–63, and Shatskikh, Black Square, 1–33. 135.  Malevich’s speech was printed in the newspaper Rech’, no. 32 (February 20, 1914): 5. 136.  Kliun, “Kazimir Malevich: Memoirs,” 66. 137. Summers, Real Spaces, 640. 138.  Kazimir Malevich to Mikhail Matiushin, September 24, 1915, in Kazimir Malevich: Letters, Documents, Memoirs, Criticism, 1:68; Malevich, “Reply,” in Essays on Art, 1:54. 139.  Kazimir Malevich to Pavel Ettinger, April 3, 1920, in Kazimir Malevich: Letters, Documents, Memoirs, Criticism, 1:127. 140. Shatskikh, Black Square, 109. 141.  Maria Gough, “Architecture as Such,” in Borchardt-​ Hume, Malevich, 62. 142.  Malevich, “Question of Imitative Art,” 170. 143.  Fabio Rambelli and Eric Reinders, “What Does Iconoclasm Create? What Does Preservation Destroy? Reflections on Iconoclasm in East Asia,” in Iconoclasm: Contested Objects, Contested Terms, ed. Stacy Boldrick and Richard Clay (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007), 31. 144.  Bernard Faure, “The Buddhist Icon and the Modern Gaze,” Critical lnquiry 24, no. 3 (Spring 1998): 785. 145.  Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 13. 146.  Fer, “Imagining a Point of Origin,” 7. 147.  Ivan Kliun, “The Funeral of Kazimir Malevich,” in Kazimir Malevich: Letters, Documents, Memoirs, Criticism, 2:89–91. 148.  Jane Ashton Sharp, “ ‘Action-​Paradise’ and ‘Readymade Reliquaries’: Eccentric Histories in/of Recent Russian Art,” in Betancourt and Taroutina, Byzantium/Modernism, 283. 149.  Mudrak, “Malevich and the Liturgical Tradition,” 54–55.

150.  Ibid., 55. 151.  Malevich, “I Am the Beginning,” 12. 152.  Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-​ Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition,” October 18 (Autumn 1981): 53–54. 153.  Charles Barber, Contesting the Logic of Painting: Art and Understanding in Eleventh-​Century Byzantium (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 29. 154.  Achim Borchardt-​Hume, “An Icon for a Modern Age,” in Borchardt-​Hume, Malevich, 29. 155.  Marcadé, “Malevich i pravoslavnaia ikonografiia,” 171. 156.  Ibid., 171–72. 157.  Oleg Tarasov, Icon and Devotion: Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia, trans. and ed. Robin Milner-​Gulland (London: Reaktion, 2002), 378; G. Seryi, “A Monastery on State Support” (Leningradskaia pravda, June 10, 1926), in Kazimir Malevich: Letters, Documents, Memoirs, Criticism, 2:529. 158.  Kazimir Malevich to Mikhail Gershenzon, April 11, 1920, in Kazimir Malevich: Letters, Documents, Memoirs, Criticism, 1:129. 159. Malevich, World as Non-​Objectivity, 352–54. 160.  Malevich, “God Is Not Cast Down,” 203. 161.  Ibid., 216. 162. Tarabukin, Ot mol’berta k mashine, cited in Gough, Artist as Producer, 145–46. 163. Stepanova, Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda, 181. Epilogue 1.  For thoughtful and detailed analyses of Punk Prayer, see Vera Shevzov, “Women on the Fault Lines of Faith: Pussy Riot and the Insider/Outsider Challenge to Post-​Soviet Orthodoxy,” Religion and Gender 4, no. 2 (2014): 121–44; Anya Bernstein, “An Inadvertent Sacrifice: Body Politics and Sovereign Power in the Pussy Riot Affair,” Critical Inquiry 40, no. 1 (2013): 220–41; Dmitry Uzlaner, “The Pussy Riot Case and the Peculiarities of Russian Post-​Secularism,” State, Religion, and Church 1, no. 1 (2014): 23–58. 2.  Nadieszda Kizenko, “Feminized Patriarchy? Orthodoxy and Gender in Post-​Soviet Russia,” Signs 38, no. 3 (2013): 595–621; Elena Gapova, “Delo Pussy Riot: Feministskii protest v kontekste klassovoi bor’by,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas 5, no. 85, http://​magazines​.russ​.ru​/nz​/2012​/5​/g2​ .html, accessed on May 25, 2017. 3.  Liubov Shirshova, “Sovremennaia monumental’naia zhivopis’ Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi: po materialam

vossozdania Kafedral’nogo sobornogo Khrama Khrista Spasitelia v Moskve” (Ph.D. diss., St. Petersburg State Art and Industry Academy, St. Petersburg, 2012). 4.  Shevzov, “Women on the Fault Lines,” 133. 5.  Sestra Olga, “Patriarkh Kirill protiv molitvy v khrame?,” Arsen’evskie vesti 13 (March 28, 2012): 3; “Stenogramma vstrechi predsedatelia Pravitel’stva RF V. V. Putina so Sviateishim Patriarkhom Kirillom i liderami tradiotsionnykh religioznykh obshchin Rossii,” Patriarchia.ru, February 8, 2012, http://​www​.patriarchia​.ru​/db​/text​/2005767​.html, accessed on June 2, 2017. 6.  Benois, “Posledniaia futuristskaia vystavka,” 517. 7.  For a detailed analysis of ecclesiastical architecture in post-​Soviet Russia, see Anna Ryndina, ed., Russkoe tserkovnoe iskusstvo novogo vremeni (Moscow: Indrik, 2004); Natalia Laitar’, “Sovremennaia pravoslavnaia tserkovnaia arkhitektura Rossii: Tendentsii stilevogo razvitia i tipologia khramov” (Ph.D. diss., Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, St. Petersburg, 2012). 8. A. I. Klibanov, ed., Russkoe pravoslavie: Vekhi istorii (Moscow: Politizdat, 1989), 380. 9.  Patriarch Alexei II quoted by Interfax Religion on November 10, 2006: http://​www​.interfax​-religion​.ru​ /orthodoxy​/​?act​=​news​&​div​=​15024, accessed on November 23, 2015. 10.  For example, see Nina Kuteinikova, Sovremennaia pravoslavnaia ikona (St. Petersburg: Znaki, 2007), and Irina Buseva-​Davydova, “Sovremennye Khramovye Rospisi: Programma, traditsiia, stil’,” in Iskusstvo v sovremennom mire, ed. O. B. Dubova, M. A. Busev, and M. P. Lazarev (Moscow: Pamiatniki istoricheskoi mysli, 2004), 258–78. 11.  Robert Service, “Putin’s Czarist Folly,” New York Times, April 6, 2014; Anders Aslund, “Unmasking President Putin’s Grandiose Myth,” Moscow Times, November 28, 2007; Jérôme Gautheret, “Poutine, dans l’ombre de l’impitoyable Tsar Nicolas Ier,” Le Monde, May 12, 2014; Orlando Figes, “Geopolitik wie im zaristischen Russland,” Kölner Stadt-​ Anzeiger, January 1, 2016. 12.  Shevzov, “Women on the Fault Lines,”136. 13.  For a discussion of Le Corbusier’s ongoing fascination with the Church of Hagia Sophia, see Tulay Atak, “Abstraction’s Economy: Hagia Sophia in the Imaginary of Modern Architecture,” in Betancourt and Taroutina, Byzantium/Modernism, 135–62.

