The Development of Painting in Russia

Abstract

The history of Russian art has not yet become at all familiar to the art historian. Naturally, comprehensive handbooks cannot get along without a chapter on “mediaeval” Russian art, and this chapter is likely to be accompanied with some striking illustrations, but there is never any discussion of a course of development that is at all analogous to the course of development of any other art. Even authors who write special books on Russian art are just as helpless before the problem. Louis Reau questions whether one should speak of Russian art at all, for as he sees it there is really only Byzantine art and then European art in Russia. And a Russian author, P. Muratov, expresses the opinion that the Russians are a remarkable example of an imitative people, who have never known an archaic art, have had no artistic beginnings, but must always take on a style of foreign growth in which to express themselves. In all textbooks of Russian art history that are circulated in Russia itself one reads that the state, ...