Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art E DITED BY L OUISE H ARDIMAN AND N ICOLA K OZICHAROW New Perspectives MODERNISM AND THE SPIRITUAL IN RUSSIAN ART Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art New Perspectives Edited by Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow https://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2017 Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow. Copyright of each chapter is maintained by the author. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow, Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2017, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0115 In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/609#copyright Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/609#resources Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. The publication of this volume has been made possible by a grant from the Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute of Historical Research at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-338-4 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-339-1 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-340-7 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-341-4 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-342-1 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0115 Cover image: Mikhail Vrubel, Demon Seated (1890), detail, Wikimedia, https://upload.wikimedia.org/ wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Vrubel_Demon.jpg Cover design: Heidi Coburn All paper used by Open Book Publishers is sourced from SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative) accredited mills and the waste is disposed of in an environmentally friendly way. Contents Acknowledgements 1 Notes on Transliteration and Conventions 3 Notes on Contributors 5 1. Introduction: Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow 9 2. From Angels to Demons: Mikhail Vrubel and the Search for a Modernist Idiom Maria Taroutina 37 3. ‘The Loving Labourer through Space and Time’: Aleksandra Pogosskaia, Theosophy, and Russian Arts and Crafts, c. 1900–1917 Louise Hardiman 69 4. Kazimir Malevich, Symbolism, and Ecclesiastic Orthodoxy Myroslava M. Mudrak 91 5. Spirituality and the Semiotics of Russian Culture: From the Icon to Avant-Garde Art Oleg Tarasov 115 6. Re-imagining the Old Faith: Larionov, Goncharova, and the Spiritual Traditions of Old Believers Nina Gurianova 129 7. ‘Russian Messiah’: On the Spiritual in the Reception of Vasily Kandinsky’s Art in Germany, c. 1910–1937 Sebastian Borkhardt 149 8. Ellis H. Minns and Nikodim Kondakov’s The Russian Icon (1927) Wendy Salmond 165 9. Stelletsky’s Murals at Saint-Serge: Orthodoxy and the Neo-Russian Style in Emigration Nicola Kozicharow 195 10. The Role of the ‘Red Commissar’ Nikolai Punin in the Rediscovery of Icons Natalia Murray 213 11. Ucha Japaridze, Lado Gudiashvili, and the Spiritual in Painting in Soviet Georgia Jennifer Brewin 229 Select Bibliography 265 Illustrations 289 Index 299 Acknowledgements Above all, we are grateful to our authors for enriching this book with their outstanding research and writing, and for sharing our interest in its theme. The project to publish this book evolved from discussions at a conference, ‘On the Spiritual in Russian Art’, which we organised at Pembroke College, Cambridge, on 7–8 September 2012, in honour of the centenary of the publication of Vasily Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art (1910–12). The event was the first international symposium to be hosted at the University of Cambridge by the Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre (CCRAC), an academic collaboration established by Rosalind P. Blakesley of the Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge and Professor John Milner of The Courtauld Institute with the goal of promoting and supporting Russian and Soviet art scholarship in Britain. 1 This volume reflects many of the values which the centre has sought to promulgate in the years since its founding in 2011, and stands as lasting testament to the stimulating dialogue that took place at the inaugural conference. We would like to thank the speakers and delegates, and especially Rosalind Blakesley, Richard Marks, Maria Mileeva, John Milner, Robin Milner-Gulland, and Elizabeth Valkenier for contributing to a memorable two days. Our keynote speakers, Wendy Salmond and Oleg Tarasov, not only gave outstanding presentations but have encouraged us throughout the process of the ensuing book project, and we are delighted to include chapters based on their papers here. We thank the funders of the conference for their support: the British Association for Slavonic and Eastern European Studies (BASEES); the George Macaulay Trevelyan Fund, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge; and the Department of History of Art, Cambridge. We also gratefully acknowledge the award of a Publication Grant from the Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, towards the costs of this book. At Open Book Publishers, we are indebted to Alessandra Tosi, Bianca Gualandi, Lucy Barnes, and our cover designer, Heidi Coburn. We thank Alessandra and all those others who gave invaluable feedback on the manuscript at various phases of its creation, and two independent peer reviewers for their constructive comments. Finally, we thank our families, friends, and colleagues for their patience, encouragement, and unstinting support (and, of course, those of our authors); they have all played their part in the making of this book. 1 