notes to pages 210–223

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Blakesley, Rosalind P., and Susan E. Reid, eds. Russian Art and the West: A Century of Dialogue in Painting, Architecture, and the Decorative Arts. DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007. Blakesley, Rosalind P., and Margaret Samu, eds. From Realism to the Silver Age: New Studies in Russian Artistic Culture; Essays in Honor of Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier. DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2014. Boersma, Linda S. 0.10: The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1994. Bogemskaia, Ksenia, and Gerold Vzdornov, eds. Era Rumian­ tsevskogo muzeia: Iz istorii formirovaniia sobraniia GMII im A. S. Pushkina. Vol. 1, Kartinnaia galereia. Moscow: Izd. Krasnaia ploshchad’, 2010. Boldrick, Stacy, and Richard Clay, eds. Iconoclasm: Contested Objects, Contested Terms. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007. Bolshakov, A. O., and L. G. Klimanov, eds. Iz kollektsii akademika N. P. Likhacheva: Katalog vystavki. St. Petersburg: Izd-​vo Seda-​S, 1993. Bonnell, Victoria E. Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters Under Lenin and Stalin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Borchardt-​Hume, Achim, ed. Malevich. London: Tate Publishing, 2015. Bowlt, John E. “From Practice to Theory: Vladimir Tatlin and Nikolai Punin.” In Literature, Culture, and Society in the Modern Age, Stanford Slavic Studies 4, no. 2, 50–66. Stanford: Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Stanford University, 1992. ———. Moscow and St. Petersburg, 1900–1920: Art, Life, and Culture of the Russian Silver Age. New York: Vendome Press, 2008. ———. “Orthodoxy and the Avant-​Garde: Sacred Images in the Work of Goncharova, Malevich, and Their Contemporaries.” In Brumfield and Velimirovic, Christianity and the Arts in Russia, 145–50. ———. “Neoprimitivism and Russian Painting.” Burlington Magazine 116, no. 852 (March 1974): 133–40. ———, ed. Russian Art of the Avant-​Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902–1934. New York: Viking Press, 1976. ———. “Symbolism and Modernity in Russia.” Artforum 16, no. 3 (November 1977): 40–45. Bowlt, John E., and Olga Matich, eds. Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-​Garde and Cultural Experiment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Bowlt, John E., and Rose-​Carol Washton Long, eds. The Life of Vasilii Kandinsky in Russian Art: A Study of “On the Spiritual in Art.” Translated by John E. Bowlt. Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1980. Bruk, Ia. V., and L. I. Iovleva, eds. Gosudarstvennaia Tretiakovskaia galereia: Katalog sobraniia. 4 series. Moscow: Krasnaia ploshchad’, 1995–2013. Brumfield, William Craft. A History of Russian Architecture. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004. Brumfield, William Craft, and Milos M. Velimirovic, eds. Christianity and the Arts in Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Bullen, J. B. “Byzantinism and Modernism, 1900–1914.” Burlington Magazine 141, no. 1160 (November 1999): 665–75. ———. Byzantium Rediscovered. London: Phaidon, 2003. Bychkov, Viktor. The Aesthetic Face of Being: Art in the Theology of Pavel Florensky. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993. ———. “Russian Religious Aesthetics.” In Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, edited by Michael Kelly, 4:195–202. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Chlenova, Masha. “0.10.” In Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art, edited by Leah Dickerman, 206–8. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012. Cormack, Robin. Byzantine Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. ———. Writing in Gold: Byzantine Society and Its Icons. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Cracraft, James, and Daniel Rowland, eds. Architectures of Russian Identity, 1500 to the Present. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Dabrowski, Magdalena. Kandinsky Compositions. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1995. ———. “Tatlin and Cubism.” Notes in the History of Art 11, nos. 3–4 (Spring–Summer 1992): 39–46. Demus, Otto. Byzantine Mosaic Decoration: Aspects of Monumental Art in Byzantium. Boston: Boston Book & Art Shop, 1955. Dmitrieva, Nina. Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel’. Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1984. Dobrenko, Evgeny, and Eric Naiman, eds. The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. Douglas, Charlotte, and Christina Lodder, eds. Rethinking Malevich: Proceedings of a Conference in Celebration of the

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Gough, Maria. The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. ———. “Faktura: The Making of the Russian Avant-​Garde.” RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 36 (Autumn 1999): 32–59. Gray, Camilla. The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863–1922. Edited by Marian Burleigh-​Motley. London: Thames & Hudson, 1986. Greenberg, Clement. Art and Culture: Critical Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. Gregor, A. James. Totalitarianism and Political Religion: An Intellectual History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. Gritz, T., and N. Kardzhiev. “Matiss v Moskve.” In Matiss: Sbornik statei o tvorchestve, edited by A. Vladimirskii, 96–119. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo inostrannoi literatury, 1958. Grohmann, Will. Wassily Kandinsky: Life and Work. Translated by Norbert Guterman. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1958. Gurianova, Nina. The Aesthetics of Anarchy: Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avant-​Garde. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Gusakova, Viktoriia. Viktor Vasnetsov i religiozno-​natsional’noe napravlenie v russkoi zhivopisi kontsa xix–nachala xx veka. St. Petersburg: Avrora, 2008. Hardiman, Louise, and Nicola Kozicharow, eds. Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2017. Harten, Jürgen, ed. Vladimir Tatlin: Leben, Werk, Wirkung; Ein internationales Symposium. Cologne: DuMont, 1993. Heller, Reinhold. “Kandinsky and Traditions Apocalyptic.” Art Journal 43, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 19–26. Henderson, Linda Dalrymple. “The Merging of Time and Space: ‘The Fourth Dimension’ in Russia from Ouspensky to Malevich.” Structurist, nos. 15–16 (1975–76): 97–108. Henry, Michel. Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky. Translated by Scott Davidson. London: Continuum, 2009. Hilton, Alison. “Matisse in Moscow.” Art Journal 29, no. 2 (Winter 1969–70): 166–73. ———. Russian Folk Art. Bloomington: Indiana Univeristy Press, 1995. Howard, Jeremy, Irena Bužinska, and Z. S. Strother, eds. Vladimir Markov and Russian Primitivism: A Charter for the Avant-​Garde. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2015. Isdebsky-​Pritchard, Aline. The Art of Mikhail Vrubel (1856– 1910). Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982. Jackson, David. “Icons in the 19th Century.” In Icons 88: To Celebrate the Millenium of the Christianisation of Russia, an Exhibition of Russian Icons in Ireland, edited by Sarah

Smyth and Stanford Kingston, 75–84. Dublin: Veritas Publications, 1988. Kalb, Judith E. Russia’s Rome: Imperial Visions, Messianic Dreams, 1890–1940. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. Kandinsky, Nina. Kandinsky und ich. Munich: Kindler, 1976. Karasik, I. N., and E. N. Petrova, eds. Iz istorii muzeia: Sbornik statei i publikatsii. St. Petersburg: Gos. Russkii muzei, 1995. Kean, Beverly Whitney. All the Empty Palaces: The Great Merchant Patrons of Modern Art in Pre-​Revolutionary Russia. New York: Universe Books, 1983. Kelly, Martha M. F. Unorthodox Beauty: Russian Modernism and Its New Religious Aesthetic. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016. Kennedy, Janet. “Lermontov’s Legacy: Mikhail Vrubel’s Seated Demon and Demon Downcast.” Transactions of the Association of Russian-​American Scholars in the U.S.A. 15 (1982): 163–84. Khan-​Magomedov, S. O. INKhUK i rannii konstruktivizm. Moscow: Architectura, 1994. ———. Konstruktivizm: Kontseptsiia, formoobrazovaniia. Moscow: Stroiizdat, 2003. ———. Vhutemas: Moscou, 1920–1930. 2 vols. Paris: Éditions du Regard, 1990. Khardzhiev, Nikolai. Stati ob avangarde v dvukh tomakh. Moscow: RA, 1997. Kiaer, Christina. Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. Kogan, Dora. M. A. Vrubel’. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1980. Kornblatt, Judith Deutsch. Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. Kornilova, Anna. Grigorii Gagarin: Tvorcheskii put’. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 2001. ———. “Istoki russko-​vizantiiskogo stilia: Teoreticheskii aspect.” Trudy Sankt-​Peterburgskogo gosudarstvennogo instituta kulturi, no. 186 (2009): 126–30. Kovalev, Andrei. “Samosoznanie kritiki: Iz istorii sovetskogo iskusstvoznaniia 1920-kh godov.” Sovetskoe iskusstvoznanie, no. 26 (1990): 344–80. Krasnotsvetov, Pavel. Kazanskii sobor: Istoricheskii ocherk stroitelstva i tserkovnoi zhizni. St. Petersburg: Artdeko, 2001. Kunichika, Michael. “Our Native Antiquity”: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Culture of Russian Modernism. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2015. Kuteinikova, Nina. Sovremennaia pravoslavnaia ikona. St. Petersburg: Znaki, 2007.

Kyrkevych, Viktor. Volodymyrskyi sobor u Kyievi. Kiev: Tekhnika, 2004. Kyzlasova, Irina Leonidovna. Istoriia izucheiniia vizantiiskogo i drevnerusskogo iskusstva v Rossii: F. I. Buslaev, N. P. Kondakov; Metody, idei, teorii. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo universiteta, 1985. ———. Mir Kondakova: Publikatsii, stat’i, katalog vystavki. Moscow: Russkii put’, 2004. ———. Russkaia ikona xiv–xvi vekov. Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Avrora, 1988. Lazarev, Viktor. Drevnerusskie mozaiki i freski xi–xv vv. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1973. ———. Russkaia ikonopis’, ot istokov do nachala xvi veka. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 2000. (Also available in a more comprehensive edition of 6 vols., published 1983–2000.) Lidov, Aleksei, ed. Hierotopy: Comparative Studies of Sacred Spaces. Moscow: Indrik, 2009. ———, ed. Hierotopy: The Creation of Sacred Spaces in Byzantium and Medieval Russia. Moscow: Indrik, 2006. ———, ed. Spatial Icons: Performativity in Byzantium and Medieval Russia. Moscow: Indrik, 2011. Lisovskii, Vladimir. “Natsionalnyi stil’” v arkhitekture rossii. Moscow: Sovpadenie, 2000. Lodder, Christina. Russian Constructivism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983. ———. “The VKhUTEMAS and the Bauhaus.” In The Avant-​ Garde Frontier: Russia Meets the West, 1910–1930, edited by Gail Harrison Roman and Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt, 196–237. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992. Lynton, Norbert. Tatlin’s Tower: Monument to Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Marcadé, Jean-​Claude. Malévitch. Paris: Nouvelles éditions françaises, 1990. Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Millon, Henry A., and Susan Scott Munshower, eds. An Architectural Progress in the Renaissance and Baroque: Sojourns in and out of Italy; Essays in Architectural History Presented to Hellmut Hager on His Sixty-​Sixth Birthday. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. Milner, John. Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-​Garde. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Milner-​Gulland, Robin. “Icons and the Russian Modern Movement.” In Icons 88: To Celebrate the Millenium of the Christianisation of Russia, an Exhibition of Russian Icons

