Icon and the Square

In The Icon and the Square, Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with the radical, leftist, and revolutionary avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century through a shared interest in the Byzantine past, offering a counternarrative to prevailing notions of Russian modernism. Focusing on the works of four different artists—Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin—Taroutina shows how engagement with medieval pictorial traditions drove each artist to transform his own practice, pushing beyond the established boundaries of his respective artistic and intellectual milieu. She also contextualizes and complements her study of the work of these artists with an examination of the activities of a number of important cultural associations and institutions over the course of several decades. As a result, The Icon and the Square gives a more complete picture of Russian modernism: one that attends to the dialogue between generations of artists, curators, collectors, critics, and theorists.The Icon and the Square retrieves a neglected but vital history that was deliberately suppressed by the atheist Soviet regime and subsequently ignored in favor of the secular formalism of mainstream modernist criticism. Taroutina’s timely study, which coincides with the centennial reassessments of Russian and Soviet modernism, is sure to invigorate conversation among scholars of art history, modernism, and Russian culture.

“Well written and richly illustrated, it gives a comprehensive sense of the way in which the Byzantine ground of Russian national identity was laid throughout the nineteenth century, without which some of the most influential manifestations of world modernism could never have flowered the way they did.”—Andrew Spira, Burlington Magazine, “Maria Taroutina’s beautifully illustrated and informative book demonstrates convincingly that the story is much more multifarious and complicated than has so far been shown.”—Per-Anne Bodin, The Russian Review, “In her lavishly illustrated book, Taroutina revises the time period during which art historians generally locate the origins of modernism in Russian art from the beginning of the twentieth century to the closing decades of the nineteenth.”—Maria Lipman, Foreign Affairs, “In the 1909 essay ‘New Paths in Art,’ artist and writer Léon Bakst observed that Russian art could move forward only by turning back to the aesthetics of antiquity, national folklore, and even prehistory. In her audacious analysis, Maria Taroutina places luminaries of both Symbolism and the avant-garde, such as Goncharova, Malevich, Tatlin, and Vrubel, in a wide temporal framework and persuasively establishes a harmonious correlation between their radical stance and bygone cultures.”—John E. Bowlt, editor of Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902-1934, “This remarkable account tackles longstanding and resilient binaries to reveal ways in which some of the most innovative members of Russia's avant-garde willingly engaged with the cultural and political establishment and deployed medieval visual practice to galvanize modernist discourse in highly unexpected and suggestive ways.”—Rosalind Polly Blakesley, author of The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia, 1757-1881

Maria Taroutina is Assistant Professor of Art History at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.