For more information, visit: http://www.ccrac.org.uk. John Milner has since stepped down from his role as co-director, and this position is held by Dr Maria Mileeva of The Courtauld Institute. Notes on Transliteration and Conventions This book uses a modified form of the Library of Congress transliteration system with some exceptions. For readability, we leave out diacritical marks from proper names and nouns (e.g., Vrubel) in the main text, but maintain these in footnotes. Patronymics of Russian names are not used, and when a Russian name or place has a conventional or generally known transliteration that differs from the Library of Congress System, this has been used (e.g., Alexandre Benois, not Aleksandr Benua, and Nicholas Roerich rather than Nikolai Rerikh; Tretyakov Gallery). We use ‘y’ instead of ‘ii’ or ‘yi’ (Kandinsky, not Kandinskii), except for the titles of Russian texts in the footnotes. Standard western names are used for Russian rulers (Peter the Great, Nicholas I) and places (Moscow, Munich); however, we use the Ukrainian transliteration Kyiv, rather than Kiev. If an alternative method of transliteration has been used in a quotation from a source or in a source citation, this is upheld. We also maintain original spelling in quotations, rather than altering these to reflect British English. When the title of a publication or an artistic group appears for the first time in the main text, its translated name in English is used together with a transliteration of the Russian in parentheses; when the title is used again later, only its translation is stated. However, in the footnotes and bibliography, only the transliteration is given, with no English translation. When quoting Russian text in footnotes, original orthography has been used wherever possible, including pre-1917 spellings upheld in emigration (such as ‘ago’, rather than the currently used form, ‘ogo’). This older orthography is used to maintain the integrity of émigré texts, but at the same time, letters which were eliminated after the Revolution, such as ‘і’, are not used. Translations of quotations are the author’s own unless stated otherwise in the footnotes. Contributors Sebastian Borkhardt studied History of Art, East Slavonic Philology, and Religious Studies in Tübingen and St Petersburg. After completing his MA, he began doctoral research at the University of Tübingen. His dissertation examines the role of the Russian roots of Vasily Kandinsky in the reception of the artist’s work in Germany and is supervised by Professors Eva Mazur-Keblowski (Tübingen) and Ada Raev (Bamberg). Borkhardt has received scholarships from the State Graduate Funding ( Landesgraduiertenförderung ) of Baden-Württemberg and the German National Academic Foundation ( Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes ). His research interests include modernism, with a particular focus on Russian art, as well as reception history, human-animal studies, and contemporary museum practice. Borkhardt is a member of the Russian Art and Culture Group based at Jacobs University in Bremen (http:// russian-art.user.jacobs-university.de) and co-editor of the 2017 issue of Experiment: A Journal of Russian Culture which is dedicated to the memory of Dmitry Sarabyanov. Jennifer Brewin is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. Her research, supervised by Dr Rosalind Polly Blakesley, explores the interaction of painting and national politics in Soviet Georgia under Stalin. Her research interests include all areas of Russian and Soviet art. She received her MA in History of Art from The Courtauld Institute of Art (2011) and her BA in Russian and History of Art from the University of Bristol (2008). She is a member of the advisory board of the Courtauld Cambridge Russian Art Centre (CCRAC). Her research is funded by the Lander PhD Studentship at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Nina Gurianova is Associate Professor at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Comparative Literary Studies Program at Northwestern University (USA). Her scholarship in the fields of literature and art history encompasses both Russian and European modernist and avant-garde movements, with a specific emphasis on the interrelation of aesthetics and politics. She has authored and edited six books on the Russian avant-garde and published extensively in Europe, the United States, and Russia. Gurianova served as the primary exhibition consultant for the Guggenheim Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and participated in 6 Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art the organisation of many exhibitions. Gurianova’s most recent book, The Aesthetics of Anarchy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012) won the AATSEEL Best Book in Literary/Cultural Studies annual award. Her research was supported by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University, the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, the William F. Milton Fund, IREX, the National Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for Humanities. Currently she is working on a monograph, New Art and Old Faith , which explores in depth the themes outlined in her chapter. Louise Hardiman is an art historian specialising in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian art. She is a graduate of the universities of Oxford, London, and Cambridge, where she completed a PhD on the history of Russian Arts and Crafts in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Her primary research concerns the history of the ‘neo-national’ movement and Anglo-Russian cultural exchange. She was consultant and catalogue contributor for the exhibition A Russian Fairy Tale: The Art and Craft of Elena Polenova (Watts Gallery, Guildford, 2014–15), and is the editor of Elena Polenova, Why the Bear Has no Tail and other Russian Folk Tales (London: Fontanka, 2014) and The Story of Synko- Filipko and other Russian Folk Tales (London: Fontanka, forthcoming). In 2016–17 she held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art to work on her book The Firebird’s Flight: Russian Art in Britain, 1851–1917 Nicola Kozicharow is the Schulman Research Fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge and an Affiliated Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Cambridge. She is a specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and Russian art, and her current book project is entitled Visual Culture and the Construction of Russian Émigré Identity . Her research has recently been sponsored by the Getty Research Institute and the Likhachev Foundation. Kozicharow received her PhD and MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and holds an MA from University College London, and a BA in History of Art (Honors) and Slavic Studies from Brown University. Myroslava M. Mudrak is Emerita Professor of the History of Art at The Ohio State University. Her research centres on modernist art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with special emphasis on avant-garde and abstract art in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Ukraine. Her primary interest is in the ideological discourses, socio-political influences, and artistic practices within East European cultures that use modernity to signify national identity. Mudrak has curated and produced catalogues for two historic exhibitions at The Ukrainian Museum in New York: Borys Kosarev: Modernist Kharkiv, 1915–31 (2012) and Staging the Ukrainian Avant-Garde 1910s–1920s (2015), the latter winning the prestigious Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions, under the auspices of the College Art Association in 2016. Mudrak’s publications include essays on Ukrainian Dada and Dissidence, Propaganda Pavilions, the Ukrainian Studio of Plastic Arts in 7 Contributors Prague, Panfuturism, Constructivism, David Burliuk, and ‘Neue Slowenische Kunst and the Semiotics of Suprematism’. Her seminal work, New Generation and Artistic Modernism in Ukraine (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986), soon to be published in a Ukrainian translation, was awarded the Kovaliw Prize for Ukrainian Studies. Natalia Murray has a PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and prior to this she studied History of Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg and completed the PhD course at the Hermitage Museum. In 2012 she wrote her monograph, The Unsung Hero of the Russian Avant-Garde. The Life and Times of Nikolay Punin (1888–1953) (Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic, 2012). At present she is lecturing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian art at The Courtauld Institute of Art, the Art Fund, and The Arts Society; she also works as head of education and public programmes at GRAD (Gallery for Russian Art and Design), and curates exhibitions of Russian art in England. She recently curated a major exhibition for the Royal Academy of Arts entitled Revolution: Russian Art 1917–32 (11 February–17 April 2017) and is now editing her next book, on the subject of post-revolutionary festivals in Petrograd. Wendy Salmond is Professor of Art and Art History at Chapman University, CA. She has written and lectured extensively on Russian and Soviet art, the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Nouveau, and Russian modernism. Her current project is a book tracing transformations in the perception and function of icons in Russia, from objects of devotion to works of art. Salmond has been a guest curator of exhibitions at Hillwood Museum and Gardens, Washington, DC (Tradition in Transition: Russian Icons in the Age of the Romanovs, 2004) and The New York Public Library (Russia Imagined, 1825–1925: The Art and Impact of Fedor Solntsev, 2006). She is a prolific translator of texts on Russian art and culture, and has edited volumes on the sculptor Sergei Konenkov, the Bolshevik sales of Russian art in the 1920s and 1930s, and the reception of Art Nouveau in Russia. Oleg Tarasov is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Slavic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences. He has an MA in History and a PhD in History and Theory of Arts from Moscow State University and a PhD in History from the Russian Academy of Sciences. Tarasov is the author of Icon and Devotion. Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), Framing Russian Art: From Early Icons to Malevich (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), and Modern i drevnie ikony: Ot sviatyni k shedevru ( Art Nouveau and Ancient Icons: From Sacred Object to Masterpiece ) (Moscow: Indrik, 2016). He is also a consultant and catalogue contributor for many exhibitions including Picture and Frame (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 2014). Maria Taroutina is Assistant Professor of Art History at Yale–NUS College in Singapore. She received her PhD in 2013 from Yale University and has published a number of articles and essays on the art and architecture of Imperial and early Soviet Russia. She is also co-editor, with Roland Betancourt, of Byzantium/Modernism: The 8 Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art Byzantine as Method in Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2015). Her first sole-authored book monograph, provisionally titled The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival , is forthcoming with Pennsylvania State University Press. It charts the rediscovery and reassessment of medieval Russian and Byzantine representation in Russia in the years 1860–1920. Currently, she is working on another edited volume, which will address new narratives and methodologies in Russian and Eastern European art. 1. Introduction: Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow It also belongs to my definition of Modernism [...] that art, that aesthetic experience no longer needs to be justified in other terms than its own, that art is an end in itself and that the aesthetic is an autonomous value. It could now be acknowledged that art doesn’t have to teach, doesn’t have to celebrate or glorify anybody or anything, doesn’t have to advance causes; that it has become free to distance itself from religion, politics, and even morality. All it has to do is be good as art. Clement Greenberg 1 In his 1961 text ‘Modernist Painting’ and other writings since, renowned art critic Clement Greenberg contended that the significance of modernist painting lay precisely in its aesthetic qualities. The autonomy granted to an artwork rendered factors outside of its formal aspects, such as artistic intention, tangential to its meaning or value. Art was now free from religious, political, or moral content and ideas, however strongly intended or present. Greenberg’s theory of formalist modernism has been criticised at length since the 1960s, yet scholars still find it necessary to refute it, especially in discussions of the importance of spirituality or religion in the history of modern art, showing its lasting power. 2 For Russian modernism, however, Greenberg’s theories 1 Clement Greenberg, ‘Modern and Postmodern’, in Late Writings , ed. by Robert C. Morgan (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). [First given as the William Dobell Memorial Lecture, Sydney, Australia, 31 October 1979; first published in Arts 54 , 6 (February 1980), http://www. sharecom.ca/greenberg/postmodernism.html]. 2 See, for example: Charlene Spretnak, The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 129; Maurice Tuchman, ‘Hidden Meanings in Abstract Art’, in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 , ed. by Maurice Tuchman, et al. (exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New York: Abbeville Press, 1986), pp. 17–61 (p. 18). © 2017 Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0115.01 10 Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow have little relevance. It is this book’s contention that, in Russia, extrinsic ideas and influences — and, most of all, those of Russian religious and spiritual traditions — were of the utmost importance in the making, content, and meaning of modern art. The claim is not entirely new; for example, scholarship in recent years has engaged with such highly pertinent questions as how icon painting became an inspiration for the Russian avant-garde. 3 Highlighting fresh research from an international set of scholars, this volume introduces new interpretations and approaches, and aims to energise debate on issues which have been circulating in scholarship on modern art over the past century. Ten chapters from emerging and established historians illustrate 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. The relationship between modernism and the spiritual has been, and continues to be, a subject of debate in art historical scholarship in the west. Vasily Kandinsky, whose seminal treatise, On the Spiritual in Art ( Über das Geistige in der Kunst ), of 1911–12 (fig. 1.1) has been hailed as one of the most important texts in the history of modern art, is a key figure in such discussions. 4 Kandinsky’s theories, based upon spiritual notions outside of Russian Orthodoxy, are now interpreted as owing much to Theosophy; 5 indeed, the influence of spiritual traditions beyond mainstream religion has informed much scholarship to date on the nexus between modernism and spirituality. Appearing soon after Greenberg set out his definition of modernism, Sixten Ringbom’s publications on Kandinsky pioneered the discussion of the spiritual in theories of modern art. 6 In the past fifty years more research has emerged, often in connection with the multitude of exhibitions on the theme of ‘the spiritual in modern art’ that took place in the late 1970s and 1980s. 7 3 See, for example: John E. Bowlt, ‘Orthodoxy and the Avant-Garde: Sacred Images in the Work of Goncharova, Malevich, and Their Contemporaries’, in Christianity and the Arts in Russia , ed. by William C. Brumfield and Milos M. Velimirovic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 145–50; Andrew Spira, The Avant-Garde Icon. Russian Avant-Garde Art and the Icon Painting Tradition (Aldershot: Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd, 2008); Jane Sharp, Russian Modernism between East and West: Natal′ia Goncharova and the Moscow Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 4 Vasily Kandinsky, ‘On the Spiritual in Art’, in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art , ed. by Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1982), Vol. 1, pp. 121–219. The first English translation of ‘On the Spiritual in Art’ by Michael T. H. Sadler, entitled The Art of Spiritual Harmony (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914), can be read online: https://archive.org/ details/artofspiritualha00kandrich. Also see John E. Bowlt and Rose Carol Washton-Long, The Life of Vasilii Kandinsky in Russian Art: A Study of ‘On the Spiritual in Art’ (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1980); Lisa Florman, Concerning the Spiritual — and the Concrete — in Kandinsky’s Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). 