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The Russian and Soviet Avant-​Garde, 1915–1932, 25–37. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1992. Razdolskaia, Vera, ed. Problemy razvitia zarubezhnogo i russkogo iskusstva: Sbornik nauchnykh trudov. St. Petersburg: Institut imeni I. E. Repina, 1995. Ringbom, Sixten. The Sounding Cosmos: A Study in the Spiritualism of Kandinsky and the Genesis of Abstract Painting. Åbo: Åbo Akademi, 1970. Romachkova, L. I. Kandinsky et la Russie. Martigny: Fondation Pierre Gianadda, 2000. Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer, ed. The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Rowell, Margit. “Vladimir Tatlin: Form/Faktura.” In “Soviet Revolutionary Culture,” special issue, October 7 (Winter 1978): 83–108. Rusakov, Iurii. “Matisse in Russia in the Autumn of 1911.” Translated by John E. Bowlt. Burlington Magazine 117, no. 866, special issue devoted to twentieth-​century art (May 1975): 284–91. Ryndina, Anna, ed. Russkoe tserkovnoe iskusstvo novogo vremeni. Moscow: Indrik, 2004. Salmond, Wendy R. Arts and Crafts in Late Imperial Russia: Reviving the Kustar Art Industries, 1870–1917. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. “Moscow Modern.” In Art Nouveau, 1890–1914, edited by Paul Greenhalgh, 388–97. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000. ———. Tradition in Transition: Russian Icons in the Age of the Romanovs. Washington, D.C.: Hillwoood Museum & Gardens, 2004. Sarabianov, Dmitrii. Modern: Istoriia stilia. Moscow: Galart, 2001. ———. Russian Art: From Neoclassicism to the Avant-​Garde, 1800–1917; Painting—Sculpture—Architecture. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990. ———. Russkaia zhivopis’ kontsa 1900-kh–nachala 1910-kh godov: Ocherki. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1971. ———. Russkie zhivopistsy nachala xx v.: Novye napravleniia. Leningrad: Avrora, 1973. ———, ed. Russkoe iskusstvo mezhdu zapadom i vostokom: Materialy konferentsii, Moskva, sentiabr, 1994. Moscow: Gos. inst. iskusstvoznaniia, 1997. Sarabianov, Dmitrii, and Natalia Avtonomova, eds. Vasilii Kandinskii. Moscow: Galart, 1994. Sarabianov, Dmitrii, Natalia Avtonomova, and Valerii Turchin, eds. Mnogogrannyi mir Kandinskogo. Moscow: Nauka, 1998.

Sarabianov, Dmitrii, and Mikhail Meilakh, eds. Poeziia i zhivopis’: Sbornik trudov pamiati N. I. Khardzhieva. Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 2000. Savel’ev, Iurii. Iskusstvo istorizma i gosudarstvennyi zakaz: Vtoroia polovina xix–nachala xx veka. Moscow: Sovpadenie, 2008. ———. “Vizantiiskii stil’” v arkhitekture rossii: Vtoraia polovina xix–nachalo xx veka. St. Petersburg: Liki rossii, proekt-2003, 2005. Schapiro, Leonard. “The Vekhi Group and the Mystique of Revolution.” Slavonic and East European Review 34, no. 82 (1955): 56–76. Sendler, Egon. The Icon: Image of the Invisible; Elements of Theology, Aesthetics, and Technique. Translated by Steven Bigham. Redondo Beach, Calif.: Oakwood Publications, 1988. Senkevitch, Tatiana V. “The Illusive Aesthetic Project of Pavel Florenskii: Space Between Geometry and Religion.” In Pavel Florenskij: Tradition und Moderne, edited by Norbert Franz, Michael Hagemeister, and Frank Haney, 403–22. Frankfurt am Mein: Peter Lang, 2001. Sergeeva, N. V. Rerikh i Vrubel’: Estetika russkogo zhivopisnogo simvolizma. Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi Tsentr Rerikhov, 2002. Sers, Philippe. Kandinsky: Philosophie de l’abstraction; L’image métaphysique. Geneva: Skira, 1995. Sevelenko, Irina. “Modernizm kak arkhaizm: Natsionalizm, russkii stil’ i arkhaiziruiushiaia estetika v russkom modernizme.” Wiener slawistischer Almanach 56 (2005): 141–83. Shandrovskaia, V. S., ed. Vizantinovedenie v Ermitazhe. Leningrad: Gosudarstvennyi Ermitazh, 1991. Sharp, Jane Ashton. “The Critical Reception of the 0.10 Exhibition: Malevich and Benua.” In The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-​Garde, 1915–1932, 38–52. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1992. ———. Russian Modernism Between East and West: Natal’ia Goncharova and the Moscow Avant-​Garde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Shatskikh, Aleksandra. Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism. Translated by Marian Schwartz. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. ———. Kazimir Malevich i obshchestvo Supremus. Moscow: Tri kvadrata, 2009. Shevzov, Vera. Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Shkurko, Alexander, E. M. Yukhimenko, and Vadim Ego­ rov, eds. The State Historical Museum. Translated by

P. A. Aleinikov, V. N. Eiler, S. A. Khomutov, E. V. Kurdyukova, and A. A. Timofeyev. Moscow: Interbook Business Publishers, 2006. Short, Christopher. The Art Theory of Wassily Kandinsky, 1909–1928: The Quest for Synthesis. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010. Simmons, Sherwin. “Kasimir Malevich’s ‘Black Square’: The Transformed Self, Part Three; The Icon Unmasked.” Arts Magazine 53 (December 1978): 126–34. Smith, Oliver. Vladimir Soloviev and the Spiritualization of Matter. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011. Smolik, Noemi. Ikonen der Moderne? Zur Entstehung des abstrakten Bildes bei Kandinsky und Malewitsch. Stuttgart: Hatje, 1999. Spira, Andrew. The Avant-​Garde Icon: Russian Avant-​Garde Art and the Icon Painting Tradition. Aldershot, Hampshire: Lund Humphries, 2008. Steinberg, Mark D. Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. Steinberg, Mark D., and Heather J. Coleman, eds. Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. Stepanova, Varvara. Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda: Pisma, poeticheskie opyty, zapiski khudozhnitsy. Edited by A. N. Lavrentiev and V. A. Rodchenko. Moscow: Sfera, 1994. Stephenson, Paul. “Pioneers of Popular Byzantine History: Freeman, Gregorovius, Schlumberger.” In The Byzantine World, edited by Paul Stephenson, 462–80. New York: Routledge, 2010. Strigalev, Anatolii. “O poezdke Tatlina v Berlin i Parizh.” Iskusstvo, nos. 2 and 3 (1989): 39–44 and 26–31. ———. “O Poslednei futuristicheskoi vystavke kartin ‘0,10 (Nol’-Desiat’).’ ” Nauchno-​analiticheskii informatsionnyi biulleten’ Fonda K. S. Malevicha (2001): 12–38. ———. “Tatlin i Pikasso.” In Pikasso i okrestnosti: Sbornik statei, edited by M. A. Busev, 111–44. Moscow: Progress-​ Traditsiia, 2006. ———. “Universitety khudozhnika Tatlina.” Voprosy iskusstvoznaniia 9, pt. 2 (1996): 405–31. Strigalev, Anatolii, and Jürgen Harten, eds. Vladimir Tatlin: Retrospektive. Cologne: Dumont, 1993. Summers, David. Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism. New York: Phaidon, 2003. Suzdalev, P. K. Vrubel’—lichnost’, mirovozzrenie, metod. Moscow: Izobrazitelnoe Iskusstvo, 1984.

Selected bibliography

259

Tarasov, Oleg. Icon and Devotion: Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia. Translated and edited by Robin Milner-​Gulland. London: Reaktion, 2002. ———. “The Russian Icon and the Culture of the Modern: The Renaissance of Popular Icon Painting in the Reign of Nicholas II.” Experiment 7 (2001): 73–101. Taroutina, Maria. “Second Rome or Seat of Savagery: The Case of Byzantium in Nineteenth-​Century European Imaginaries.” In Civilisation and Nineteenth-​Century Art: A European Concept in Global Context, edited by David O’Brien, 150–77. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. Terekhina, V. N., and A. P. Zimenkov, eds. Russkii futurizm: Teoriia, praktika, kritika, vospominaniia. Moscow: Nasledie, 1999. Timberlake, Charles E., ed. Religious and Secular Forces in Late Tsarist Russia. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992. Tsakiridou, Cornelia. Icons in Time, Persons in Eternity: Orthodox Theology and the Aesthetics of the Christian Image. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013. Ugolnik, Anthony. The Illuminating Icon. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1989. Vzdornov, Gerold. Iskusstvo knigi v drevnei Rusi: Rukopisnaia kniga severo-​vostochnoi Rusi xii–nachala xv vekov. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1980. ———. Istoriia otkrytiia i izucheniia russkoi srednevekovoi zhivopisi: xix vek. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1986. ———. Restavratsiia i nauka: Ocherki po istorii otkrytiia i izucheniia drevnerusskoi zhivopisi. Moscow: Indrik, 2006.

