Abstract
REVIEWS 169 modern Russian theatre’ (p. 171). Similarly, a detached audience member at the Teatr ‘Sovremennik’ in the 1970s, or at Efremov’s touring MKhAT productions in 1980s London, might consider the director’s designation as Stanislavskii’s heir (pp. 179–91 passim) to be a case of wishful thinking. The whole amounts to a well-intentioned attempt at introducing important Russian theatre work to a new student readership and, despite its flaws, can be commended for a less conventional and more inclusive sense of both gender and genre. London Nick Worrall Hardiman, Louise and Kozicharow, Nicola (eds). Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives. OpenBook Publishers, Cambridge, 2017. 310 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. £24.95 (paperback). From the very outset of this volume, Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow claim that their goal as its editors was to ‘energise debate […] on the diverse ways in which themes of religion and spirituality were central to the work of artists and critics during the rise of Russian modernism’ (p. 10). Over the course of the eleven essays which comprise the text, this objective is definitively met. The book begins with an effectively written introduction by Hardiman and Kozicharow which provides a historical summary of religion in Russian art, a discussion of changing attitudes towards icons and an understated justification for the book’s focus on the period from the 1880s through the 1960s. Also threaded through this introduction are subtle but important new claims about the nature of Russian modernism and, as the authors assert, the ways in which ‘notions of the spiritual […] helped shape modernism in Russian art and underpinned some of its most radical experiments’ (p. 13). The individual case studies that comprise the main body of the volume begin with Maria Taroutina’s investigation of the frescoes that Mikhail Vrubel painted in the Church of St Cyril in Kyiv in 1884. These important works show how: ‘Vrubel was able to anticipate many of the formal and conceptual innovations of the future’ (p. 67) by embracing the artistic traditions of the past. Effectively argued and beautifully researched, Taroutina’s contribution adroitly weaves the voice of Vrubel with others from his time to create a multilayered argument that is as conceptually rigorous as it is convincing. Louise Hardiman then probes the debates surrounding the ‘Church of the Spirit’ commissioned by Maria Tenisheva, the founder of the Talashkino colony, before turning to the theosophical beliefs of Aleksandra Pogosskaia, a leading purveyor of Russian peasant art mostly in the West. In the third essay of the volume, Myroslava Mudrak creates a sophisticated new understanding SEER, 98, 1, JANUARY 2020 170 of how a group of Symbolist-style paintings produced by Kazimir Malevich between 1907–08 (sometimes referred to as the ‘Yellow Series’) should be understood as an integral part of Malevich’s progression to Suprematism. Mudrak intertwines succinct readings of individual paintings with effective comparisons to the works of Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard to create a persuasive sense of how the spiritual traditions of Orthodoxy lie at the heart of Malevich’s utopian trajectory. This is followed by Oleg Tarasov’s essay, which begins by exploring the epistemological differences between icons and avant-garde images before moving into the ‘specific features of Russian image veneration’ (p. 120). While Tarasov makes several fascinating points, his essay contains some odd contradictions which distract from the potential impact of his discussion of Malevich in the context of the conceptual space between icons and modern art. Tarasov’s work is counterbalanced, however, by Nina Gurianova’s assessment of how hand-painted Old-Believers’ religious lubki and manuscript books influenced painters like Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov at the beginningofthetwentiethcentury.Gurianovaalsopointsoutthebroadinterest members of the avant-garde had in various ‘archaic and traditional cultures’ (p. 144) beyond just the Old Believers. She calls this ‘pluralist expansiveness’ (p. 144) and provides brief, but significant comparisons to the primitivist interests of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as well as to the differences between Russian and Italian Futurism. Sebastian Borkhardt then delivers an in-depth examination of the German interpretations of Vasilii Kandinskii’s paintings in terms of ideas then circulating regarding the German soul and Russian...
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