5 For a recent discussion of theosophical influences in Kandinsky’s oeuvre, see Marian Burleigh-Motley, ‘Kandinsky’s Sketch for “Composition II”, 1909–1910: A Theosophical Reading’, in From Realism to the Silver Age: New Studies in Russian Artistic Culture , ed. by Rosalind P. Blakesley and Margaret Samu (De Kalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2014), pp. 189–200. 6 Sixten Ringbom, ‘Art in the “Epoch of the Great Spiritual”: Occult Elements in the Early Theory of Abstract Painting’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes , 29 (1966), 386–418, https://doi. org/10.2307/750725. Also see Sixten Ringbom, The Sounding Cosmos. A Study in the Spiritualism of Kandinsky and the Genesis of Abstract Painting (Åbo: Åbo Akademi, 1970). 7 S. Arthur Jerome Eddy, Cubists and Post-Impressionists (Chicago, IL: McClurg, 1914); Sheldon Cheney, A Primer of Modern Art (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1924); Harold Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the 11 1. Introduction: Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art 1.1 Vasily Kandinsky, cover of Über das Geistige in der Kunst ( On the Spiritual in Art ), 1911 (dated 1912). 8 Displays such as Perceptions of the Spirit in Twentieth-Century American Art (Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1977) and The Spiritual in Modern Art: Abstract Painting, 1890–1985 (Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art, 1986) did much to change the terms of debate (indeed, the latter was described by James Elkins as “watershed work”). 9 The momentum continues. To take a more recent example, the relationship between Russian art and religious culture was examined in the exhibition Jesus Christ in Christian Art and Culture of the Fourteenth to Twentieth Centuries ( Iisus Khristos v khristianskom iskusstve i kul′ture XIV–XX veka ) in 2000 to 2001 at the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg. 10 At the time of publication there has been an Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (New York: Harper & Row, 1975); The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 , ed. by Maurice Tuchman, et al. (exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New York: Abbeville Press, 1986); Roger Lipsey, An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Modern Art (Boston: Shambhala, 1988); Piet Mondrian 1872–1944: A Centennial Exhibition (exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1971); Art of the Invisible (exh. cat., Bede Gallery, Jarrow, 1977); Kunstenaren der Idee: Symbolistische tendenzen in Nederland ca. 1880–1930 (exh. cat., Haags Gemeente- museum, The Hague, 1978); Abstraction: Towards a New Art (exh. cat., Tate, London, 1980). 8 Photograph in the public domain. Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kandinsky,_ Umschlag_über_das_Geistige_in_der_Kunst,_ver._1911,_dat._1912.jpg 9 James Elkins, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), p. 78. 10 Evgeniia Petrova, ‘“Zemnaia zhizn” Iisusa Khrista v russkom izobrazitel′nom iskusstve’, in Iisus Khristos v khristianskom iskusstve i kul′ture XIV–XX veka , ed. by Evgeniia Petrova (St Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2000), pp. 13–24; The Russian Avant-Garde: Siberia and the East , ed. by John E. Bowlt, Nicoletta Misler, and Evgeniia Petrova (exh. cat., Florence, Palazzo Strozzi; Skira, 2013). 12 Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow upsurge in books, conferences, and academic networks focused upon the relationship between modernism and spirituality and/or religion, making this volume’s publication especially timely. 11 With these developments in mind, one of the principal aims of this book is to broaden the debate on Russian artists and the spiritual beyond Kandinsky. Instead, the discussion expands to highlight other modern artists, critics, and mediating figures. Our intention is to open research in new directions; this is not, and does not claim to be, a comprehensive survey. The plurality of religious and spiritual traditions with active followers in Russia during the timeframe under consideration, and the resulting effects upon art, cannot meaningfully be reflected by a group of disparate authors without forfeiting analytical depth and the detail of their research. For example, none of the chapters deals with Judaism, which naturally falls into the frame in any discussion of avant-garde artists such as Marc Chagall, Nathan Altman, and others. Esoteric spirituality here is reflected only by Theosophy, but encompasses a far broader set of belief practices that influenced modernist art during this period — the story of Shamanism and Kandinsky is a notable example. 