260

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Walicki, Andrzej. A History of Russian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Marxism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979. ———. The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-​Century Russian Thought. Translated by Hilda Andrews-​Rusiecka. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Warren, Sarah. Mikhail Larionov and the Cultural Politics of Late Imperial Russia. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2013. Washton Long, Rose-​Carol. Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Weiss, Peg. Kandinsky and Old Russia: The Artist as Ethnographer and Shaman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. ———. “Kandinsky and the Symbolist Heritage.” Art Journal 45, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 137–45. ———. Kandinsky in Munich: The Formative Jugendstil Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Werenskiold, Marit. “Kandinsky’s Moscow.” Art in America 77 (March 1989): 96–111. Whittaker, Cynthia Hyla, ed. Visualizing Russia: Fedor Soln­ tsev and Crafting a National Past. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Worringer, Wilhelm. Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpyschologie. Munich: R. Piper, 1908. Wortman, Richard. Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy from Peter the Great to the Abdication of Nicholas II. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Zernov, Nicolas. The Russian Religious Renaissance of the Twentieth Century. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1963. Zhadova, Larissa, ed. Tatlin. New York: Rizzoli, 1988.

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to images. Abgar of Edessa, 184 Abramtsevo, xiii abstract, 153–54, 161–62, 167 academic art, 15, 17–21, 33–36, 40, 110–12 Act of Toleration (1905), 93–94, 236 n. 143 Adamovich, Vladimir, 86–87 Afanasiev, Aleksei, 194, 202–3 Ainalov, Dmitrii, 3, 43, 91, 92–93 Aksakov, Konstantin, 31 Alexander II, 228 nn. 37,38 Alexander III, 67, 114. See also Russian Museum of His Imperial Majesty Alexander III Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, 34 All-​Russian Archaeological Conventions, 87, 88–90 All Saints (Kandinsky), 140 All Saints I (Kandinsky), 158, 163, 165 All Saints II (Kandinsky), 158–61, 163 Alpatov, Mikhail, 107 ancient civilizations, Russian enthusiasm for, 4–5 Angel of Death (Vrubel), 123–25 Angels’ Lamentation (Vrubel), 97, 98 Anisimov, Alexander, 48 Annunciation (Vrubel), 99, 100, 101 Annunciation icon, 101 Antonova, Clemena, 168–69 Apollon (journal), 54, 62, 72, 77, 132, 141, 204 Apostle Thomas, 201, 202 archaeological conventions, 87, 88–90 archetype, 153–54 architecture, ecclesiastical, 16–17 Art Nouveau, 40, 128, 134–35. See also stil modern Arvatov, Boris, 182 Assumption, depictions of, 18–20 Assumption Cathedral, 83–84 Assumption of the Virgin (Briullov), 18–19, 20 Autumn (Larionov), 149 Avant-​garde French, 46, 168 pre-​revolutionary, 92–95, 130–31, 148–51, 179–82, 191–92, 198 Russian, 3, 53, 59, 127, 130, 148, 151, 168, 170, 171, 241 n. 7, 244 n. 15

Soviet, 7, 11, 57, 131–32, 135, 138, 173 theory and aesthetics, 45–57, 128–35, 148–51, 170–77, 191– 98, 204–17 Avvakum Petrovich, 16 Azrael (Vrubel), 123–25 Bagration, Petr, 88 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 152 Barber, Charles, 211 Barr, Alfred, 138 Basilewsky, Alexander, 43, 64–67 Basin, Petr, 33 Battle of Novgorod with Suzdal, The, 82–83 “beautiful” corner, 184, 205 beauty, 50, 55 Benjamin-​Constant, Jean-​Joseph, 24, 25–26 Benois, Alexander on Byzantinism, 1–2 on icons, 140 on Malevich’s Black Square, 180, 204–5 on Matisse, 47 on Religious Composition: Virgin (with Ornament), 149 on Vrubel, 122 on Western artists, 48–49 on works in St. Vladimir Cathedral, 116–17 Berdiaev, Nikolai, 48, 50, 171 Black Accompaniment (Kandinsky), 155–56 Black Square (Malevich), 180, 181, 183, 204–7, 209–13, 217 Blaue Reiter Almanac, 142, 144, 171, 240 n. 47 Blessing of the Bread, The (Kandinsky), 141 Blok, Alexander, 122 blue, 239 n. 24 Blue Rayonism (Portrait of a Fool) (Larionov), 127 Blue Rose, 55 Bogaevskii, Konstantin, 120–21 Bogochelovechestvo, 207 Bolin, Edward, 87 Bolin, Gustaf, 87 Bolshevik regime, 209, 213, 231 n. 152 Bolshevik Revolution, 5, 56, 72, 191, 208, 217 Borchardt-​Hume, Achim, 213 Borovikovsky, Vladimir Royal Doors with Christ, the Virgin, the Archangel Gabriel and the Four Evangelists, 20, 21

261

Borovikovsky, Vladimir (cont’d) Saint Catherine, 18 Bowlt, John, 131, 141, 226 n. 22, 240 n. 47 Braque, Georges, 145, 190 Briullov, Karl, 18–19, 20 broadsheet (lubok), 9, 149, 192 Bruni, Fedor, 33 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 99 Bulgakov, Sergei, 48, 170, 171, 207 Bullen, J. B., 23 Burliuk, David, 131 Burne-​Jones, Edward, 148 Buslaev, Fedor, 40, 77 Bychkov, Viktor, 152, 169 “Byzantine,” 3–4, 43 Byzantine art. See also Russo-​Byzantine revival and change in contemporary art world, 45–47 criticism of, 20–24 Florensky, Punin, and Tarabukin on, 49–57 Florensky on perspective in, 52 in Hermitage Museum, 63–67 ideological and cultural reevaluation of, 31–38 in Imperial Russian Historical Museum, 79–87 Kandinsky’s exposure to, 141–44 Kondakov on, 45 Matisse’s interest in, 245 n. 26 in Moscow Public and Rumiantsev Museum, 73–79 relationship between Russian icon painting and, 59–61 rising interest in, 23–31 in Russian Museum of His Imperial Majesty Alexander III, 67–73 as underappreciated, 45 Western influence on, 13–20 Byzantine Empire changing Russian attitudes towards, 31–38 denigration of, 20–26 Byzantine revival, 23–31, 227 n. 27. See also Russo-​Byzantine revival Byzantinism, 1–2, 152–53 Byzantium criticism of, 20–24 evolution of Russia’s relationship with, 13 ideological and cultural reevaluation of, 31–38 Kondakov on, 45 rising interest in, 23–31 Russian engagement with, 5 “Byzanto-​Russian,” 43 Caillebotte, Gustave, 128, 129 cameos, 63–64

262

Index

Caricature of Kazimir Malevich, a “Rare Bird” (Goloshchapov), 184 Cathedral of Christ the Savior, 32–33, 36, 219–20, 228 nn. 37,38 Catherine the Great, 63–64 Le Caucase pittoresque (Gagarin), 36, 37 Caviar Icon (Kosolapov), 221–22 Cézanne, Paul as founder of Cubism, 130 Mont Sainte-​Victoire, 107, 108, 109 Punin on, 198 as savior of European art, 46 Vrubel compared to, 107–10, 129 Chaadaev, Petr, 22 Chagall, Marc, 72 Chistiakov, Pavel, 99 Chizhov, Fedor, 20 Christ in the Wilderness (Kramskoi), 121 Christ Pantocrator, 200 Christ Pantocrator icon, 69, 70 Christ Pantocrator with Archangels, 104, 105 Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, 161, 162 Church of San Vitale, 26, 30 Church of the Dormition, 200 cleaning and restoration, 7, 39, 44, 61–62, 94 color Kandinsky on, 239 n. 24 Punin on Tatlin’s use of, 197–98 Colorful Life (Motley Life) (Kandinsky), 86, 144, 145 Committee for the Encouragement of Icon Painting, 44 Composition-​Analysis (Tatlin), 192–94, 246 n. 52 Composition V (Kandinsky), 163, 164 Composition VI (Kandinsky), 161–62 Composition VII (Kandinsky), 165, 167 Concentric Circles (Kandinsky), 165, 168 conservation, 7, 39, 44, 61–62, 94 Constantine I (emperor), 25 Constantine VII (emperor), 86 Constantinople (Istanbul), 13, 22, 23, 31–32, 33, 36, 60–61, 198–99 Constructivism, 130, 131, 176–77, 182, 244 n. 15 copying of artworks, 79 Corbett, David Peters, 6 Cormack, Robin, 60 Corner Counter-​Reliefs (Tatlin), 180, 181, 182, 183, 198–204, 217 corner display, 183–84, 205 Couchaud, André, 23 Crimean War (1853–56), 31 Crusades, 41 Cubism, 54, 130, 183, 186–87, 190, 191–98 Cubo-​Futurism, 130, 138 Cutler, Anthony, 22

