Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art E-Book

Louise Hardiman

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

In 1911 Vasily Kandinsky published the first edition of ‘On the Spiritual in Art’, a landmark modernist treatise in which he sought to reframe the meaning of art and the true role of the artist. For many artists of late Imperial Russia – a culture deeply influenced by the regime’s adoption of Byzantine Orthodoxy centuries before – questions of religion and spirituality were of paramount importance. As artists and the wider art community experimented with new ideas and interpretations at the dawn of the twentieth century, their relationship with ‘the spiritual’ – broadly defined – was inextricably linked to their roles as pioneers of modernism.This diverse collection of essays introduces new and stimulating approaches to the ongoing debate as to how Russian artistic modernism engaged with questions of spirituality in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Ten chapters from emerging and established voices offer new perspectives on Kandinsky and other familiar names, such as Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Larionov, and Natalia Goncharova, and introduce less well-known figures, such as the Georgian artists Ucha Japaridze and Lado Gudiashvili, and the craftswoman and art promoter Aleksandra Pogosskaia.Prefaced by a lively and informative introduction by Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow that sets these perspectives in their historical and critical context, Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives enriches our understanding of the modernist period and breaks new ground in its re-examination of the role of religion and spirituality in the visual arts in late Imperial Russia. Of interest to historians and enthusiasts of Russian art, culture, and religion, and those of international modernism and the avant-garde, it offers innovative readings of a history only partially explored, revealing uncharted corners and challenging long-held assumptions.

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MODERNISM AND THE SPIRITUAL IN RUSSIAN ART

Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art

New Perspectives

Edited by Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow

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© 2017 Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow.

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Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow, Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2017, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0115

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Contents

Acknowledgements

1

Notes on Transliteration and Conventions

3

Notes on Contributors

5

1.

Introduction: Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art

Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow

9

2.

From Angels to Demons: Mikhail Vrubel and the Search for a Modernist Idiom

Maria Taroutina

37

3.

‘The Loving Labourer through Space and Time’: Aleksandra Pogosskaia, Theosophy, and Russian Arts and Crafts, c. 1900–1917

Louise Hardiman

69

4.

Kazimir Malevich, Symbolism, and Ecclesiastic Orthodoxy

Myroslava M. Mudrak

91

5.

Spirituality and the Semiotics of Russian Culture: From the Icon to Avant-Garde Art

Oleg Tarasov

115

6.

Re-imagining the Old Faith: Larionov, Goncharova, and the Spiritual Traditions of Old Believers

Nina Gurianova

129

7.

‘Russian Messiah’: On the Spiritual in the Reception of Vasily Kandinsky’s Art in Germany, c. 1910–1937

Sebastian Borkhardt

149

8.

Ellis H. Minns and Nikodim Kondakov’s The Russian Icon (1927)

Wendy Salmond

165

9.

Stelletsky’s Murals at Saint-Serge: Orthodoxy and the Neo-Russian Style in Emigration

Nicola Kozicharow

195

10.

The Role of the ‘Red Commissar’ Nikolai Punin in the Rediscovery of Icons

Natalia Murray

213

11.

Ucha Japaridze, Lado Gudiashvili, and the Spiritual in Painting in Soviet Georgia

Jennifer Brewin

229

Select Bibliography

265

Illustrations

289

Index

299

Acknowledgements

Above all, we are grateful to our authors for enriching this book with their outstanding research and writing, and for sharing our interest in its theme. The project to publish this book evolved from discussions at a conference, ‘On the Spiritual in Russian Art’, which we organised at Pembroke College, Cambridge, on 7–8 September 2012, in honour of the centenary of the publication of Vasily Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art (1910–12). The event was the first international symposium to be hosted at the University of Cambridge by the Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre (CCRAC), an academic collaboration established by Rosalind P. Blakesley of the Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge and Professor John Milner of The Courtauld Institute with the goal of promoting and supporting Russian and Soviet art scholarship in Britain.1 This volume reflects many of the values which the centre has sought to promulgate in the years since its founding in 2011, and stands as lasting testament to the stimulating dialogue that took place at the inaugural conference. We would like to thank the speakers and delegates, and especially Rosalind Blakesley, Richard Marks, Maria Mileeva, John Milner, Robin Milner-Gulland, and Elizabeth Valkenier for contributing to a memorable two days. Our keynote speakers, Wendy Salmond and Oleg Tarasov, not only gave outstanding presentations but have encouraged us throughout the process of the ensuing book project, and we are delighted to include chapters based on their papers here. We thank the funders of the conference for their support: the British Association for Slavonic and Eastern European Studies (BASEES); the George Macaulay Trevelyan Fund, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge; and the Department of History of Art, Cambridge. We also gratefully acknowledge the award of a Publication Grant from the Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, towards the costs of this book. At Open Book Publishers, we are indebted to Alessandra Tosi, Bianca Gualandi, Lucy Barnes, and our cover designer, Heidi Coburn. We thank Alessandra and all those others who gave invaluable feedback on the manuscript at various phases of its creation, and two independent peer reviewers for their constructive comments. Finally, we thank our families, friends, and colleagues for their patience, encouragement, and unstinting support (and, of course, those of our authors); they have all played their part in the making of this book.

1 For more information, visit: http://www.ccrac.org.uk. John Milner has since stepped down from his role as co-director, and this position is held by Dr Maria Mileeva of The Courtauld Institute.

Notes on Transliteration and Conventions

This book uses a modified form of the Library of Congress transliteration system with some exceptions. For readability, we leave out diacritical marks from proper names and nouns (e.g., Vrubel) in the main text, but maintain these in footnotes. Patronymics of Russian names are not used, and when a Russian name or place has a conventional or generally known transliteration that differs from the Library of Congress System, this has been used (e.g., Alexandre Benois, not Aleksandr Benua, and Nicholas Roerich rather than Nikolai Rerikh; Tretyakov Gallery). We use ‘y’ instead of ‘ii’ or ‘yi’ (Kandinsky, not Kandinskii), except for the titles of Russian texts in the footnotes. Standard western names are used for Russian rulers (Peter the Great, Nicholas I) and places (Moscow, Munich); however, we use the Ukrainian transliteration Kyiv, rather than Kiev. If an alternative method of transliteration has been used in a quotation from a source or in a source citation, this is upheld. We also maintain original spelling in quotations, rather than altering these to reflect British English. When the title of a publication or an artistic group appears for the first time in the main text, its translated name in English is used together with a transliteration of the Russian in parentheses; when the title is used again later, only its translation is stated. However, in the footnotes and bibliography, only the transliteration is given, with no English translation. When quoting Russian text in footnotes, original orthography has been used wherever possible, including pre-1917 spellings upheld in emigration (such as ‘ago’, rather than the currently used form, ‘ogo’). This older orthography is used to maintain the integrity of émigré texts, but at the same time, letters which were eliminated after the Revolution, such as ‘і’, are not used. Translations of quotations are the author’s own unless stated otherwise in the footnotes.

