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
Maria Taroutina is Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies at Brown University.
“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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