Dabrowski, Magdalena, 190 Danilevskii, Nikolai, 33 “decadent,” 98–99, 113 defamiliarization, 131 Demoiselles d’Avignon (Picasso), 130 Demon: An Eastern Tale, The (Lermontov), 112–13 Demon Cast Down (Vrubel), 120–21, 122, 123, 125, 130 Demon Looking at a Dale (Vrubel), 109 Demon series (Vrubel), 118–27 Demus, Otto, 200–201 Denis, Maurice, 223 Descent of the Holy Ghost (Vrubel), 103 Diaghilev, Sergei, 113, 146 Didron, Adolphe, 23, 101 Dionysius, 23, 34, 55, 60, 101 directional lighting, 101, 187 Dmitriev, Vsevolod, 117, 127 Dmitrieva, Nina, 110 Dobychina, Nadezhda, 179 Donkey’s Tail Exhibition, 191 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 55 Douglas, Charlotte, 194 dualism in iconic representations, 148, 150 Durand, Paul, 23, 101 dynamic field, picture plane as, 174 Eastern Tale (Vrubel), 131, 134 Egypt, Russian engagement with, 5 Eichner, Johannes, 145, 146 Eighth All-​Russian Archaeological Convention, 87, 89–90 Ekimov, Vasilii, 17 Ekster, Alexandra, 131 Eleventh All-​Russian Archaeological Convention, 89 Elijah, 156–61 Elisha, 156 Emerson, Caryl, 152 Emperor Leo VI Prostrated Before Christ Pantocrator, 81 Empress Theodora at the Coliseum, The (Benjamin-​Constant), 24, 25–26 Exhibition of Ancient Russian Art (1913), 47–48, 59, 91–95, 151, 179, 192–93, 195 Exhibition of Icon Painting and Artistic Antiquities, 92–93, 236 n. 135 Exhibition of Russian and Finnish Artists, 113 extramission, theory of, 200 Fabergé, Karl, 87 “false” Realism, 51 Fauvism, 145, 183 Fedor Rerberg Art Institute, 184

Female Model (Nude 1: Composition Based on a Female Nude) (Tatlin), 188–90 Female Model (Nude 2) (Tatlin), 188–90 Fer, Briony, 209 Fiery Ascension of the Prophet Elijah, The, 156, 157 Fifteenth All-​Russian Archaeological Convention, 88–89 Filimonov, Giorgii, 79 Filonov, Pavel, 97 Fineberg, Jonathan David, 146 Finlay, George, 23 First Abstract Watercolor (Kandinsky), 153 Fishmonger (Tatlin), 186 Florensky, Pavel on iconic visuality, 110 “Iconostasis,” 51–52, 231 n. 127 on icon’s embodied presence, 197 The Meaning of Idealism, 48 on medieval conception of universe, 6 and philosophy of icon, 49, 50–53, 57 on Picasso, 48 “Reverse Perspective,” 51–52, 173–74 similarities between Malevich and, 207–8 teaches at VKhUTEMAS, 242 n. 107 theoretical and aesthetic convergence between Kandinsky and, 171–77 Formalism, 51, 54, 55, 95, 131, 138, 139, 177 Fossati, Gaspare and Giuseppe, 23, 81 France critical reception of Russian art, 130, 191–92 exhibitions of Russian art in, 130, 146–47 French art in Russian collections, 45–46, 48, 109, 237 n. 24 French artists in Russia, 46–47 French modernism and its reception in Russia, 1–2, 45–49, 78, 107–10, 130–31, 194, 197–98 Russian artists in, 109, 130, 144–48, 194–96 Frank, Semen, 170 Franses, Rico, 200 Freeman, Edward, 23–25 Freud, Sigmund, 153 Fry, Roger, 1–2 Funeral, The (Kandinsky), 144–46 Futurism, 196 Gabo, Naum, 107–8, 131, 132 Gagarin, Grigorii, 36, 37–38 Galla Placidia Mausoleum, 26, 28, 29 Gatrall, Jefferson, 8 Gauguin, Paul, 1, 94 Ge, Nikolai, 111, 121 Genuine Icon Painting and Lubki exhibition, 149

Index

263

Georgievskii, Vasilii, 93 Gershenzon, Mikhail, 207 Gesamtkunstwerk, 176 Gibbon, Edward, 21–22, 226–27 n. 10 Godmanhood, 207 Goloshchapov, Nikolai, 184 Goncharova, Natalia, 86, 148, 149–50, 191–92, 241 n. 54 gospodstvo, 208 Gothic art and architecture, 23, 64, 76, 91 Gothic Revival, 4 Gough, Maria, 50, 196–97, 199–200 Grabar, Igor, 78 Granovskii, Timofei, 31–32 Gray, Camilla, 226 n. 22 Greenberg, Clement, 2, 138, 165–67 Greenfield, Douglas, 8, 173, 175 Gregory Palamas, Saint, 169 Grishchenko, Aleksei, 46, 47, 48, 140, 196 Grohmann, Will, 145 Hagia Sophia, 22, 23, 81 Head No. 2 (Gabo), 131, 132 Head of a Lion (Vrubel), 131, 133 Head of an Angel (Vrubel), 120 Head of Demon (Vrubel), 118, 119 Head of John the Baptist (Vrubel), 123 Head of the Demon (Vrubel), 120 Heavenly Ladder of Saint John Climacus, The, 187–88 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 21, 55 Heller, Reinhold, 140 Hermitage Museum, 63–67 Herzen, Alexander, 22–23 hidden construction, 153–54, 174 History of Byzantine Art and Iconography Traced in the Miniatures of Greek Manuscripts, The (Kondakov), 40–41 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon), 21–22, 227 n. 10 “holy” corner, 184, 205 Holy Synod, 13–14, 76, 111 Holy Trinity (Vasnetsov), 110, 111 “I Am the Beginning” (Malevich), 211 Iaremich, Stepan, 97, 237 n. 12 iconic space, 56, 203–4. See also spatial icons iconoclasm, 198, 209 “Iconostasis” (Florensky), 51–52, 231 n. 127 icon painting. See also Russian icon painting blue in, 239 n. 24 contemporary practices in, 44–45

264

Index

during fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, 15 secularization of, 20 as serious subject of study, 35–38 Tarabukin on, 204 ikonopis, 6 Imperial Academy of Arts, 99–101, 111, 112 Imperial Academy of Sciences, 42 Imperial Archaeological Institute, 90 Imperial Moscow Archaeological Society, 44 Imperial Russian Archaeological Society, 44 Imperial Russian Historical Museum (State Historical Museum), 79–87, 89–90 Impressionism, 1–2, 54 Impression IV (Gendarme) (Kandinsky), 161, 168 INKhUK, 57, 176, 177 intermedial and intermediality, 199 In the Black Square (Kandinsky), 154–55, 156 Isaiah’s Prayer with Dawn, 143 Isakov, Sergei, 195 Isdebsky-​Pritchard, Aline, 109 Jack of Diamonds, 151, 206, 208 John of Damascus, Saint, 53 Jugendstil, 140, 146 Justinian (emperor), 25 Kalb, Judith, 5 Kandinsky, Nina, 139 Kandinsky, Vasily, 138–39, 140 All Saints, 140 All Saints I, 158, 163, 165 All Saints II, 158–61, 163 artistic process of, 161–62 on artist’s role in society, 137 Black Accompaniment, 155–56 In the Black Square, 154–55, 156 The Blessing of the Bread, 141 on blue in icon painting, 239 n. 24 Colorful Life (Motley Life), 86, 144, 145 Composition V, 163, 164 Composition VI, 161–62 Composition VII, 165, 167 Concentric Circles, 165, 168 within context of Russian Religious Renaissance, 170–77 engagement of, with iconic representation, 148–65 First Abstract Watercolor, 153 The Funeral, 144–46 and Imperial Russian Historical Museum, 86 Impression IV (Gendarme), 161, 168