Contributors

Sebastian Borkhardt studied History of Art, East Slavonic Philology, and Religious Studies in Tübingen and St Petersburg. After completing his MA, he began doctoral research at the University of Tübingen. His dissertation examines the role of the Russian roots of Vasily Kandinsky in the reception of the artist’s work in Germany and is supervised by Professors Eva Mazur-Keblowski (Tübingen) and Ada Raev (Bamberg). Borkhardt has received scholarships from the State Graduate Funding (Landesgraduiertenförderung) of Baden-Württemberg and the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes). His research interests include modernism, with a particular focus on Russian art, as well as reception history, human-animal studies, and contemporary museum practice. Borkhardt is a member of the Russian Art and Culture Group based at Jacobs University in Bremen (http://russian-art.user.jacobs-university.de) and co-editor of the 2017 issue of Experiment: A Journal of Russian Culture which is dedicated to the memory of Dmitry Sarabyanov.

Jennifer Brewin is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. Her research, supervised by Dr Rosalind Polly Blakesley, explores the interaction of painting and national politics in Soviet Georgia under Stalin. Her research interests include all areas of Russian and Soviet art. She received her MA in History of Art from The Courtauld Institute of Art (2011) and her BA in Russian and History of Art from the University of Bristol (2008). She is a member of the advisory board of the Courtauld Cambridge Russian Art Centre (CCRAC). Her research is funded by the Lander PhD Studentship at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

Nina Gurianova is Associate Professor at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Comparative Literary Studies Program at Northwestern University (USA). Her scholarship in the fields of literature and art history encompasses both Russian and European modernist and avant-garde movements, with a specific emphasis on the interrelation of aesthetics and politics. She has authored and edited six books on the Russian avant-garde and published extensively in Europe, the United States, and Russia. Gurianova served as the primary exhibition consultant for the Guggenheim Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and participated in the organisation of many exhibitions. Gurianova’s most recent book, The Aesthetics of Anarchy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012) won the AATSEEL Best Book in Literary/Cultural Studies annual award. Her research was supported by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University, the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, the William F. Milton Fund, IREX, the National Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for Humanities. Currently she is working on a monograph, New Art and Old Faith, which explores in depth the themes outlined in her chapter.

Louise Hardiman is an art historian specialising in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian art. She is a graduate of the universities of Oxford, London, and Cambridge, where she completed a PhD on the history of Russian Arts and Crafts in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Her primary research concerns the history of the ‘neo-national’ movement and Anglo-Russian cultural exchange. She was consultant and catalogue contributor for the exhibition A Russian Fairy Tale: The Art and Craft of Elena Polenova (Watts Gallery, Guildford, 2014–15), and is the editor of Elena Polenova, Why the Bear Has no Tail and other Russian Folk Tales (London: Fontanka, 2014) and The Story of Synko-Filipko and other Russian Folk Tales (London: Fontanka, forthcoming). In 2016–17 she held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art to work on her book The Firebird’s Flight: Russian Art in Britain, 1851–1917.

Nicola Kozicharow is the Schulman Research Fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge and an Affiliated Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Cambridge. She is a specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and Russian art, and her current book project is entitled Visual Culture and the Construction of Russian Émigré Identity. Her research has recently been sponsored by the Getty Research Institute and the Likhachev Foundation. Kozicharow received her PhD and MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and holds an MA from University College London, and a BA in History of Art (Honors) and Slavic Studies from Brown University.

Myroslava M. Mudrak is Emerita Professor of the History of Art at The Ohio State University. Her research centres on modernist art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with special emphasis on avant-garde and abstract art in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Ukraine. Her primary interest is in the ideological discourses, socio-political influences, and artistic practices within East European cultures that use modernity to signify national identity. Mudrak has curated and produced catalogues for two historic exhibitions at The Ukrainian Museum in New York: Borys Kosarev: Modernist Kharkiv, 1915–31 (2012) and Staging the Ukrainian Avant-Garde 1910s–1920s (2015), the latter winning the prestigious Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions, under the auspices of the College Art Association in 2016. Mudrak’s publications include essays on Ukrainian Dada and Dissidence, Propaganda Pavilions, the Ukrainian Studio of Plastic Arts in Prague, Panfuturism, Constructivism, David Burliuk, and ‘Neue Slowenische Kunst and the Semiotics of Suprematism’. Her seminal work, New Generation and Artistic Modernism in Ukraine (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986), soon to be published in a Ukrainian translation, was awarded the Kovaliw Prize for Ukrainian Studies.

Natalia Murray has a PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and prior to this she studied History of Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg and completed the PhD course at the Hermitage Museum. In 2012 she wrote her monograph, The Unsung Hero of the Russian Avant-Garde. The Life and Times of Nikolay Punin (1888–1953) (Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic, 2012). At present she is lecturing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian art at The Courtauld Institute of Art, the Art Fund, and The Arts Society; she also works as head of education and public programmes at GRAD (Gallery for Russian Art and Design), and curates exhibitions of Russian art in England. She recently curated a major exhibition for the Royal Academy of Arts entitled Revolution: Russian Art 1917–32 (11 February–17 April 2017) and is now editing her next book, on the subject of post-revolutionary festivals in Petrograd.

Wendy Salmond is Professor of Art and Art History at Chapman University, CA. She has written and lectured extensively on Russian and Soviet art, the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Nouveau, and Russian modernism. Her current project is a book tracing transformations in the perception and function of icons in Russia, from objects of devotion to works of art. Salmond has been a guest curator of exhibitions at Hillwood Museum and Gardens, Washington, DC (Tradition in Transition: Russian Icons in the Age of the Romanovs, 2004) and The New York Public Library (Russia Imagined, 1825–1925: The Art and Impact of Fedor Solntsev, 2006). She is a prolific translator of texts on Russian art and culture, and has edited volumes on the sculptor Sergei Konenkov, the Bolshevik sales of Russian art in the 1920s and 1930s, and the reception of Art Nouveau in Russia.

