Art History Today

Full Circle: Modern meets Old Russian Art. (slide list).

1) Photograph of Pushkin Museum, 1937 with Schulkin’s Matisses in place.

2) Henri Matisse, Zorah on the Terrace, 1910, oil on canvas, 116 x 100 cm, Pushkin Museum, Moscow.

3) Andrei Rublëv, The Archangel Michael, 1410s, tempera on wood, 158 x 108 cm, Tretyakov, Moscow.

4) Photograph of Oustroukhov & Tretyakov staff in front of Viktor Vasnetsov’s Bogyars.

5) Boris Kustodiev, Portrait of Igor Grabar, Art Historian & Restorer, 1916, oil on canvas, 83.5 x 61.7 cm, Private Coll, Moscow.

6) Photograph of Tretyakov board with Grabar.

7) Boris Kustodiev, Portrait of A. I. Anisimov, Art Historian & Restorer, 1915, oil on card and board, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

8) Andrei Rublëv, The Apostle Paul, 1410s, tempera on wood, 160 x 109 cm, Tretyakov, Moscow.

9) Andrei Rublëv, Christ the Saviour, 1410s, tempera on wood, 158 x 106 cms, Tretyakov, Moscow.

10) Andrey Rublëv, Icon of the Old Testament Trinity, 1411 or 1425-27, tempera on wood, 142 x 114 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

11) The Praying Novgorodians, 1467, Novgorod School, oil on wood, 57 x 42 cm, Museum of Architecture and Ancient Monument, Novgorod.

12) Theotokos of Vladimir (Our Lady of Vladimir), c. 1130, orig in Constantinople, transferred to Vladimir, thence to Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

13) Diagram of the repairs and touch-ups of the Vladimir Mother of God, reproduced from A.I. Anisimov’s Our Lady of Vladimir, translation, Prague, 1928.

14) Gold Cover for the Vladimir Mother of God.

15) Boris Kustodiev, Portrait of Tsar Nicholas II, 1915, oil on canvas, location unknown.

16) Photograph of the Romanov Family, 1913-14.

17) Church on the Blood, Yekaterinburg.

18) Leonardo da Vinci, The Mona Lisa, c. 1503-6, oil on canvas, 77 x 53 cms, Museé du Louvre, Paris.

19) Kazimir Malevich, Composition with Mona Lisa, 1914, oil, collage, and graphite on canvas, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

20) Fernand Léger, Mona Lisa with Keys, 1930, oil on canvas, Musée National Fernand Leger, Biot.

21) Kazimir Malevich, The Black Square, aka Black Suprematic Square, 1915, oil on linen, 79.5 x 79.5, Tretyakov, Moscow.

22) Malevich’s Room at the 0.10 Exhibition.

23) Tatlin’s room at the 0.10 exhibition.

24) Photo of Vladimir Tatlin.

25) Photo of Kazimir Malevich.

26) Lyubov Sergeyevna Popova, The Pianist, oil on canvas, 106.5 x 88.7 cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

27) El Lissitzky, Street Poster, Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, 1919-20, colour lithograph, 53 x 70 cms, Lenin Library, Moscow.

28) Photograph of Marc Chagall in 1920.

29) Marc Chagall, Introduction to the Jewish Theatre, 1920, oil on canvas, Tretyakov, Moscow.

30) Boris Kustodiev, The Bolshevik, 1920, oil on canvas, 101 x 141 cm, Tretyakov, Moscow.

31) Boris Kustodiev, Self-Portrait before Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, 1912, tempera on board, 100x85cm, Uffizi.

32) Boris Kustodiev, Shrove Tide, 1916, oil on canvas, 35.04 x 75 inches, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

33) Kuzma Sergeevich Petrov-Vodkin, Bathing the Red Horse, 1912, oil on canvas, 160 x 186 cm, Tretyakov, Moscow.

34) Kuzma Sergeevich Petrov-Vodkin, Petrograd Madonna, or 1918 in Petrograd, 1920, oil on canvas, 73 x 92, Tretyakov, Moscow.

