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.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration, Translation, and Dates
Introduction
1. Byzantium Reconsidered: Revivalism, Avant-Gardism, and the New Art Criticism
2. From Constantinople to Moscow and St. Petersburg: Museums, Exhibitions, and Private Collections
4. Vasily Kandinsky’s Iconic Subconscious and the Search for the Spiritual in Art
5. Toward a New Icon: Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, and the Cult of Nonobjectivity
Epilogue
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
“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.”