12 Although this volume highlights the richness of the spiritual theme, it should be remembered that this did not necessarily have an impact upon the work of every Russian artist of the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century; rather, this phenomenon represented a pervasive theme within Russian modernism. Throughout this publication, ‘spiritual’ is used as an umbrella term to encompass a broad range of religious sources and art that engaged — and, at times, entranced — critics and artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Credit is given to the variety of influences, including Russian religious art — primarily icons and frescoes, 11 James D. Herbert, Our Distance from God. Studies of the Divine and the Mundane in Western Art and Music (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2008); Lynn Gamwell, Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002). ‘Modernism and Spirituality’, Conference at Tate Modern, Linda Nochlin and Sarah O’Brien-Twohig, 2013; Sam Rose, ‘How (Not) to Talk About Modern Art and Religion’, at ‘Modern Gods: Religion and British Modernism’ symposium, The Hepworth Wakefield, 24 September 2016; Thomas Laqueur, ‘Why The Margins Matter: Occultism and the Making of Modernity’, Modern Intellectual History , 3 (April 2006), 111–35, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244305000648; Leigh Wilson, Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012); James Elkins, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art (New York and London: Routledge, 2004); Charlene Spretnak, The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Leah Dickerman, ‘Vasily Kandinsky, Without Words’, in Inventing Abstraction 1910–1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art , ed. by Leah Dickerman and Matthew Affron (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010), pp. 50–53; Enchanted Modernities: Mysticism, Landscape and the American West , exhibition at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, 2014; Jonathan A. Anderson and William A. Dyrness, Modern Art and the Life of a Culture: The Religious Impulses of Modernism (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2016). 12 See, for example: Peg Weiss, Kandinsky and Old Russia: The Artist as Ethnographer and Shaman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Charlotte Gill, ‘A “Rupture Backwards”: The Re-emergence of Shamanic Sensibilities Amongst the Russian Avant-Garde from 1900–1933’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Durham, 2015). 13 1. Introduction: Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art which, in the late nineteenth century, were appreciated for the first time as artistic, rather than religious, objects — and spiritual concepts such as Theosophy, ideas of the Russian ‘soul’, and the translation of mystical concepts. Religion — that “noncultic, major system of belief” and all its often public and communal trappings (hymns, catechisms, liturgies, rituals, etc.) — is thus united with spirituality — the “private, subjective, often wordless”. 13 Scholarship in Russia and the west has explored some of the overarching themes of this book with reference to a variety of figures, mostly artists themselves, over a wide chronology. The narrative spans from Aleksandr Ivanov’s exploration of religious ideas in his paintings of the first half of the nineteenth century, to the Soviet nonconformist artists of the 1960s, and ultimately to other artistic media, for example, Andrei Tarkovsky’s films of the latter half of the twentieth century. 14 However, this book concentrates on the critical years of modernism in Russia from its early stages in the late nineteenth century, when artists began to challenge the traditional boundaries of painting, sculpture, and architecture by consciously adopting more radical techniques, media, or themes, until the Thaw period, by which time socialist realism had become thoroughly entrenched as the official art of the Soviet Union. The diverse array of spiritual influences during this period fuelled new formal and theoretical investigations in art, incited fierce debates among artists and critics as to how such concerns were to be deployed, and drew interest from followers and enthusiasts in the west. The notion of the spiritual, broadly defined — whether drawn from conventional religious art or from esoteric ideas — helped shape modernism in Russian art and underpinned some of its most radical experiments. This was especially the case with Russia’s pioneering exponents of non-objective painting — Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Natalia Goncharova, and Mikhail Larionov — who now appear at the heart of the standard art historical narrative of early abstraction. 15 This volume offers new readings of a history only partially explored, delving into less familiar stories, and challenging long-held assumptions. 13 Elkins, p. 1. 14 See, for example: M. N. Tsvetaeva, Khristianskii vzgliad na russkoe iskusstvo: ot ikony do avangarda (St Petersburg: R. Kh. G. A., 2012); Anna Lawton, ‘Art and Religion in the Films of Andrei Tarkovskii’, in Christianity and the Arts in Russia , pp. 151–64; John E. Bowlt, ‘Esoteric Culture and Russian Society’, in Tuchman, The Spiritual in Art , pp. 165–83; Charlotte Douglas, ‘Beyond Reason: Malevich, Matiushin, and their Circles’, in Tuchman, The Spiritual in Art , pp. 185–99; Jane Sharp, ‘“Action-Paradise” and “Readymade Reliquaries”: Eccentric Histories in/of Recent Russian Art’, in Byzantium/Modernism: The Byzantine as Method in Modernity , ed. by Roland Betancourt and Maria Taroutina (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 271–310. 15 See, for example, the treatment of Russian art in survey texts such as Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art Between the Wars , ed. by Briony Fer, David Batchelor, and Paul Wood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 87–169; Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism , ed. by Hal Foster, et al. (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), pp. 174–272.