35) Abram Arkhipov, Woman in Red, 1919, oil on canvas, 115 x 85 cm, Art Museum, Gorky.

36) Kazimir Malevich, Red Square: Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions, 1915, oil on canvas, 53 x 53 cm, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

37) Giorgy Ryazhsky, The Chairwoman, 1928, oil on canvas, 99 x 61 cms, Tretyakov, Moscow.

38) Yevgeny Katzman, The Kaliazin Lacemakers, 1928, pastel, red chalk, black pencil on paper, 91 x 142 cms, Tretyakov, Moscow.

39) Ilya Mashkov, Still-Life with Samovar, c. 1919, oil on canvas, 142 x 180 cm, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

40) Kazimir Malevich, Supremacist teapot, designed for the State Pottery Leningrad 1920-3, porcelain, 15.5 x 16.8 cms, Museum of State Porcelain works, St Petersburg.

41) Ilya Mashkov, Still Life with Skulls, 1910, oil on canvas, location unknown.

42) Zinaida Serebriakova, House of Cards, 1919, oil on canvas, 65 x 75,5 cms, Private Coll.

43) Natalia Goncharova, Angels and Aeroplanes, 1914, lithograph on paper, Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Massachusetts.

44) Natalia Goncharova, Costume Sketch for an angel from the ballet Liturgy, 1915, watercolour on paper, Central Theatrical Museum, Moscow.

45) Novgorod School, Descent from the Cross, Icon of the Northern School of Russia, 15^th century, Tretyakov Gallery.

46) Vladimir Tatlin, Composition from a Nude, 1913, oil on canvas, 143 x 108 cm, Tretyakov, Moscow.

47) Photo of cover of Gray’s Avant-Garde Experiment in Russia Art, pub. 1962.

48) Photograph of Camilla Gray and Oleg Prokofiev in New York.

49) Photo of Alfred H. Barr in Russia.

50) Nicholas Roerich, “And We See,” from the "Sancta" Series, 1922, oil on canvas, International Museum of the Roerichs, Moscow.

51) View of the Soviet Loan Exhibition at the Cleveland Museum showing copy of Rublëv’s Trinity, 1932.

52) Kazimir Malevich, Black Cross, Black Square (St Petersburg’s version), Black Circle hung together, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

53) Aleksander Mikhaylovich Gerasimov, Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin after the Rain, 1938, oil on canvas, 296 x 386 cms, Tretyakov, Moscow.

Full Circle: Modern meets Old Russian Art. (10)

Coda: Between Russia & America.

While researching her The Avant-Garde Experiment in Russian Art, the young scholar Camilla Gray supported herself by working at the New York Public Library. Working in NYC, she was able to gain access to the director of MOMA, Alfred H. Barr who- outside Russia- was the leading authority on twentieth-century Russian art. Barr had visited the Soviet Union during the 1920s, and had spoken to many of the deceased members of the avant-garde as well as Grabar who he thought was the scholar most responsible for saving Russia’s icons; Gray however would have to make do with interviewing surviving artists in Paris like Larionov and Goncharova. Less than a decade after Barr visited Russia, a loan exhibition of Russian icons opened at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on 14^th October 1930. This was the first ever exhibition of Russian icons in America; over the next nineteenth months it travelled across the country to nine cities.[1] Billed as the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Loan Exhibition” it opened the eyes of the American museum-going public to the beauty of these images. The cynic however might see the exhibition as a propaganda initiative designed to offer a more favourable view of a society that was perceived by the American public as “atheistic” and “iconoclastic”, to use Salmond’s words; and as she does say, “these secularized icons were pulled into the Soviet Union’s ideological battle with the West.”[2] As Salmond also explains, a hidden agenda was to “create a market demand for icons in the bourgeois West,” though ultimately it failed.”[3] This initiative actually originated in the pre-revolutionary period, back in the days when Anisimov and Grabar were organising the recovery and restoration of icons. However, Grabar went much further and advocated exhibitions abroad designed to draw attention to the icons (and the work of his restorers) with a view to selling some of them on the world art market. Against prevailing opinion in the Russian museum world, Grabar was adamant that twelfth, thirteenth and fifteenth- centuries icons should be shown in Europe and America; but only copies of the Vladimir Mother and Christ and Rublëv’s Trinity were shown as the originals were too fragile to travel.[4] One year after this exhibition in Boston, Malevich was arrested and told that his art (above) was bourgeois and not suitable for Stalin’s vision of Russia. To this and his other critics Malevich responded that art could advance and develop for art’s sake alone: “art does not need us, and it never did.”