Oleg Tarasov is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Slavic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences. He has an MA in History and a PhD in History and Theory of Arts from Moscow State University and a PhD in History from the Russian Academy of Sciences. Tarasov is the author of Icon and Devotion. Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), Framing Russian Art: From Early Icons to Malevich (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), and Modern i drevnie ikony: Ot sviatyni k shedevru (Art Nouveau and Ancient Icons: From Sacred Object to Masterpiece) (Moscow: Indrik, 2016). He is also a consultant and catalogue contributor for many exhibitions including Picture and Frame (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 2014).

Maria Taroutina is Assistant Professor of Art History at Yale–NUS College in Singapore. She received her PhD in 2013 from Yale University and has published a number of articles and essays on the art and architecture of Imperial and early Soviet Russia. She is also co-editor, with Roland Betancourt, of Byzantium/Modernism: The Byzantine as Method in Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2015). Her first sole-authored book monograph, provisionally titled From the Tessera to the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival is forthcoming with Pennsylvania State University Press. It charts the rediscovery and reassessment of medieval Russian and Byzantine representation in Russia in the years 1860–1920. Currently, she is working on another edited volume, which will address new narratives and methodologies in Russian and Eastern European art.

1. Introduction: Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art

Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow

© 2017 Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0115.01

It also belongs to my definition of Modernism […] that art, that aesthetic experience no longer needs to be justified in other terms than its own, that art is an end in itself and that the aesthetic is an autonomous value. It could now be acknowledged that art doesn’t have to teach, doesn’t have to celebrate or glorify anybody or anything, doesn’t have to advance causes; that it has become free to distance itself from religion, politics, and even morality. All it has to do is be good as art.

Clement Greenberg1

In his 1961 text ‘Modernist Painting’ and other writings since, renowned art critic Clement Greenberg contended that the significance of modernist painting lay precisely in its aesthetic qualities. The autonomy granted to an artwork rendered factors outside of its formal aspects, such as artistic intention, tangential to its meaning or value. Art was now free from religious, political, or moral content and ideas, however strongly intended or present. Greenberg’s theory of formalist modernism has been criticised at length since the 1960s, yet scholars still find it necessary to refute it, especially in discussions of the importance of spirituality or religion in the history of modern art, showing its lasting power.2 For Russian modernism, however, Greenberg’s theories have little relevance. It is this book’s contention that, in Russia, extrinsic ideas and influences — and, most of all, those of Russian religious and spiritual traditions — were of the utmost importance in the making, content, and meaning of modern art. The claim is not entirely new; for example, scholarship in recent years has engaged with such highly pertinent questions as how icon painting became an inspiration for the Russian avant-garde.3 Highlighting fresh research from an international set of scholars, this volume introduces new interpretations and approaches, and aims to energise debate on issues which have been circulating in scholarship on modern art over the past century. Ten chapters from emerging and established historians illustrate the diverse ways in which themes of religion and spirituality were central to the work of artists and critics during the rise of Russian modernism.

The relationship between modernism and the spiritual has been, and continues to be, a subject of debate in art historical scholarship in the west. Vasily Kandinsky, whose seminal treatise, On the Spiritual in Art(Über das Geistige in der Kunst), of 1911–12 (fig. 1.1) has been hailed as one of the most important texts in the history of modern art, is a key figure in such discussions.4Kandinsky’s theories, based upon spiritual notions outside of Russian Orthodoxy, are now interpreted as owing much to Theosophy;5 indeed, the influence of spiritual traditions beyond mainstream religion has informed much scholarship to date on the nexus between modernism and spirituality. Appearing soon after Greenberg set out his definition of modernism, Sixten Ringbom’s publications on Kandinsky pioneered the discussion of the spiritual in theories of modern art.6 In the past fifty years more research has emerged, often in connection with the multitude of exhibitions on the theme of ‘the spiritual in modern art’ that took place in the late 1970s and 1980s.7

1.1 Vasily Kandinsky, cover of Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art), 1911 (dated 1912).8

Displays such as Perceptions of the Spirit in Twentieth-Century American Art (Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1977) and The Spiritual in Modern Art: Abstract Painting, 1890–1985 (Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art, 1986) did much to change the terms of debate (indeed, the latter was described by James Elkins as “watershed work”).9 The momentum continues. To take a more recent example, the relationship between Russian art and religious culture was examined in the exhibition Jesus Christ in Christian Art and Culture of the Fourteenth to Twentieth Centuries (Iisus Khristos v khristianskom iskusstve i kul′ture XIV–XX veka) in 2000 to 2001 at the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg.10 At the time of publication there has been an upsurge in books, conferences, and academic networks focused upon the relationship between modernism and spirituality and/or religion, making this volume’s publication especially timely.11

With these developments in mind, one of the principal aims of this book is to broaden the debate on Russian artists and the spiritual beyond Kandinsky. Instead, the discussion expands to highlight other modern artists, critics, and mediating figures. Our intention is to open research in new directions; this is not, and does not claim to be, a comprehensive survey. The plurality of religious and spiritual traditions with active followers in Russia during the timeframe under consideration, and the resulting effects upon art, cannot meaningfully be reflected by a group of disparate authors without forfeiting analytical depth and the detail of their research. For example, none of the chapters deals with Judaism, which naturally falls into the frame in any discussion of avant-garde artists such as Marc Chagall, Nathan Altman, and others. Esoteric spirituality here is reflected only by Theosophy, but encompasses a far broader set of belief practices that influenced modernist art during this period — the story of Shamanism and Kandinsky is a notable example.12 Although this volume highlights the richness of the spiritual theme, it should be remembered that this did not necessarily have an impact upon the work of every Russian artist of the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century; rather, this phenomenon represented a pervasive theme within Russian modernism.

Throughout this publication, ‘spiritual’ is used as an umbrella term to encompass a broad range of religious sources and art that engaged — and, at times, entranced — critics and artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Credit is given to the variety of influences, including Russian religious art — primarily icons and frescoes, which, in the late nineteenth century, were appreciated for the first time as artistic, rather than religious, objects — and spiritual concepts such as Theosophy, ideas of the Russian ‘soul’, and the translation of mystical concepts. Religion — that “noncultic, major system of belief” and all its often public and communal trappings (hymns, catechisms, liturgies, rituals, etc.) — is thus united with spirituality — the “private, subjective, often wordless”.13