influence of, 7 interest in and exposure of, to iconic tradition, 139–48 Last Judgment, 140, 162, 163, 163 Last Supper, 140 Matisse’s influence on, 196 The Morning Hour, 144–46 perception of, in modernist historiography, 137–38 Picture with the White Edge, 162 Red Spot II, 158, 160, 161 Reminiscences, 139 Riding Couple, 144–46 Saint George cycles, 140 scholarship on interest of, in medieval and religious art, 240–41 n. 47 Sound of Trumpets, 140 On the Spiritual in Art, 141, 142, 146, 147–48, 151, 239 n. 20 spiritual versus empiricist vision of, 165–70 teaches at VKhUTEMAS, 242 n. 107 Untitled, 142 Volga Song, 144–46 Yellow-​Red-​Blue, 154, 156, 163–65 Kapkov, Iakov, 34–35, 36 Karamzin, Nikolai, 31, 226–27 n. 10 Kazan Cathedral, 16–19, 20–21, 33 Kelly, Martha M. F., 2–3 Kharichkov, N. N., 74 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 132 Khomiakov, Aleksei, 31, 32 Kiev Eleventh All-​Russian Archaeological Convention, 89 and Malevich, 185 and Tatlin, 186 and Vrubel, 97, 99–104, 110, 113, 117–18, 130–31 Kievan Rus, 13, 33, 34, 71, 82, 234 n. 90 Kiev Museum of Antiques and Art, 88 Kiev Theological Academy, 89–90 Kireevskii, Ivan, 31 Kirpichnikov, Alexander, 91 Kliun, Ivan, 182, 206, 208, 209–10 Koimesis, 19–20 Kondakov, Nikodim and Basilewsky collection at Hermitage Museum, 65–67 and contemporary artistic movements, 44–45 on Gibbon’s attacks on Byzantium, 21–22 The History of Byzantine Art and Iconography Traced in the Miniatures of Greek Manuscripts, 40–41 as key figure in Russo-​Byzantine revival, 40–42 on krasnyi ugol, 184 photographic album published by, 236 n. 10

on relief icon, 199 Russian Antiquities in Monuments of Art, 42–43 on Russian Museum of His Imperial Majesty Alexander III, 69 and study of medieval Russian art, 42–43 and term “Russo-​Byzantine,” 3 Korovin, Sergei, 87 Koshelev, Alexander, 74 Kosolapov, Alexander, 221–22 Kramskoi, Ivan, 121 krasnyi ugol, 184, 205 Krauss, Rosalind, 211 Krumbacher, Karl, 142 Kulbin, Nikolai, 130, 141 Kurbanovsky, Alexei, 207 Kuzmin, Mikhail, 2, 99 Kuznetsov, Pavel, 95 Lamentation I (Vrubel), 114, 115 Lamentation II (Vrubel), 114–16, 237 n. 40 Larionov, Alexander, 172 Larionov, Mikhail, 127, 148–49, 150, 191, 194 Last Judgment (Kandinsky), 140, 162, 163, 163 Last Judgment (St. Sophia Cathedral), 162, 164 Last Judgment, Novgorod icon, 166 Last Judgment mosaic (Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta), 103 Last Supper (Kandinsky), 140 Lecky, William Edward Hartpole, 25 Le Corbusier, 223 Lef, 177 Le Fauconnier, Henri, 48–49, 140 Lenin, Vladimir, 215–16 Leporskaia, Anna, 207 Lermontov, Mikhail, 112–13 Lidov, Aleksei, 181 lighting, directional, 101, 187 Likhachev, Nikolai, 43, 71–72 linear perspective, 52, 147–48, 173, 204 Lissitzky, El, 213 liturgy, 13, 176 Lodder, Christina, 186, 206 Lorrain, Claude, 16 Lowden, John, 61 Lubetkin, Berthold, 195 lubok (broadsheet), 9, 149, 192 Maiat, Vladimir, 86–87 Makovksy, Sergei, 94, 184

Index

265

Malevich, Kazimir Black Square, 180, 181, 183, 204–7, 209–13, 217 historical conflict between Tatlin and, 182–91, 244–45 n. 24 “I Am the Beginning,” 211 influence of, 7 Moscow debut of, 87 and new theology of art, 204–17 Self-​Portrait, 185, 213, 214 Suprematism: Self-​Portrait in Two Dimensions, 210–11, 212 34 Drawings, 206 The Yellow Series, 184–86 Malmstad, John, 149 Mamontov, Savva, 237 n. 15 Mandelstam, Osip, 99 Mandylion, 71, 86, 184, 187, 206, 207, 211, 245 n. 30 Manet, Edouard, 2 Man in a Russian Old-​Style Costume, A (Vrubel), 103–4 Manuel d’iconographie chrétienne et latine; traduit du manuscrit byzantin “Le guide de la peinture” (Didron and Durand), 101 Marc, Franz, 144 Marcadé, Jean-​Claude, 213 Markov, Aleksei, 33, 196 Markov, Vladimir, 196 Martos, Ivan, 17 Matisse, Henri, 1, 3, 46–47, 140, 191, 193, 196, 245 n. 26 Matiushin, Mikhail, 204 Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, 26, 28, 29 Meaning of Idealism, The (Florensky), 48 medieval Russian art and artistic revival, 44–45 and change in contemporary art world, 45–47 collection, institutionalization, and exhibition of, 59, 60, 61 color and pigment in, 197–98 conservation of, 43–44 discovery of, 44 featured in art journals, 62–63 in Imperial Russian Historical Museum, 79–87 Kondakov on, 45 Matisse on, 46–47 in Moscow Public and Rumiantsev Museum, 73–79 reconceptualization of, 92–95 as serious subject of study, 42–43 underestimation of, 45 Meier-​Graefe, Julius, 142 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice, 200 Metropolitan Alexis Healing the Tatar Queen Taidula of Blindness While Dzhanibeg Looks On (Kapkov), 34–35, 36 Metzinger, Jean, 145

266

Index

Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 195 Mir iskusstva (journal), 141 Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) (movement), 46, 55 Misler, Nicoletta, 51, 171, 177 modernist painting and artists, 1–3, 40, 46–49, 226 n. 22 modernity Florensky and, 171–77 iconic tradition aligned with, 94–95 icon’s function in theorization of, 6 Kandinsky and, 138–39, 148, 151 markers of, 221 move away from, 180 Orthodox faith in, 219 and philosophy of icon, 49–56 and reception of contemporary art, 48–49 and rise of international modernism, 128 in Russia and Europe, 9 Russian engagement with, 2–3, 40 modernization, 7, 20, 150 Monastery of St. Michael of the Golden Domes, 39, 43, 82 Montesquieu, 21, 25 Month of May (Tatlin), 195 Mont Sainte-​Victoire (Cézanne), 107, 108, 109 Morning—Decorative Panel (Vrubel), 113 Morning Hour, The (Kandinsky), 144–46 Morning Visit of a Byzantine Empress to the Graves of Her Ancestors (Smirnov), 26–31 Morozov, Ivan, 45 mosaics in Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello, 103 in Church of San Vitale, Ravenna, 26, 30, 55 in Church of the Dormition in Daphni, 200 in Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, St. Petersburg, 203 as discussed by Julius Meier-​Graefe, 142–44 as discussed by Otto Demus, 200–201 as discussed by Roger Fry, 1–2 in Galla Placidia Mausoleum, Ravenna, 26, 28–29, 81 in Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, 23, 55, 81, 99 in the Monastery of St. Michael of the Golden Domes, 39, 42–43, 82, 102, 185 as a source of inspiration in Kandinsky’s art, 144–45 as a source of inspiration in Vrubel’s art, 104–6, 123–25 in State Historical Museum, 81–82 in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, 76 in St. Sophia Cathedral, Kiev, 39, 42–43, 55, 82, 99–100, 102–5, 185 Moscow Archaeological Society, 85 Moscow Courtyard (Polenov), 128, 129 Moscow Public and Rumiantsev Museum, 73–79

Moscow Society of Art Lovers, 90–91 Moses (Vrubel), 118–20 Mount Athos, 37, 41, 70–71, 76, 85, 99, 101, 144 Mount Sinai, 5, 90, 101 Mudrak, Myroslava, 185–86, 210 Murashko School of Drawing, 39, 102 Muratov, Pavel on art research and theory, 46 employment of, 232 n. 14 and Exhibition of Ancient Russian Art, 92 on interest in icon, 95 on medieval Novgorod icons, 151 and Moscow Public and Rumiantsev Museum, 77–78 Sofia, 48 on underestimation of medieval Russian art, 45 on Vrubel and Cézanne, 109 on Vrubel as avant-​garde martyr, 122 Museum of Christian Antiquities, 36–37, 38, 99 museums and private collections. See also temporary exhibitions Hermitage Museum, 63–67 Imperial Russian Historical Museum, 79–87, 89–90 Moscow Public and Rumiantsev Museum, 73–79 Museum of Christian Antiquities, 36–37, 38, 99 and reconceptualization of medieval art, 59, 60, 61, 63 Russian Museum of His Imperial Majesty Alexander III, 62, 67–73, 179 Napoleonic Wars, 3 nationalism, 4, 7, 31, 40, 49, 223 naturalism, 20, 44, 46, 51, 53–54, 129, 144, 169 Nazarenes, 148 Nelidov, Alexander, 41 Nelson, Robert S., 23, 105, 200 “Neo-​Byzantine,” 3–4 neoclassicism, 4, 17, 196 Neoprimitivism, 191 “Neo-​Russian,” 3–4 Neradovskii, Petr, 71–72 Nesterov, Mikhail, 87, 110, 116–17 Newmarch, Rosa, 112 Nicholas I, 32, 33, 113 Nicholas II, 67–68, 236 n. 143 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 116 Nikon, Patriarch, 94 nimbus / nimbi, in Kandinsky works, 165 Old Believers, 94, 236 n. 143 Old Testament Trinity (Rublev), 14, 15–16, 64, 169

