| This dissertation charts the gradual rediscovery and rigorous reassessment of the medieval Russo-Byzantine artistic tradition in Imperial Russia in the years 1870-1920. Born of an essentially revivalist, nationalist impulse, this trend rapidly evolved into a crucial catalyst for Modernist experimentation with far-reaching artistic and theoretical implications for the twentieth-century avant-gardes. In particular, this dissertation challenges traditional accounts of this phenomenon, which interpret it as a Russian NeoPrimitivist movement. Instead, it argues that rather than being seen as outmoded, primitive relics of a bygone past, Russo-Byzantine art in general, and icons more specifically, were increasingly perceived as highly sophisticated, dialectical structures with philosophical and utilitarian---as well as aesthetic and cultural---significance for the Modern world and twentieth-century psychology.;Artists, art historians, philosophers, theorists and art critics were all profoundly affected by the rediscovery of this previously neglected artistic patrimony. For many young talents, Russo-Byzantine visuality not only provided a powerful pictorial alternative to the then pervasive nineteenth-century naturalism still propagated by the European Academies, but it likewise offered a different formal and conceptual genealogy to ascending French Modernism. Through a close analysis of a wide array of architectural, artistic and textual material, this dissertation examines the variable and fluid citations, reiterations and after-lives of the iconic tradition throughout the trajectory of Russian modern art. In doing so, it interrogates not only the inherent mechanisms and theoretical underpinnings of Russian Modernism, but also the internal logic of its rapid rise to international prominence in the early twentieth century.;The first chapter traces the broader context of the revival in art and architecture as it unfolded in Imperial Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century. Adopting a comparative model of inquiry, it examines how this phenomenon differed in Russia from its European variants in Britain and France, where it was predominantly seen as being part of the larger Orientalist trend. It likewise analyzes the emergence of prominent scholars of Byzantine art and architecture such as Nikodim Kondakov and Dmitrii Ainalov, as well as the theories of major twentieth-century art historians and critics such as Nikolai Punin and Nikolai Tarabukin, who became important advocates of the avant-garde.;The second chapter examines the works of Mikhail Vrubel (1856-1910), active in the late-nineteenth century, for whom Russo-Byzantine art became an important forebear of an indigenous anti-Realist, proto-abstract painting that seemed to presage his own Modernist innovations. The unusual iconography and characteristically Modernist pictorial structure of Vrubel's paintings ensured that he was subsequently espoused by leftist art criticism as the mythical origins for the Soviet avant-garde project.;The third chapter traces Vasily Kandinsky's (1866-1944) nascent interest in the iconic tradition on the eve of his move to non-objectivity. In addition to producing a series of religious paintings at this time, Kandinsky appeared to rely on the image philosophy of the icon in the formulation of many of his key concepts and ideas on abstract painting---as he expressed them in his theoretical text On the Spiritual in Art (1911).;Lastly, the fourth and final chapter of the dissertation explores the abandoning of easel painting altogether in the Corner Counter-Reliefs of Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953). Tatlin's firsthand experience with monumental church frescos allowed him to re-conceptualize the spatial relationships between an artwork and the viewer on the one hand; while on the other hand, it foregrounded alternative ways in which an art object could function in society. Paradoxical at is may seem, for Tatlin the icon became the perfect conceptual model for the new Soviet art object, which was meant to be transpersonal, collective and ideological. Consequently, even as late as the 1920s, at the height of a secularized and politicized Soviet culture, the icon continued to structure artistic practice and theory. |