Scholarship in Russia and the west has explored some of the overarching themes of this book with reference to a variety of figures, mostly artists themselves, over a wide chronology. The narrative spans from Aleksandr Ivanov’s exploration of religious ideas in his paintings of the first half of the nineteenth century, to the Soviet nonconformist artists of the 1960s, and ultimately to other artistic media, for example, Andrei Tarkovsky’s films of the latter half of the twentieth century.14 However, this book concentrates on the critical years of modernism in Russia from its early stages in the late nineteenth century, when artists began to challenge the traditional boundaries of painting, sculpture, and architecture by consciously adopting more radical techniques, media, or themes, until the Thaw period, by which time socialist realism had become thoroughly entrenched as the official art of the Soviet Union. The diverse array of spiritual influences during this period fuelled new formal and theoretical investigations in art, incited fierce debates among artists and critics as to how such concerns were to be deployed, and drew interest from followers and enthusiasts in the west. The notion of the spiritual, broadly defined — whether drawn from conventional religious art or from esoteric ideas — helped shape modernism in Russian art and underpinned some of its most radical experiments. This was especially the case with Russia’s pioneering exponents of non-objective painting — Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Natalia Goncharova, and Mikhail Larionov — who now appear at the heart of the standard art historical narrative of early abstraction.15 This volume offers new readings of a history only partially explored, delving into less familiar stories, and challenging long-held assumptions.

Between East and West: Religion in Russian Art

Thanks to Kandinsky, Russian art has frequently appeared at the heart of discussions of western modernism and spirituality, with a chronology that begins in the 1910s.16 However, in scholarship concentrating on Russian art, the link between art and the spiritual tradition has been a more constant thread. This has much to do with the exceptionally close relationship between art and religion over centuries in Russia’s history, and the particular dynamics of art production in the Church/state relationship, after Grand Prince Vladimir I of Kyiv adopted Orthodoxy from Byzantium as the state religion in AD 988. At the other end of the timeline, the era of emerging modernism was concomitant with a period in the late nineteenth century when various historical developments prompted a deeper, renewed interest in religion and spirituality among artistic communities.17

Until the late seventeenth century, artistic production in Russia was largely dedicated to the service of the Russian Orthodox Church and the ceremonial and personal needs of the Tsars. The visual arts were dominated by the Byzantine tradition of icon painting brought over from Constantinople; the only notable exception was the tradition of folk art that dated from ancient times and continued to develop in parallel with other arts. However, the era of Peter the Great (reigned 1682–1721) saw radical cultural changes as a result of his decision to secularise the arts and implement western modes of representation. This new, secular tradition continued under the auspices of the Imperial Academy of Arts, founded in 1757 in St Petersburg by Empress Elizabeth (reigned 1741–62), and reshaped and energised by Catherine the Great (reigned 1762–96). As in Europe, Russian academic history painting — officially the most elevated genre — encouraged the painting of religious scenes, as well as those from history and classical myth. Among others, the history painter Anton Losenko painted scenes from the Bible such as his vibrant depiction of the apostles hauling up Christ’s miraculous net full of fish (The Miraculous Catch, 1762, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg). Here, however, the religious narrative was used to showcase the artist’s prowess at emulating the best of European artistic practice (for example, Rubens and Raphael had both executed canvases on the same subject), rather than engaging with the spiritual dimensions of the content.

1.2 Aleksandr Ivanov, TheAppearance of Christ to the People,1837–57. Oil on canvas, 540 x 750 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photograph in the public domain. Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alexander_Andrejewitsch_Iwanow_-_The_Appearance_of_Christ_before_the_People.jpg

The shift toward a more deeply felt engagement with spiritual themes has been credited to Aleksandr Ivanov, whose magnum opus, TheAppearance of Christ to the People (1837–57, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow) can be seen as a more fully formed expression of an interest in religious painting emerging earlier in the century (fig. 1.2). For Rosalind Blakesley, Ivanov’s precursor, Fedor Bruni, “was the grit in the oyster in pushing Russian history painting in spiritual directions”, but Ivanov “cast the pearl”.18 Contemporaries praised Bruni’s The Brazen Serpent (1834–31, State Russian Museum) for the “profoundly religious thought that gave soul to the painting”.19 This “soul”, wrote one commentator, set Russian painting apart from that of European artists, for, if a Frenchman had painted this work, “nothing would have engaged our soul and overcome the harsh reality of this world”.20 Thus by the 1830s Russia’s artistic identity had, at least for some observers, developed a distinctive spiritual character.

Ivanov’s The Appearance of Christ heralded the next phase of Russian religious painting — that of realism.21 When the painting was finally revealed to the public in 1858, Bruni called the figures’nakedness “unchristian”, and one in particular, he wrote, had a head like “a deformed, half-decayed corpse”.22 These realistic portrayals offered a fresh approach to how spiritual themes might be conveyed in paint. As Ivanov wrote to the radical thinker Nikolai Chernyshevsky, he sought to “combine the technique of Raphael with the ideas of modern civilisation — that is the role of art in the present time”.23 To make Christ’s message relevant for contemporary viewers, Ivanov chose to focus on the moment of its reception rather than the figure of Christ himself; the reactions of the slave and other onlookers thus became the main subjects, and Christ was relegated to the background. This was an inversion of the traditional hierarchy of religious figures, for Ivanov had produced a painting in the academic manner, yet with an unprecedented authenticity. To prepare, he had visited synagogues, read accounts of the Holy Land, sketched en plein air, and, like the pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt in England, he attempted to travel to Palestine. Text, too, was crucial: Ivanov knew the Bible by heart and, after reading David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1835–36), which underlined the significance of Christ as a living person, he travelled to Germany to meet the author. Such actions place Ivanov as an early experimenter on the path towards modernism, in that they signal the artistic freedom and individuality that would characterise modernist painting, the turn away from the studio to lived experience, and, crucially in this context, the idea of the spiritual quest — a notion that would become more important as the century progressed. Ivanov’s explorations of art and spirituality brought him into contact with the Nazarenes, a group of German Romantic painters formed in 1809. These artists had a significant influence on him, sharing his interest in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century devotional art of Giotto and Fra Angelico, and, indeed, in the nature of devotion itself.24 However, The Appearance of Christ did not have the religious impact Ivanov had hoped. Rather it was Ivanov’s proto-realist approach that remained his lasting legacy. Yet the part played by broader notions of the spiritual in the creative process did not end with Ivanov. Indeed, parallels can be drawn between his use of textual and artistic sources, his interest in spiritual ideas, and the role of his own religious faith and those of artists in subsequent decades, in ways that are well illustrated by this volume. Moreover, as Pamela Davidson has argued, Ivanov can be seen as inaugurating a more fully developed tradition in the visual arts of ‘artist as prophet’, foreshadowing Kandinsky and other spiritually oriented artists and thinkers of the Silver Age.25

In the politically charged climate of the 1860s and 1870s, the state of Russian society and its ills became a rich source of debate in intellectual circles, and the hallmarks of a critical realist art movement emerged when a number of artists broke away from Academic painting and began to approach religious themes in unusually bold ways. Corruption in the Orthodox Church had incited public debate since the 1840s, but it was not until this moment that artists would openly criticise the church in paint, provoking hostile reactions.26 When Vasily Perov exhibited his work The Village Religious Procession at Easter (1861, Tretyakov Gallery) at the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, the Holy Synod ordered that it be removed from display, owing to its brazen depiction of drunken clergy. The Society acquiesced, and the censor banned its reproduction in print form until 1905.

