“Suzdal God-Daubers,” “Novgorodian Quattrocento,” and the Russian Avant-Garde

Abstract

This chapter begins by examining the activities of the Committee for the Tutelage of Russian Icon Painting founded in 1901 by Nicholas II's decree, which understood its mission to be the revival of popular icon painting while, at the same time, bringing its aesthetic closer to the tastes of the educated class. It highlights the discovery of the medieval icon painting tradition. The chapter focuses on the reception of the 1913 Moscow Exhibition of Ancient Russian Art in contemporaneous modernist art criticism, an exhibition where the legacy of fourteenth- to early sixteenth-century Russian icon painting, hitherto largely unknown, was on display. The 1913 exhibition led to a dramatic re-evaluation of the place of icon painting in the Russian artistic tradition: from a tradition of popular culture, it turned into a tradition of high culture and, as such, came to be seen as the foundation of the Russian national artistic tradition. The chapter then considers the politics of discursive and artistic appropriation of this tradition in Russian experimental art. It demonstrates how the paradigmatic change in the status of icon painting allowed avant-garde artists to claim an aesthetic genealogy unavailable to Russian artists of previous generations.