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

by Maria Taroutina

Overview

In The Icon and the Square, Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with the radical, leftist, and revolutionary avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century through a shared interest in the Byzantine past, offering a counternarrative to prevailing notions of Russian modernism.

Focusing on the works of four different artists—Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin—Taroutina shows how engagement with medieval pictorial traditions drove each artist to transform his own practice, pushing beyond the established boundaries of his respective artistic and intellectual milieu. She also contextualizes and complements her study of the work of these artists with an examination of the activities of a number of important cultural associations and institutions over the course of several decades. As a result, The Icon and the Square gives a more complete picture of Russian modernism: one that attends to the dialogue between generations of artists, curators, collectors, critics, and theorists.

The Icon and the Square retrieves a neglected but vital history that was deliberately suppressed by the atheist Soviet regime and subsequently ignored in favor of the secular formalism of mainstream modernist criticism. Taroutina’s timely study, which coincides with the centennial reassessments of Russian and Soviet modernism, is sure to invigorate conversation among scholars of art history, modernism, and Russian culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780271082554
Publisher:	Penn State University Press
Publication date:	11/26/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	57 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Maria Taroutina is Assistant Professor of Art History at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

AcknowledgmentsNote on Transliteration, Translation, and DatesIntroduction1. Byzantium Reconsidered: Revivalism, Avant-Gardism, and the New Art Criticism2. From Constantinople to Moscow and St. Petersburg: Museums, Exhibitions, and Private Collections3. Angels Becoming Demons: Mikhail Vrubel’s Modernist Beginnings4. Vasily Kandinsky’s Iconic Subconscious and the Search for the Spiritual in Art5. Toward a New Icon: Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, and the Cult of NonobjectivityEpilogueNotesSelected BibliographyIndex

Editorial Reviews

Well written and richly illustrated, it gives a comprehensive sense of the way in which the Byzantine ground of Russian national identity was laid throughout the nineteenth century, without which some of the most influential manifestations of world modernism could never have flowered the way they did.”

—Andrew Spira Burlington Magazine

“Maria Taroutina’s beautifully illustrated and informative book demonstrates convincingly that the story is much more multifarious and complicated than has so far been shown.”

—Per-Anne Bodin The Russian Review

“In her lavishly illustrated book, Taroutina revises the time period during which art historians generally locate the origins of modernism in Russian art from the beginning of the twentieth century to the closing decades of the nineteenth.”

—Maria Lipman Foreign Affairs

“In the 1909 essay ‘New Paths in Art,’ artist and writer Léon Bakst observed that Russian art could move forward only by turning back to the aesthetics of antiquity, national folklore, and even prehistory. In her audacious analysis, Maria Taroutina places luminaries of both Symbolism and the avant-garde, such as Goncharova, Malevich, Tatlin, and Vrubel, in a wide temporal framework and persuasively establishes a harmonious correlation between their radical stance and bygone cultures.”

—John E. Bowlt, editor of Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902-1934

“This remarkable account tackles longstanding and resilient binaries to reveal ways in which some of the most innovative members of Russia's avant-garde willingly engaged with the cultural and political establishment and deployed medieval visual practice to galvanize modernist discourse in highly unexpected and suggestive ways.”

—Rosalind Polly Blakesley, author of The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia, 1757-1881

“Brilliantly complicates and expands our largely secular, future-oriented understanding of Russian modernism by revealing the myriad affinities that bound avant-garde artists and critics to the values of the Russo-Byzantine revival. The historiographic questions raised in this paradigm-shifting study are central to the emerging field of global modernist studies, while those interested in medieval culture and its modern revivals will find much to stimulate new thinking.”

—Wendy Salmond, author of Konstantin Makovsky: The Tsar's Painter in America and Paris

“Nowhere was modernist experimentation with new forms more dramatic and radical than in Russia. Maria Taroutina demonstrates how the reach toward abstraction was deeply connected with a search for the “spiritual in art.” The pioneering artists in this study found stimuli in medieval icons, mosaics, and frescoes; at the same time, official efforts to promote national culture focused on these Russo-Byzantine sources. Extensively documented, this book offers insights into both conservative and modernist motivations, activities, and ideas that made up the densely woven tapestry of Russian modernism.”

—Alison Hilton, author of Russian Folk Art

“The Icon and the Square paves the way for further study by laying a solid methodological groundwork that invites further analysis of its core themes.”

—Kamila Kocialkowska H-SHERA

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