This censorship did not deter realist artistswho tackled biblical scenes in their work. The most notable of these, Nikolai Ge and Ivan Kramskoi, were founder members of the dominant exhibiting society of the late nineteenth century, the ‘Association of Travelling Art Exhibitions’ (Tovarishchestvo peredvizhnykh khudozhestvennykh vystavok, 1870–1923) known as the ‘Peredvizhniki’. Both artists’ depictions of Christ were fiercely debated. Their approaches had in common with Ivanov’s that they sought to portray Christ as a living man and opposing force against the troubled state of society. This was especially true of Ge, whose strong faith prompted him to declare a wish to incite religious ire among his spectators: “I will shake their minds with Christ’s agony. I want them, not to sigh gently, but to howl to the heavens!”27 Enamoured with the religious writings of Leo Tolstoy, he began corresponding with the writer. Tolstoy had broken away from Orthodoxy to found his own belief system, one so controversial that by 1901 he would be excommunicated. Tolstoy saw Ge’s work as representing “the living Christ”, but others reacted with vitriol.28 For Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ge’s Last Supper (1863, State Russian Museum) presented “not the Christ we know […] there is no historical truth here […] everything here is false”.29 Furthermore, in 1890, Ge’s What is Truth? (Tretyakov Gallery) — a bold image of Christ and Pontius Pilate — was exhibited at the Peredvizhnikexhibition in St Petersburg, only to be removed and banned from further display.30 This direct involvement of the state and the Holy Synod in censoring works of a religious nature continued well into the early twentieth century, affecting the work of Natalia Goncharova and Symbolist artists of the ‘Blue Rose’ group, among others. Disapproval might be directed at the choice of imagery or, more broadly, the spiritual ideas which underpinned the work. Indeed Ge, whose work often fell outside the Orthodox and academic canons, can be seen as a precursor of those modernist artists whose unconventional spirituality led them to a new artistic approach, but one that was destined for a difficult reception.

Paths to Modernism: Realism and Nationalism

The rise of realism coincided with an upsurge in nationalist sentiment from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, and realist painters were championed by influential writers such as Vladimir Stasov, who regarded them as the embodiment of a ‘national school’ for their interest in contemporary Russian subjects. The Russian landscape was one of the most prominent of these themes, and artists’ engagement with their native land prompted a spiritual turn that, at times, harked back to the Romanticism of earlier in the century. Such concerns emerged even among the most committed of realist painters: witness the unsettling scenes of deep forest and desolate snowy wildernesses of Ivan Shishkin. A subtly spiritual mood is evoked by such works as In the Wilds of the North (after Lermontov) (1891, National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kyiv), a stark depiction of a solitary pine against the wild, snowy expanse that, as in the works of Caspar David Friedrich, positions landscape as sublime; the expression of a highly ‘spiritualised’ Russian landscape would later reach its height in the work of Isaak Levitan, most notably in such works as Above Eternal Peace (1894) and Evening Bells (1892) (both Tretyakov Gallery).

1.3 Viktor Vasnetsov and Vasily Polenov, The Church of the Saviour Not Made by Hands. 1881–82. Photograph. Abramtsevo Estate and Museum Reserve.31

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century artists also began increasingly to draw inspiration from the native tradition of folk art, exploring new motifs, colours, and styles, and experimenting in media beyond painting and sculpture. In so doing, they moved beyond conventional modes of representation — the verisimilitude and linear perspective of the Academy and the realists. The germ of these innovations first took root at Abramtsevo, a country estate some sixty kilometres outside Moscow owned by the industrialist Savva Mamontov. An aspiring artist himself, whose passion found its outlet in patronage rather than practice, Mamontov urged the artists in his circle to try their hand at theatre design, ceramics, and mosaics in an environment free from restrictions.

For the Abramtsevo artists, the medieval art and architecture of the Russian Orthodox Church became a key source of inspiration, and naturally shaped their first major collaborative art project: the design of a new church on the estate, which they named The Church of the Saviour Not Made by Hands (1881–82) (fig. 1.3). This project was fundamentally one of artistic and architectural revivalism, but it should also be viewed in the broader context of professionally trained artists’ involvement in church design and decoration during the mid- to late nineteenth century; quite apart from such private spaces as Abramtsevo, church commissions were an important source of work for artists during this period, and supplied another means for a direct encounter between modernising artists and the legacy of Russia’s religious past.32 When church building became a key ingredient in Tsar Nicholas I’s official policy of ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality’ (‘Pravoslavie, Samoderzhavie, Narodnost′’), adopted in 1833, artists such as Bruni and Karl Briullov painted icons and frescoes for monumental Imperial churches, such as St Isaacs Cathedral in St Petersburg (1818–58). But western styles and approaches had dominated such commissions, whereas the Abramtsevo church was inspired by early Russian art and architecture; Viktor Vasnetsov’s designs for the exterior evoked twelfth-century churches of Novgorod and Pskov.33 However, the interior, masterminded by Ilia Repin and Vasily Polenov, was an exemplar of the eclecticism characteristic of the Arts and Crafts movement: the ornamental iconostasis and mosaic floor engaged with ancient art, but the figures on the icons were painted realistically, departing from the canon, and reflecting a modern idiom.

