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Modernism and the spiritual in russian art:new perspectives

Hardiman, Louise - Nama Orang
Kozicharow, Nicola - Nama Orang

Introduction: Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art
Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow
In an extended introductory essay, the editors briefly examine the significant role played by spiritual themes in the history of modernism and provide a chronological overview of the history of spiritual and religious themes in the development of Russian and early Soviet art. The main themes of the essays are outlined, thus highlighting the recurrence and endurance of certain ideas across the edited volume as a whole.

From Angels to Demons: Mikhail Vrubel and the Search for a Modernist Idiom
Maria Taroutina
Revisiting his 1884 frescoes in the Church of St Cyril in Kyiv, Mikhail Vrubel purportedly lamented in the spring of 1901 that "this is the kind of work to which I should return”. Indeed, in the years leading up to his premature death in 1910, the artist obsessively depicted Biblical and apocryphal subjects again and again, producing several cycles of paintings and drawings on these themes. Accordingly, this essay examines Vrubel’s sustained engagement with religious subject matter on the one hand and the Russo-Byzantine representational idiom on the other in the years 1884-1906, and argues that they became important formal and conceptual catalysts in his artistic evolution towards a unique turn-of-the-century modernist style. The essay likewise analyses the ways in which Vrubel’s elusive, at times disturbing and constantly mutating Symbolist iconography expressed a specifically fin-de-siècle sense of spiritual malaise and destabilised identity in the face of widespread secularisation, epitomising the modern move away from institutionalised religion towards new spiritual and philosophical possibilities. Consequently, in their unusual combination of modernist forms with mystical, transcendental themes, Vrubel’s paintings prefigured a particular strain of visionary avant-gardism that found its full expression in the twentieth-century artworks of artists such as Pavel Filonov, Vasily Kandinsky, and Kazimir Malevich.

‘The Loving Labourer through Space and Time’: Aleksandra Pogosskaia, Theosophy, and Russian Arts and Crafts, c. 1900-1917
Louise Hardiman
The turn of the twentieth century witnessed increasing interest in Russia in non-conventional forms of religion and esoteric spirituality, and many artists and intellectuals were influenced by the Theosophical movement launched by Helena Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott, and William Quan Judge in New York in 1875. This essay examines how such ideas came to bear upon the ‘neo-national’ movement – Russia’s version of the international ‘Arts and Crafts’ movement of the late nineteenth century. It begins with a discussion of esoteric spiritual influences at the Talashkino artists’ colony founded by Princess Maria Tenisheva near Smolensk, and, in particular, the involvement of Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947), an artist who became one of Tenisheva’s closest artistic collaborators and, in later life, was a mystic and guru. It then turns to another figure who worked with Tenisheva, the Russian émigré Aleksandra Loginovna Pogosskaia (1848-1921). From the early 1900s onwards, Pogosskaia campaigned to place the development and production of Arts and Crafts (primarily, but not only, Russian) under the auspices of the Theosophical movement. Both movements had universalist aims and aspirations; both had global reach and sought to alter public opinion, fighting the increasing shift towards materialism and a growing spiritual deficit. The aim of this essay is not only to extend debate on the spiritual dimensions of Russian artistic modernism, but to bring fresh insight to the neo-national movement and, specifically, its international reach.

Kazimir Malevich, Symbolism, and Ecclesiastic Orthodoxy
Myroslava Mudrak
The simple geometric shapes of Suprematism—the most complete non-objective art of the twentieth century inaugurated by Kazimir Malevich in 1915—not only exemplify the century’s artistic quest for the absolute through abstract means, but also signify the artist’s lifelong search for the pictorial expression of spiritual purity. This essay makes two claims: that Malevich’s body of work from his largely overlooked Symbolist period, c. 1907-1908, carries the seed of his pursuit of the spiritual in art, and that the series of paintings of this period, largely conceived as fresco designs, appear to reference enigmatic religious rituals and were prepared as part of a projected, but unrealized, mural. This early period set the stage for Malevich’s expression of transcendent themes, cultivated throughout his entire creative life. Suprematism would become its pure manifestation in expanded dimensions of time and space. The author’s main argument is that Malevich’s point of access to the transcendent lay in the ritualistic acts of Orthodox (Byzantine) liturgy as practised by the peasantry and depicted in ecclesiastical wall painting. The sacred traditions of Orthodoxy and the ancient aesthetic culture of fresco painting appealed to Malevich from childhood, for they expressed communal values of deliverance shared by the Orthodox faithful. This appeal to the masses served as a guidepost for Malevich’s post-revolutionary utopian projects, for example, in UNOVIS (The Affirmation of the New in Art).

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