Russia and the Story of Art.
“Historians of European art are even more equivocal in their appraisal of the imagery produced in Russia before Peter’s time. In fact, except as a provincial subset of medieval Byzantine art, Russian imagery is entirely absent from the familiar “story of art” as it unfolds in Europe until the advent of modernism around the turn of the twentieth century. Such is the case in the most widely consulted general art histories.” [1]
Why was Russia left out of the “story of art”? In the famous survey of the same name, Ernst Gombrich after dealing with the Roman and Byzantine art of the fifth to thirteenth centuries, opened his next chapter by “looking eastwards” towards Islamic and Chinese art.[2] Why was Russia not included in this oriental excursion? The answer, as Cracraft says in the extract above is that “Russian art” would have been viewed as a sub-species of Byzantine art- see below. However, Gombrich should not be chided too much as his omission of early Russian art is reflective of a prevailing trend in general histories of art: for Western art historians Russian art did not begin until the efflorescence of avant-garde modern art in the early twentieth-century. Thus it is not until near the end of Gombrich’s book that Russian artists like Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) are considered, and then only as a facet of German Expressionism.[3] By showing Russia’s contribution as late as the modern period Gombrich was merely repeating what most Western art historians had done when representing Russian art. Some balance was restored with the publication of Camilla Gray’s The Russian Experiment in Art 1863- 1922 which surveyed the evolution of Russian art alongside its European counterparts from the realist period of the nineteenth- century until 1922. Gray’s study was important because it did not neglect the influence of early Russian art on the new, experimental artists; thus Gray showed how modern constructivist sculptors like Vladimir Taitlin (1885-1953) and painters like Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962) with her Madonna and Child of 1905-7 (above) looked back to the icon painters of the medieval period and later.[4] A comparison between Goncharova’s Madonna and one of the medieval ones like the Lady of Vladimir is instructive because it shows certain traditional compositional forms were playfully subverted by twentieth-century avant-garde artists. Unlike historical icons, Goncharova dispenses with the flat yellow of the background and substitutes a textured, worked surface out of which flowery forms sprout. At the same time the modern icon retains old-school iconographical details such as angels flanking the Virgin, though they are painted dull green like the plants and flowers.
[1] James Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery, (University of Chicago, 1997), 4.
[2] It is worth comparing Gombrich’s treatment of Russian art with Hermann Leicht who in his History of World Art (Spring Books, London, 1963), gives a whole chapter to Russia after Early Christian Art and before Islamic Art, 188-196.
[3] Ernst Gombrich, The Story of Art, (Phaidon, 1950, rep 1984), 451. Kandinsky is the only Russian artist Gombrich includes.
[4] Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863- 1922), (first pub 1962, rev 1972, Thames and Hudson), 98.
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