Of the Abramtsevo artists, Mikhail Vrubel was the most radical in combining his interest in religious art with formal innovation, moving even further beyond the official canon of the Orthodox Church. Vrubel’s experimentation in media such as mosaic informed his ground-breaking paintings of the 1890s, such as Demon Seated (1890, Tretyakov Gallery) (figs. 2.7 and 2.8), in which he broke down the surface into geometric shapes, leaving areas of blank canvas. This technique, sometimes superficially compared with that of Paul Cézanne, made him arguably the first modernist artist in Russia. But, as Maria Taroutina argues in Chapter 2, a more likely catalyst for his new approach was his interest in the tradition of medieval Russian icon painting and frescoes inherited by the Orthodox Church from Byzantium. In his commission to restore the frescoes of the twelfth-century Church of St Cyril in Kyiv in 1884, Vrubel’s use of heavy stylisation and icon-like facial features reflects his serious attention to medieval precursors, whereas Vasnetsov’s frescoes for St Vladimir’s Cathedral in Kyiv (1886–96), on the other hand, demonstrate realistic modelling and a strong sense of three-dimensional space. The stylistic gulf between the two clearly illustrates the shift in priorities in Russian art at the end of the nineteenth century, from being faithful to reality, to valuing art’s expressive and formal potential. These new aesthetic considerations, which had shaken off the last vestiges of academic tradition and, unlike realism, no longer depended on the external world for representation, thus mark the beginning of the narrative of modernism in Russian art.

Symbolism and the Age of Enquiry

The spiritual turn at Abramtsevo associated with Mikhail Vrubel is now seen as the beginning of Russian Symbolism, which was allied to the broader European Symbolist movement, and thus a more international conception of Russian modernism. Other artists associated with the circle who were forging new paths in this direction included Maria Vasilevna Iakunchikova and Mikhail Nesterov. Iakunchikova, who spent her formative years at the estate before moving her main home to Paris in 1889, painted elegiac, muted landscapes of rural chapels and deserted fields, in which mood and meaning predominate. Likewise, Nesterov often depicted the surrounding Russian landscape, but prioritised religious figures and spiritual themes, as in his famed Vision of the Youth Bartholomew (1889–90, Tretyakov Gallery) (fig. 1.4). By the early twentieth century the focus upon national content had faded in the second wave of Symbolist practice, and now, spirituality could be conveyed by colour, and certain favoured themes evoking life’s essences: love, fear, motherhood, birth, and death. Critical in this respect was Viktor Borisov-Musatov, an artist from Saratov who, like Iakunchikova, was exposed to Symbolism while studying in Paris. He returned to Russia in 1898 to inspire the mystically charged colour experiments of the group of artists known as ‘Blue Rose’, who can be seen as the first ‘avant-garde’ artistic movement in Russia.

Artists of the Blue Rose continued the precedent set by Vrubel for experimenting with church design in ways which stepped further away from the established canons of the Orthodox Church. They worked on several commissions to paint the interiors of churches of the early 1900s, the most notable of which was the project executed by Pavel Kuznetsov, Petr Utkin, and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin in 1902 to decorate the Church of the Kazan Mother of God in Saratov. Their bold frescoes were so far from the Orthodox canon that they provoked public outcry and were destroyed. Similarly, designs by Nicholas Roerich for the church at Talashkino (1909–11) — the second major centre of the national revival in decorative art, seen as the inheritor of Abramtsevo’s legacy — were too radical for the Orthodox Church to consecrate the building, as Louise Hardiman discusses in Chapter 3. The application of new developments in secular painting to church design reflected the important place religious art had come to occupy in Russian modernism. They also underline the fact that while artists engaged with Orthodox artistic traditions, the church’s official canon was largely ignored. This gave rise to subjective and imaginative renderings of church design that were anathema to its strict codes of representation.

1.4 Mikhail Nesterov, The Vision of the Youth Bartholomew, 1889–90. Oil on canvas, 160 x 211 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.Photograph in the public domain. Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mikhail_Nesterov_001.jpg

Fear of the noxious effects of materialism and industrialisation continued to grow as the new century drew near, and thinking beyond ordinary perception and the outside, tangible world took on new significance.34 The paintings of the Russian Symbolists had made manifest in images the ideas that were emerging in Silver Age poetry and philosophy, and responded to an existential disquiet which conventional religion seemed unable to answer. This wider Symbolist movement, involving such figures as Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Bely, Aleksandr Scriabin, and Vladimir Solovev, dominated Russian culture at and around the fin de siècle. Most influential of all was Solovev, whose Spiritual Foundations of Life (Dukhovnye osnovy zhizni) had been published in the early 1880s.35Symbolism influenced later religious thinkers of the early twentieth century too, notably Nikolai Berdiaev, Pavel Florensky, and Sergei Bulgakov. They inaugurated a new breadth to the notion of the spiritual in art and literature, exploring theological ideas outside of Orthodoxy such as Sophiology. The turn away from materiality espoused by the Symbolists engineered a shift in artists’ attention from conventional Orthodoxy to broadly conceived ideas of spirituality. Their influence was far-reaching and enduring, as Jennifer Brewin’s discussion of Symbolist trends in Soviet Georgia in Chapter 11 witnesses. In this respect, the new research on Symbolism presented in several chapters of this volume is of especial importance, and has highlighted the lack of a comprehensive monograph on the Symbolist movement in Russian art.36

With Symbolist discussions of higher levels of reality and inner expression already in place, mysticism and occultism, too, became increasingly popular in Russia in the early 1900s, as well as the Theosophy of Madame Helena Blavatsky, who co-founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875.37 The notion that the artist had privileged access to higher or inner forms of reality as a ‘prophet’ or ‘superman’ was taken up by artists such as Kandinsky,Malevich, and Roerich, playing roles mirroring those which Dostoevsky and Tolstoy (once described as a “seer of the flesh” and a “seer of the soul” respectively) had famously adopted in literature.38 An active Theosophist, Roerich even founded his own spiritual system, Agni Yoga, together with his wife Elena, and, in the 1920s, organised a highly publicised expedition to India, Tibet, and Mongolia. His vividly coloured canvases often portrayed mystical landscapes and figures, and reflected a preoccupation with rites and rituals (fig. 1.5). Roerich’s work serves as a reminder that questions of the spiritual in Russian art are not only about responses to a religious tradition entwined with the country’s nationalism.

New areas of science and pseudoscience investigating areas beyond physical reality and the natural world also permeated the arts. The first X-rays were shown in public at the Berlin Physical Society in 1896, and the possibility of non-Euclidian geometry and the fourth dimension — as first discussed by Charles Howard Hinton in ‘What is the Fourth Dimension’ (1884), and expanded upon by Petr Ouspensky in The Fourth Dimension (1904) — became of interest to the avant-garde in particular. These ideas helped to shape the theories underpinning artists’ experiments with non-objective forms in the early 1910s, such as Kandinsky’s notion of the ‘inner’ sound or vibration of the soul. This concept was embodied in his famed ‘Compositions’, among others, for example, Composition VIIof 1913(Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow) (fig. 1.6). A further interesting figure in this respect was the Lithuanian Symbolist painter Mikalojus Čiurlionis, who shared with Kandinsky the credo that art was part of a world of higher perception and beyond physical reality.39 Both men claimed to possess the gift of ‘synaesthesia’ — the ability to see colours as sounds; both were synthetists too, working across multiple media. Čiurlionis, for example, was a composer as well as artist, and, like Kandinsky, gave many of his paintings musical titles. Other theories giving rise to purely abstract works of art included Mikhail Larionov’s Rayism — the depiction of rays of light reflecting off a physical object — and Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism — the expression of higher levels of consciousness through simple geometric shapes. Artists’ serious engagement with spiritual ideas, as well as contemporary developments in science, psychology, and music thus led to some of the most pioneering work of Russian modernism.