restoration of, 61–62 Old Testament Trinity (Ushakov), 15–16 On the Spiritual in Art (Kandinsky), 141, 142, 146, 147–48, 151, 239 n. 20 Orientalism, 5, 23, 25–26, 33, 34 Orthodox Church and Orthodoxy, 17, 111–12, 152, 198, 221–22 ostranenie, 131 Ostroukhov, Ilia, 62, 72, 78, 91 Ouspensky, Leonid, 20 Ovchinnikov, Mikhail, 87 Painterly Reliefs (Tatlin), 194–96, 199 Painter’s Manual (Dionysius of Fourna), 23 Panofsky, Erwin, 52 Panova, Lada, 5 Paris: A Rainy Day (Caillebotte), 128, 129 Parody of a Kazimir Malevich Painting (Zak), 184, 185 Pashkov House, 74, 75 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 197 Pentcheva, Bissera, 181, 198–99 Peredvizhniki (Itinerants or Wanderers), 46, 73, 98–99, 111, 128, 129, 149, 228 n. 38 Pestel, Vera, 182–83 Peter the Great, 13–15, 31, 175 Petrov-​Vodkin, Kuzma, 95 Picasso, Pablo, 48, 130, 190, 194, 196, 197, 246 n. 55 Picture with the White Edge (Kandinsky), 162 pigment, Punin on Tatlin’s use of, 197–98 Pillar and Ground of the Truth (Florensky), 207 Polenov, Vasilii, 128, 129 political reforms, 93–94 Popov, Pavel, 242 n. 106 Popova, Liubov, 130–31 Popova, Olga, 60 Portrait of Savva Mamontov (Vrubel), 106–7, 108, 187 Portrait of Savva Mamontov (Zorn), 107 positivism, 7 Postimpressionism, 1, 128 Postnikov, Dmitrii, 87, 234–35 n. 106 Poussin, Nicolas, 16 Prakhov, Adrian, 38–40, 42, 99, 102–3, 104, 114, 237 n. 12 Prakhov, Nikolai, 127 “pre-​Petrine,” 43 Pre-​R aphaelites, 148 “primitive,” 147–48 Primitivism, 191 Principles of Creativity in the Plastic Arts (Markov), 196 Productivists and Productivist art, 57, 176–77 Prokhorov, Vasilii, 37, 38

Index

267

psychology, Kandinsky’s interest in, 153 Puni, Ivan, 198, 243 n. 1 Punin, Nikolai and avant-​garde, 128 on decline of Russian art, 46 employment of, 232 n. 14 on Exhibition of Ancient Russian Art, 94–95 on Kandinsky, 138 on Manet and Impressionists, 2 and philosophy of icon, 49, 50, 53–55, 57 and Russian Museum, 72–73 on Suprematism, 204 Tarabukin and, 204 on Tatlin, 197–98 Tatlin (Against Cubism) , 133, 197 on Tatlin and Malevich, 182 on Vrubel, 97, 131–33 “Punk Prayer: Mother of God, Drive Putin Away!” (Pussy Riot), 219–21 Pushkin, Alexander, 227 n. 10 Pussy Riot, 219–21 Putin, Vladimir, 221 Rachmaninoff, Sergei, 219 Radzivill Chronicle, 234 n. 90 RAKhN, 153, 172, 176, 226 n. 26 Rakitin, Vasilii, 179 Rambelli, Fabio, 209 rationalism, 31, 50, 94, 137, 175, 197 Ravenna Church of San Michele, 64 Church of San Vitale, 26 Mausoleum of Galla Placidia/nl, 26, 81 Rayonism, 127, 130 Realism, “true” and “false,” 51 realists. See Peredvizhniki (Itinerants or Wanderers) real space, 11, 19, 180, 194, 196, 198, 200–202, 204 Redin, Egor, 43 Red Spot II (Kandinsky), 158, 160, 161 Reinders, Eric, 209 relief icons, 198–99 religious art, versus sacred art, 53 Religious Composition: Virgin (with Ornament) (Goncharova), 149–50 Reminiscences (Kandinsky), 139 Renaissance, 2, 16, 22, 41, 45, 47, 49, 53, 55, 56 Resurrection (Vrubel), 116 “Reverse Perspective” (Florensky), 51–52, 173–74 “revival,” 4–5

268

Index

revivalism, 3–4, 8, 9, 47, 177, 203, 221, 223 Revolution (Bolshevik), 5, 56, 72, 191, 208, 217 Riabushinsky, Stepan, 62, 72, 78, 91, 92, 93 Rider, The (Vrubel), 130 Riding Couple (Kandinsky), 144–46 Ringbom, Sixten, 240 n. 47 Robert and the Nuns (Vrubel), 130 Rodchenko, Alexander, 131, 177, 217 Roerich, Nikolai, 95, 146 Romanesque art and architecture, 43, 64, 76 Romantic movement, 23 Rome, Russian engagement with, 5. See also “Third Rome” ideology Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 148 Royal Doors with Christ, the Virgin, the Archangel Gabriel and the Four Evangelists (Borovikovsky), 20, 21 Rozanova, Olga, 137, 198, 243 n. 1 Rublev, Andrei Old Testament Trinity, 14, 15–16, 61–62, 63, 169 Virgin of Vladimir, 70, 71 Rumiantsev, Nikolai, 74 Rumiantsev Museum, 73–74. See also Moscow Public and Rumiantsev Museum Ruskin, John, 23 Russian Antiquities in Monuments of Art (Kondakov and Tolstoy), 42–43 Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople (Istanbul), 41–42 Russian icon painting cleaning and restoration of, 61–62 featured in art journals, 62–63 reconceptualization of, 92–95 relationship between Byzantine icon painting and, 59–61 temporary exhibitions featuring, 90, 91–95 Russian Museum of His Imperial Majesty Alexander III, 62, 67–73, 179 Russian Religious Renaissance, 49, 170–77 Russian Style (Russkii stil), 79 Russkaia ikona, 72 “Russo-​Byzantine,” 3–4, 43 Russo-​Byzantine revival, 4–5. See also Byzantine art; Byzantine revival Benois on, 49 key figures in, 38–42 linked with modern artistic expression, 1–2, 40, 46–49 linked with production of national art-​historical narratives, 191 and nineteenth-​century positivism, 7 polemics fueling, 33–34

second wave of, 221 Tatlin and Malevich and discourse surrounding, 217 Russo–Turkish War (1768–1774), 22 Russo–Turkish War (1877–1878), 33, 60 sacred art, versus religious art, 53 “sacred” corner, 184, 205 Safonov, Nikolai, 83–84 Sailor (Tatlin), 186–88, 191–92 Saint Catherine (Borovikovsky), 18 Saint George, 82 Saint George and the Dragon, 154, 155 Saint George cycles (Kandinsky), 140 Saint George motif, 154–56, 242 n. 81 Saint John the Baptist (Martos), 17 Saint John the Evangelist and Prochorus, 74 Saints Boris and Gleb, 71, 73, 91, 93 Saints John the Apostle and James the Great (Afanasiev), 203 Saint Theodore the Dragon Slayer, 64, 66 Salon d’automne (1906), 146 Salon des indépendants, 78 salon painting, 3, 54 Salzenberg, Wilhelm, 23, 81 Santa Maria Cathedral, 103 Sarabianov, Dmitrii, 191, 226 n. 22, 246 n. 52 Savel’ev, Iurii, 9, 43 Savior in Majesty (Goncharova), 191–92 Schmidt, Fedor, 85 Seated Demon (Vrubel), 104–5, 106, 107–8, 121, 123 Seated Figure (Tatlin), 190 Second All-​Russian Congress of Artists, 92, 93, 184, 239n20 secularization, 10, 20 Self-​Portrait (Malevich), 185, 213, 214 semiotics, 196, 209 Seraph (Vrubel), 120, 121, 238 n. 53 Serov, Valentin, 87 serpent, in Kandinsky works, 162–63 Sevastianov, Petr, 36–37, 76 Shabelskaia, Natalia, 87, 235 n. 106 Sharp, Jane, 4, 9, 118, 183, 192, 210 Shatskikh, Aleksandra, 206, 209, 244 n. 15 Shcherbatov, Prince Mikhail, 31 Shchukin, Petr, 85 Shchukin, Sergei, 46, 48 Shchusev, Aleksei, 86–87 Shevchenko, Alexander, 191 Shevzov, Vera, 5 Shklovsky, Viktor, 131 Simmons, Sherwin, 184