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[1] Information taken from Wendy R.Salmond, “How America Discovered Russian Icons: The Soviet Loan Exhibition of 1930-32 in Alter Icons, 128-143.

[2] Ibid. In this era of the Cold War, America would send abstract expressionist art around the world as a way of stressing the US’s creativity compared to the stylized Soviet Realism of the Stalinist era. This was part of the C.I.A.’s cultural propaganda programme begun in 1947 which was admitted by the organisation recently as explained in the work of Frances Stonor Saunders, “Modern Art was CIA’s Weapon,” Independent, 21/10/95.

[3] Salmond, “How America discovered Russian icons,” 129.

[4] The show was seen at the V & A in London where 30,000 visitors (in one week). It was Roger Fry who had advised the museum to take the show, ibid, 132.

Full Circle: Modern meets Old Russian Art. (9)

The Influence of Russian Icons on Russian Modern Artists.

After the samovar the most famous object in Russian cultural life might be the icon- but how did the art experimenters deal with this religious imagery which didn’t fit comfortably into their laboratories of modern art? Mashkov painted a Cézanne-inspired still-life with a skull and icon (above) , though no samovar which would have no place in an avant-garde world full of objects like Malevich’s Suprematist teapot. As far as the icon was concerned, it definitely had its place, so we see the colours and rhythms of a Novgorod Descent from the Cross icon influencing Tatlin’s 1913 Composition from a Nude. Tatlin was introduced to icons by Goncharova who was able to gain admission to many collections. Out of all the Russian avant-garde it was she who had the deepest knowledge of icons which makes it all the harder to know why she did not enjoy imperial approval. Goncharova however seems not to have enjoyed imperial support despite the pronounced religious element in her art which is such series as Mystical Images of War, blended divine figures with technological innovations like aeroplanes suggesting a widening gulf between spirituality and modernity.[1]

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[1] Ibid, 82.

Full Circle: Modern meets Old Russian Art. (8)

Russian Realisms.

The Black Square launched the movement known as Suprematism which put simply was a form of pure abstraction consisting of geometrical shapes arranged in configurations; when viewed they recall architectural plans or engineering diagrams. Suprematism also inaugurated a debate about realism in painting which was exemplified in Malevich’s essay “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: the new painterly realism.” Not content with using the term “painterly realism” in his writings, Malevich used it in descriptions of his work. Hence compositions appeared with titles like Painterly Realism of the Footballer and Red Square: Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions. Herein lay a problem: how could these abstract experiments be reconciled with realism in a more conventional sense? [1] This was a debate that rumbled on throughout the early days of the Russian Revolution during which art schools and art teaching were completely transformed within the country.[2] Tatlin would become head of the Petrograd branch of the Russian art organisation while Malevich would eventually take over at Vitebsk. It was here that great Suprematist clashed with the director of the School Marc Chagall whose art Malevich dismissed as “old-fashioned” and irrelevant.” After a temporary absence in Moscow, Chagall found himself the victim of a coup d’état and left for Moscow where he worked as a scenic designer for the State Jewish Theatre.[3] Malevich would eventually find his own art difficult to reconcile with the new ideological climate, but there were accommodations to the need for social art as opposed to avant-garde abstraction in the early days of the revolution. Kustodiev’s The Bolshevik of 1920 (above) shows a “Bolshevik Gulliver” (Wood) striding menacingly through a crowded townscape with factories and onion domes covered with powdery snow, a feature of many of his paintings including his self-portrait.[4] Then there was the gentler art of Aram Arikhipov’s Woman in Red (1919) though both “neither offered a long-term solution to the need to provide whatever it was thought the avant-garde wasn’t offering.”[5] A solution would only arrive in 1922 with the foundation of “The Association of Artists Studying Revolutionary Life” or AKhR who drew “traditional realists like Arkhipov, Mashkov and Kustodiev into its ranks. This sort of painting waged war on the supremacism of Malevich and the constructivism of Tatlin, and the symbolist salon painting of World of Art renegades like Kuzma Petro-Vadim though his most famous painting Bathing the Red Horse (1912) came to symbolise the coming ideological storm whose official style was to be Socialist Realism which is actually prefigured in the AKhR.