1.5 Nicholas Roerich, The Call of the Bells (from the old Pskov series), 1897. As reproduced in International Studio, 70, 279 (June 1920), facing p. 60. Photograph in the public domain. Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:International_studio_(1897)_(14760097306).jpg

The Icon Rediscovered

The artistic traditions of the Orthodox Church, and icon painting in particular, continued to play an important part in the work of artists during this period. Until the late nineteenth century, icons had no place in the fine arts in Russia — they were not considered artistic objects. With their meaning intrinsically linked to the context of the Church, they served as a physical medium through which believers could access the Holy Spirit. Their creators were often unknown, and they were re-painted time and again over the years; often they were blackened from the accumulation of dust and soot from incense and sometimes were encased within an oklad — a metal, ornamental casing that covered much of the painted surface. The icon historian Nikodim Kondakov (discussed by Wendy Salmond in Chapter 8) blamed the vogue for western culture from the reign of Peter the Great onwards for this widespread neglect of icons among Russians.40 During Nicholas I’s reign (1825–55) in the mid-nineteenth century, however, Orthodox Church culture became of renewed interest to the government. Restoration of medieval church frescoes began, while icons started to be removed from churches and placed in museums.41 The first proper museum collections of icons appeared in the 1860s, yet these were only showcased to the public specifically as art for the first time in 1898 at an exhibition of medieval Russian art.42 Moving into the early twentieth century, Shirley Glade and Jefferson Gatrall mark two seminal moments in this rediscovery and rehabilitation of icon painting that had an enormous impact on modernist artists: firstly, the restoration of one of the most celebrated icons — Andrei Rublev’s Trinity (fig. 1.7) — between 1904 and 1906, and secondly, the Exhibition of Old Russian Art which took place in Moscow in 1913.43 A restoration team led by Vasily Gurianov stripped away layers of overpaint and varnish to reveal unexpectedly bold colours and the sophisticated technical prowess of Rublev, who soon became a canonical figure in the history of Russian art.44 This led to other important restoration projects, and dealers and collectors scoured remote Russian provinces in search of unknown masterpieces. Prominent art collectors, such as Ilia Ostroukhov and Stepan Riabushinsky, hired hereditary icon painters (ikonniki) to work on their private collections.45 The exhibition of 1913, which included objects from these collections, was unprecedented in its range, and showed previously unseen fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Novgorod works. Other ecclesiastical objects such as embroideries and medieval manuscripts were also on display. Sponsored by the state, the display served to legitimise the icon as a symbol of Russian national culture.46

1.6 Vasily Kandinsky, Composition VII, 1913. Oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.47

In tandem with restorers, artists thus rediscovered the icon as an object of artistic creation and a rich source of inspiration. As new attitudes towards the collection, display, and conservation of icons were only just beginning during the 1880s — this volume’s starting point — artists of the fin de siècle did not yet have thirteenth-century Novgorod icons that had been newly restored and cleaned to inspire them. As Chapters 2, 3, and 4 by Taroutina, Hardiman, and Myroslava M. Mudrak discuss, the first generation of modern artists mainly responded to religious art in situ, such as church architecture and mural painting. On the other hand, as Chapters 5 and 6 by Oleg Tarasov and Nina Gurianova explain, the later, more radical generation of Russian avant-garde artists, like their counterparts in Europe, looked to other so-called ‘primitive’ art forms for new approaches to representation, and their search for new material would lead to a re-examination of the artistic potential of icons. Across Europe, avant-garde artists responded to objects such as African masks, Japanese woodcuts, and children’s drawings, which were unfettered by western artistic conventions such as chiaroscuro and modelling that had dominated painting since the Renaissance. For Russian avant-garde artists, the source of ‘primitive’ art came from within as they saw Russia as more closely aligned with the east in its origins. Western artistic influences needed to be cast off, in favour of crafting an intrinsically national culture. As Aleksandr Shevchenko wrote in his text outlining this movement — Neoprimitivism — in 1913, “The spirit of […] the East, has become so rooted in our life that at times it is difficult to distinguish where a national feature ends and where an Eastern influence begins […]. The whole of our culture is an Asiatic one”.48 Russian culture abounded with examples of art that was less constrained by western pictorial traditions: icons, Russian broadsheet prints (lubki), trays, and signboards offered “the most acute, most direct perception of life — a purely painterly one, at that”.49

The pictorial characteristics of icon painting — inverse perspective, heavy outlining, general flatness, and large, bold areas of colour — informed the avant-garde’s new artistic language. This approach found little favour with the press and public, and exhibitions of the avant-garde were met with hostility and controversy. As with earlier artists such as Vrubel, this was especially the case when artists applied experimental approaches to religious themes. The censor, for example, removed Goncharova’s Evangelists (1910–11, State Russian Museum) from the Donkey’s Tail exhibition in Moscow in 1912 for the seemingly sacrilegious combination of a sacred subject with such a vulgar exhibition title.50 Such reactions did not discourage artists from underlining the link between the new art and icon painting: Larionov pointedly staged an exhibition of icon patterns (podlinniki) and lubki in Moscow in 1913 (129 icons came from his own collection) at the same time as the ‘Target’ — the latest exhibition of avant-garde art he had organised.51 The deliberate juxtaposition emphasised that both shows were united in their rejection of the west, and that religious art — above all, the icon — was the most revered of native, primitive sources reawakened by Russian artists. As the émigré artist Boris Anrep claimed, “For us Russians, who have been raised to revere the divine countenances created by the piety of our icon painters […] Matisse’s art is neither a great revelation nor a great novelty”.52Matisse himself was famously riveted by Russian icons on a visit to Moscow in 1911; in a statement echoing the sentiments of the avant-garde, he wrote: “The icon is a very interesting type of primitive painting. Nowhere have I ever seen such a wealth of colour, such purity, such immediacy of expression.”53 And so an entire generation of Russian artists was stimulated by the icon not only for its aesthetics but also as a symbol of what Russian art could achieve outside of the west.54