Six-​Winged Seraph (Vrubel), 120, 123–25 Slap in the Face of Public Taste, A, 151 Slavophiles / Slavophilism, 20, 31, 33, 45, 49, 50, 67 Smirnov, Vasilii, 26–31, 227 n. 26 Socialist Realism, 50 Society of Ancient Russian Art, 77 Sofia, 48, 78 Soldatenkov, Kozma, 74 Solntsev, Fedor, 3, 13, 42 Soloviev, Vladimir, 32, 49–50, 55, 207 Sound of Trumpets (Kandinsky), 140 Spanish Still Life (Matisse), 191, 193 spatial icons, 180, 198–204. See also iconic space Spira, Andrew, 8, 148, 195–96 Standing Demon, The (Vrubel), 120, 121, 238 n. 53 Stasov, Vladimir, 38, 44, 113, 128 St. Catherine Monastery on Mount Sinai, 5, 90, 101 St. Cyril Church, 39, 97, 99, 102–3, 112, 117, 118 St. Dimitrii Cathedral, 84 Stepanova, Varvara, 177 Stephenson, Paul, 227 n. 27 St. Esprit Church (Paris), 223 stil modern, 40, 229 n. 66. See also Art Nouveau St. Isaac Cathedral, 36 St. Leopold am Steinhof Church (Vienna), 223 Stones of Venice (Ruskin), 23 St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Arts, 35–38 Strigalev, Anatolii, 183, 187, 194 stripping, 153 Stroganov School, 71, 79, 90, 92 Strom, Ivan, 32 Struve, Petr, 170 St. Sophia Cathedral (Kiev), 43, 82, 99, 100, 104, 105 St. Sophia Cathedral (Novgorod), 82, 83 St. Sophia Cathedral (Tsarskoe Selo), 22, 39 St. Sophia Cathedral (Vologda), 162, 164 Study for the Virgin (Vrubel), 118, 119 Study of a Head (Vrubel), 120 Study of Apostle Thomas on the Cupola of the Church of St. George, Staraia Ladoga (Tatlin), 201 St. Vladimir Cathedral, 39–40, 110, 112, 113–18 Sudeikin, Sergei, 130 Suetin, Nikolai, 213, 216 Suprematism, 182, 204, 205–6, 208, 211, 215, 216 Suprematism: Self-​Portrait in Two Dimensions (Malevich), 210–11, 212 Surikov, Vasilii, 86, 87 Surrealism, 130 Sychev, Nikolai, 59, 62, 71, 72

Index

269

Symbolist movement, 4 Symeon the New Theologian, Saint, 169 Tarabukin, Nikolai and avant-​garde, 128 on decline of Russian art, 46 on Eastern Tale, 131 on iconic space, 56, 168, 203–4 on icon painting, 204 on Manet and Impressionists, 2 on medieval conception of universe, 6 and philosophy of icon, 49, 50, 53, 55–57 and study of Vrubel’s art, 132 on Tatlin, 217 on Vrubel, 113, 117–18, 129, 133–35 Tarasov, Oleg, 213 Tatlin (Against Cubism) (Punin), 133, 197 Tatlin, Vladimir Composition-​Analysis, 192–94, 246 n. 52 Constructivism and reliefs of, 244 n. 15 Corner Counter-​Reliefs, 180, 181, 182, 183, 198–204, 217 and Cubism, 191–98 Female Model (Nude 1: Composition Based on a Female Nude), 188–90 Female Model (Nude 2), 188–90 Fishmonger, 186 historical conflict between Malevich and, 182–91, 244–45 n. 24 influence of, 7 on Levenets and Kharchenko, 245 n. 39 Month of May, 195 Painterly Reliefs, 194–96, 199 Punin on, 133 Sailor, 186–88, 191–92 Seated Figure, 190 Study of Apostle Thomas on the Cupola of the Church of St. George, Staraia Ladoga, 201 visit of, to Picasso’s studio, 246 n. 55 Vrubel and, 131 temporary exhibitions, 76, 87–95 Tenisheva, Maria, 146–47 Ter-​Oganian, Avdei, 222 Theodora (empress), 25, 26 Theodore the Studite, Saint, 53 theology of the icon, 51–53, 168–70 Theophanes the Greek, 60–61 theophany, 50, 169 Theosophy, 137, 141, 240 n. 47 “Third Rome” ideology, 5, 60, 80

270

Index

34 Drawings (Malevich), 206 Thon, Constantine, 33. See also Cathedral of Christ the Savior Tolstoy, Leo, 42–43, 128 Train Car with UNOVIS Symbol en Route to the Exhibition in Moscow (Suetin), 216 Trenev, Dmitrii, 43 Tretyakov Gallery, 47, 60, 73, 79, 221 Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, 175, 176 Tsakiridou, Cornelia, 169 Tuchkov, Pavel, 74 Tugenkhold, Iakov, 48, 94, 149 Tver, 88 Twelfth All- Russian Archaeological Convention, 89 Two Angels with Labara (Vrubel), 102, 103 two-​dimensionality of pictorial surface, 174 Ufimtsev, Viktor, 137 Ugolnik, Anthony, 152 UNOVIS, 213 Untitled (Kandinsky), 142 Ushakov, Simon, 15–16 Uspenskii, Alexander, 43 Uspenskii, Fedor, 41 Uvarov, Aleksei, 64, 79, 80, 85 Vasnetsov, Viktor, 81, 86, 110, 111–12, 116–17 veiling, 153, 154 Vekhi (Landmarks), 170–71 Vereshchagin, Vasilii, 64, 65, 87 Verneilh, Félix de, 23 Vesnin, Alexander, 204, 242 n. 106 Viktorov, Aleksei, 77 Virgin Hodegetria of Smolensk, 215 Virgin Mary mosaic, The, 99, 100 Virgin of the Don, 193 Virgin of Vladimir (Rublev), 70, 71 vision, 165–70, 200 Vision of the Prophet Ezekiel, The (Vrubel), 125–27 VKhUTEMAS, 51, 57, 172, 176, 177, 226 n. 26, 242 n. 107 Vladimir of Kiev (prince), 13 Volga Song (Kandinsky), 144–46 Voltaire, 21, 25 von Sydow, Eckart, 152–53 Voronikhin, Andrei, 17. See also Kazan Cathedral Vrubel, Mikhail Angel of Death, 123–25 Angels’ Lamentation, 97, 98 Annunciation, 99, 100, 101 and avant-​garde, 128–35



Azrael, 123–25 changed iconography of, 118–27 compared to Cézanne, 107–10 critical misunderstanding and rejection of, 112–18 Demon Cast Down, 120–21, 122, 123, 125, 130 Demon Looking at a Dale, 109 Demon series, 118–27 Descent of the Holy Ghost, 103 Eastern Tale, 131, 134 Head of a Lion, 131, 133 Head of an Angel, 120 Head of Demon, 118, 119 Head of John the Baptist, 123 Head of the Demon, 120 influence of, 7 Lamentation I, 114, 115 Lamentation II, 114–16, 237 n. 40 Last Judgment mosaic, 237 n. 12 A Man in a Russian Old-​Style Costume, 103–4 Morning—Decorative Panel, 113 Moses, 118–20 Portrait of Savva Mamontov, 106–7, 108, 187 Resurrection, 116 The Rider, 130 Robert and the Nuns, 130 Seated Demon, 104–5, 106, 107–8, 121, 123 Six-​Winged Seraph, 120, 123–25 The Standing Demon, 120, 121, 238 n. 53 and St. Cyril Church frescoes, 39 Study for the Virgin, 118, 119 Study of a Head, 120 trajectory of, toward modernist style, 97–110

Two Angels with Labara, 102, 103 The Vision of the Prophet Ezekiel, 125–27 Vzdornov, Gerold, 9, 59 Walicki, Andrzej, 31, 50 Wanderers (Itinerants). See Peredvizhniki (Itinerants or Wanderers) Warren, Sarah, 9 Washton Long, Rose-​Carol, 153, 240 n. 47, 242 nn. 81,82 Weiss, Peg, 154 Westernization, 13–14, 16, 43–44, 175 Westernizers. See Slavophiles / Slavophilism World of Art (Mir Iskusstva), 141 Worringer, Wilhelm, 142–44 Wortman, Richard, 34 Yellow-​Red-​Blue (Kandinsky), 154, 156, 163–65 Yellow Series, The (Malevich), 184–86 Young Atheist (Ter-​Oganian), 222 Zabelin, Ivan, 80, 85 Zak, Lef, 184, 185 Zaraisk Gospel, 74 Zernov, Nicolas, 230 n. 108 0.10: The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting, 179–84, 198, 199–200, 204, 206, 217, 243 nn. 1,6, 244–45 n. 24 Zhadova, Larissa, 193, 202, 245 n. 39, 246 n. 52 Zhigarev, Sergei, 33 zhivopis, 6 Zorn, Anders, 107

Index

271