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[1] Paul Wood lays out the terms of the realist debate in “Realisms and Realities” in Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art between the Wars, (Yale University Press, 1993), 264f.

[2] For a brief survey of the changes in the structure, see Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863-1922, (Thames and Hudson, 1962), 219f.

[3] Ibid, 240.

[4] Wood, “Realisms and Realities,” 272.

[5] Ibid, 273.

Full Circle: Modern meets Old Russian Art. (7)

Icon Ground Zero: Malevich’s Black Square.

As the late Charles Harrison said, Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square is “the most art-historically notorious” of all the Russian master’s works.[1] The Black Square is also an icon of modern art, and when that devout image entered the modern world its meaning changed completely. In 1916 Malevich described the Black Square “as the first step of pure creation in art.” It is perhaps right to see it as the ground zero of modern art since Malevich’s intention was to reset art for a new era. No less importantly, the Black Square has become almost inseparable from Malevich’s self-image, and it is present in a variety of contexts such as the artist’s death bed, his funeral procession and his grave. The Black Square was first shown in the exhibition ‘0.10’ (‘Zero Ten’) in Petrograd in December 1915, and from photographs ( above) we can see it hanging on walls almost like religious icons in Russian houses. The 0.10 show was supposed to signify an end to Russian Futurism and a radical direction in Russian art. Both Malevich and Tatlin had their own rooms which were to symbolise the conflict, sometimes acrimonious, between the two artists. To provoke Malevich, his opponent placed his Corner Counter Relief in a corner of his display space thus turning the room into a frame to encircle the art work.[2] As a countermove, Malevich defiantly hung his Black Square high up in a corner of his own room thus also alluding to the traditional place in the home where the religious icon was hung. This was the “Orthodox Corner” where Malevich said “the sacred image hangs.” [3] Thus the use of the word icon in discussions about Malevich does not merit scare quotes as Malevich saw no contradiction between its modernist status and the traditional religious sacred image.

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[1] Charles Harrison, Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction, 229.

[2] Hans Belting, The Invisible Masterpiece, 304.

[3] Malevich (1924) cited in Ibid. Later in the age of Soviet Realism a “red corner” containing images of Lenin and Stalin would be allocated to workers’ clubs. See Greg Castillo, “Stalinist Modern: Constructivism and the Soviet Company Town” in Architectures of Russian Identity 1500 to the Present, eds James Cracraft and Daniel Rowland, (Cornell University Press, 2003), 135-149, 138.

Full Circle: Modern meets Old Russian Art. (6)

“No, we don’t want her in Moscow.”

For virtually all of her after-life, Mona Lisa has maintained her supremacy and status, but in the era of modern art her standing took a short dip since she represented the art establishment that the moderns were supposedly rebelling against. As Hans Belting notes, by the time the Mona Lisa had been stolen from the Louvre in 1911, the idea of the masterpiece was dead; it had turned into an “empty cliché.”[1] Six years later Marcel Duchamp would draw a moustache on the Mona Lisa ushering in a century and more of pranks against the art of the academies. And in Russia Kazimir Malevich treated the art history “icon” with the same disdain and irreverence that other artists would right up to the present day. A few years before Duchamp’s act of notoriety, Malevich produced a cubist collage which featured a miniature of the Mona Lisa crossed out (above). His 1914 Composition with Mona Lisa is in Belting’s words both “a work and a critique of a work because it rejects the outdated concept of the work represented in the cliché of the Mona Lisa.”[2] Malevich’s “Mona Lisa” is a cheap colour print torn across the top and glued under a piece like a photograph on a crime scene map. Using red, the artist crossed out the face and upper body, and to add insult to injury, placed an advertisement for a Moscow flat whose juxtaposition with the other elements might be read as “No, we don’t want her in Moscow.”[3] Hovering like an avenging angel over this constellation of coloured shapes, lettering and photographs is a black square, the shape that is most readily identified with Malevich. Its unmistakeable presence in a collage featuring the “icon” of the renaissance seems to suggest that a new sign was needed for a new era of art.