1.7 Andrei Rublev, Trinity, 1411 or 1425–27. Tempera on wood, 142 x 114 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photograph in the public domain. Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Angelsatmamre-trinity-rublev-1410.jpg

Revolution and its Aftermath

The October Revolution of 1917 ushered in a new era for the arts in Russia, and, under the anti-religious Bolshevik regime, continued interest in spiritual ideas and culture became highly controversial and increasingly dangerous. The Soviet government stripped the Orthodox Church of its property rights and launched campaigns to seize, sell, or destroy its art and valuables. Yet amid the destruction of churches and ecclesiastical objects appeared prodigious efforts to save them. The renewed appreciation of the icon’s artistic value in the early 1900s initially continued to flourish in the years following the Revolution. The secular context of the museum was seen as a safe space where the centuries-long damage that icons had endured in the hands of the Church, such as overpainting and failure to clean layers of black soot from candles and incense, could be rectified. Previously unknown ancient icons were discovered on expeditions to monasteries and churches in the Russian north, and fresh restoration projects, notably those of the Trinity and Vladimir Mother of God icons, led Soviet scholars to condemn earlier interpretations of the icon’s history, as Wendy Salmond discusses in Chapter 8. The government’s anti-religious campaigns of the late 1920s, however, heralded a devastating new wave of iconoclasm and fierce persecution of those who defended religious culture. Figures such as priest and scholar Pavel Florensky, restorer and art historian Iuri Olsufev, and art historian Nikolai Punin, whose work on the link between the icon and the avant-garde is discussed by Natalia Murray in Chapter 10, were arrested and executed. Yet, despite the attempts of the authorities to undermine the Russian spiritual tradition, it would survive in art in a number of ways. The instinct to practise religion could not, of course, be completely quashed, and artists continued to engage with religious and spiritual themes. In some cases this practice moved underground, in others, abroad; in yet others, echoes of pre-Revolutionary spiritual approaches could be found at the periphery of the Union, as Jennifer Brewin testifies in Chapter 11.

With religious practice and spirituality increasingly under threat in Russia itself, the Russian diaspora tasked itself with keeping her traditions alive abroad to bequeath to future generations. The mass exodus of approximately 1.5 million Russian citizens to countries around the world was the most dramatic but often overlooked consequence of the Revolution and subsequent Civil War (1917–22). For this widespread population of émigrés, which included many modernist artists, including Kandinsky, Roerich, Goncharova, and Larionov, preserving Russian national culture was not only of collective benefit to society, but had a very personal dimension — it helped re-forge their individual connection to home. For many, the rejuvenated Orthodox Church abroad became a symbol of sustaining pre-1917 rituals and traditions, especially those facing eradication in the Soviet Union. While artists remaining in the Soviet Union were barred from working on church commissions or religious subjects, those who had emigrated received new opportunities to engage with religious art outside Russia’s borders (the case of one such émigré, Dmitry Stelletsky, is discussed by Nicola Kozicharow in Chapter 9). The practice of icon painting, for example, gained new-found interest abroad, and, in 1927, the Icon Association — a new school of icon painting — was established in Paris with artists such as Ivan Bilibin and Stelletsky among its members. This continuation of Russian religious art in emigration symbolises the broader endurance of spiritual values — and even modernism itself — in the face of its suppression in the Soviet Union. The spiritual dimensions of Russian modernism thus ultimately transcended borders, and evaded any political efforts to curtail their lasting power.

Modernism and the Spiritual: From Symbolists to Soviets

This book highlights the importance of the thriving, multifarious dialogue on spirituality and religion that permeated the visual arts in Russia from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Arranged in roughly chronological order, the ten essays rethink existing interpretations of spiritual themes and influences in the oeuvre of an individual artist or artists (Chapters 2, 4, 6, and 11 by Taroutina, Mudrak, Gurianova, and Brewin) and enhance our understanding of how mediating figures were instrumental in shaping perceptions, whether of spirituality and nationality (Chapters 3, 7, and 9 by Hardiman, Borkhardt, and Kozicharow), or such fundamental questions as the role of icons in, or as, art (Chapters 5, 8, and 10 by Tarasov, Salmond, and Murray). Our objective is to illustrate precisely the diversity of approaches among modern artists to the notion of spirituality, and document their soul-searching, exploratory quests, which are so characteristic of the period. These essays illustrate more clearly the ways in which some painters (for example, Kandinsky andMalevich) assumed the role of artist as prophet. At the same time, though modernism has been associated with a sense of individuality and artistic freedom, age-old practical considerations remained, such as responding to the desires and requirements of patrons and consumers.

After Kandinsky and his theories, it is the influence of the icon upon Russian modernism which has received the most scholarly attention in recent years. In this volume, we seek to extend and deepen this analysis in several ways. A number of our authors expand the discussion of Orthodox artistic tradition to include other media such as mosaic, fresco, and Old Believer icons. While the significance of avant-garde artists such as Malevich remains a central focus, experiments by artists who have typically been excluded from scholarly discussions are here brought to the fore. Under the broad banner of Russian modernism, the book includes such figures as Vrubel — an early practitioner of more radical approaches to painting — and Stelletsky, whose work the Russian avant-garde criticised for being too reliant on the formal characteristics of religious art. Moreover, it re-emphasises how modernising tendencies spanned a wide range of artistic movements across the late Imperial era; for example, it adds weight to the case for integrating the Arts and Crafts movement, in its Russian guise, into the longer history of Russian modernism.

The volume begins in the late nineteenth century with Maria Taroutina’s chapter on Vrubel (Chapter 2), whose art foreshadowed the seismic shift towards abstraction.55 Taroutina considers the radical new ways in which this creative and experimental artist interpreted the Orthodox artistic tradition. Her chapter shifts the chronology of the avant-garde’s engagement with icons back by two decades, to the period associated with the neo-national and Symbolist movements. Taroutina shows that as early as the 1890s the icon was already more than what Gatrall has described as a “parochial craftwork […], an antiquarian curio”.56 She strengthens the case for Vrubel’s modernism, not only in her analysis of his formal innovations (which she contends bore relation to his early experiences in mosaic) but also in his idiosyncratic use of religious art as a source. Vrubel found his inspiration mostly in national sources; drawing from the Byzantine Orthodox tradition, he interwove fresco, icon, and religious (or mythological) symbolism in his oeuvre, for example, in his use of the recurring motif of the demon. His example illustrates dramatically the intense complexity of the spiritual question for the Russian fin-de-siècle artist.