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[1] Hans Belting, The Invisible Masterpiece (Reaktion Books, 2001), 273.

[2] Ibid, 284.

[3] Ibid. By this time the Mona Lisa had been recovered and was back in Paris which Belting says was for Malevich “an example of false consciousness.”

Full Circle: Modern meets Old Russian Art. (5)

The Icon in Art History.

The word “icon” has been bandied about in modern life, especially popular culture, so much that the term has now drifted further from its religious and historical moorings. To the modern eye and mind, icon connotes glamour, wealth and star status rather than something devout or humble, or even pictorial.[1] Today, celebrities, film stars and pop stars are awarded the title of “icons.”[2] But if there is something akin to the definition of “icon” in its modern sense in the history of art, it is Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa which has a special, indefinable quality that makes it stand out and even resonate in the world of today where the mysterious lady is reproduced and replicated in a bewildering number of contexts and in different media, ranging from the solid to the digital. Despite the Mona Lisa’s separation from traditional religious art, some Leonardo scholars have sought to connect the art history “icon” with the aesthetics of the Byzantine period when icons were produced with a predominantly spiritual function in view. In an interesting essay Claire Farrago argues that despite Leonardo’s works of art not resembling Byzantine icons, the renaissance master’s work shares “an underlying, widely held assumption that human understanding of the divine is reached through the senses, above all through the most noble sense of sight.”[3] In other words supporters of Byzantine icons guarded against charges of idolatry by arguing that the image did not show the presence of the divine figure, Jesus, Mary, and they thought that the icon’s “similarity and prototype are only formal- [because] image and copy are not linked in an essential unity as are Father, Son and Holy Ghost.”[4] Later after the resolution of the Iconoclastic Controversy of 843 AD, it was decided that icons could be admitted into the liturgy.

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[1] The idea of the film star may have been predicted by Charles Baudelaire in the section on women in his 1863 “Painter of Modern Life” where he describes the detached, mystical nature of some women as demonstrating what he calls “professional beauty.” The use of the word “star” in connection with a conspicuous individual in public life seems to derive from the Frankfurt School’s investigation into what they called “the culture industry.” See Theodore Adorno: “Its ideology above all makes use of the star system, borrowed from individualistic art and its commercial exploitation. The more dehumanized its methods of operation and content, the more diligently and successfully the culture industry propagates supposedly great personalities and operates with heart-throbs. “Culture Industry reconsidered” in New German Critique, 6, Fall 1975, 12-19 (translated by Anson G. Rabinbach).

[2] The link between “icon” in its modern sense and the pop/film star probably begins in the 1980s with the Madonna phenomenon, itself revealing as a name as it brings the mystification of the star system into view while recalling the true nature of icons in their religious sense.

[3] Claire Farrago, “Aesthetics before Art: Leonardo through the Looking Glass” in Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art In and Out of History (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 45-92, 75.

[4] Ibid.

Full Circle: Modern meets Old Russian Art. (4)

Icons in the Age of Nicholas II

During Anisimov’s lifetime, Tsar Nicholas II was on the Russian throne until his forced abdication in 1917 and violent death with his family at the hands of the Bolsheviks in Yekaterinburg in 1918. According to Benois, the young Tsarevich was disappointing when it came to art appreciation. Commenting on Nicholas’s visit to a watercolours exhibition with his father, Benois said that the prince neither looked at the art, spoke to the painters and was plainly bored.[1] However, when he became Tsar Nicholas II, he did take a keen interest in icons, albeit from a spiritual rather than aesthetic perspective. As far as the avant-garde were concerned, the Cubo-Futurists, Supremacists, Constructivists, Nicholas simply had no intellectual curiosity for their experiments, though the Tsar supported the work of painters who portrayed religious scenes: Pavel Korin, Viktor Vasnetsov, Mikhail Nesterov, and Mikhail Vrubel. Nicholas’s “connection to the icon” made him very significant to the art historians in Russia and some sought to draw his attention to the plight of the Russian icon which he associated with miracle-working whose origins lay in debates between Ivan IV (“the Terrible”) and religious authorities back in the past.[2]

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[1] Robert L. Nichols, “Nicholas II and the Russian Icon” in Alter Icons, 74-87, 81.

[2] The debate is discussed in James Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Religious Imagery, (University of Chicago, 1997), 55f.

Full Circle: Modern meets Old Russian Art. (3)

Anisimov Lectures on the Vladimir Icon.

One of the most important lectures Anisimov ever gave was in 1922 when he delivered a talk on the most revered icon in all Russia: the Vladimir Mother and Child which dated back to the thirteenth-century.[1] Ansimov called it an “oriflamme,” a banner to rally troops from the medieval period down the ages. Anisimov said that it was bad enough that the icon was barely visible through a range of over-paintings and layers of varnish; but it was worse that the precious image had been covered with a cover under which it had been hermetically sealed. Between 14^th December 1918 and 5^th April 1919 Anisimov and Grabar had watched the restorer Chirikov clean this most sacred image which Anisimov reviewed in his 1922 address. During that talk Anisimov pointed out the icon’s “multiple touch-ups as well as four major repairs dating back to 1237, when the panel was damaged during the Mongol conquest of Vladimir.”[2] In a later publication Anisimov reproduced a diagram showing the icon’s transformations (above); the first layer was dated to the eleventh-century which disproved the legend about the image painted by the hands of St Luke. Anisimov also argued that the panel was the original rather than a copy made in 1395, the opinion of several specialists. In addition to his technical and connoisseurial examination of the Vladimir icon, Anisimov also used his resources and knowledge to show that the portrait quality of the faces on the icon reflected the “Macedonian Renaissance” rather than “Italo-Cretan influences,” a view held by others.[3]

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[1] Ibid, 96.

[2] Ibid, 97.

[3] Ibid, 98.

Full Circle: Modern meets Old Russian Art. (2)

Anisimov & the Tretyakov Icons.

A number of the famous icons in the Tretyakov Gallery are there because of the efforts of Anisimov and colleagues like Igor Grabar (1871-1960), art historian, painter, and one of the founders of the World of Art movement, former director of the Tretyakov Gallery from 1913, and editor of the multi-volume History of Russian Art (1910-15). Though temperamentally very different- Grabar was the consummate museum politician and Anisimov was an outspoken firebrand- their writings reflected the same concerns about the condition of Russia’s icons and frescos. Also, Grabar was an admirer of the avant-garde and defended them against their detractors; his knowledge would serve him well when he diversified the Tretyakov into modern and traditional art. Together, Grabar and Anisimov initiated a number of projects which would have significant consequences for Russian art history. Between 1918 and 1928 Anisimov led teams of experts to monasteries, churches, and chapels in a number of centres including Vologda, Vladimir, Riazan, Pskov, and the environs of Moscow which resulted in important finds.[1] The most spectacular was the three illegible panels that the restorer Chirikov rescued from a damp shed in a Zvenigorod churchyard in 1918 which turned out to be the images of an archangel, the Apostle Paul, and Christ (above), all painted in the early fifteenth-century by the famed Andrei Rublëv- now all hanging in the Tretyakov. Also Anisimov filed a report on restorer Tikhail Tiulin’s 1919 discovery of an early thirteenth-century icon of the Mother of God, over-painted in oils and secreted away in a storage room of the Spassky Monastery in Yaroslav.

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[1] Ibid, 95.