OntheSpiritualinRussianArt

78September2012TheOldLibrary

PembrokeCollege,Cambridge

Christies Images Limited [2009]

On the Spiritual in Russian Art

This conference takes as its theme the concept of the spiritual tradition in Russian art, in celebration of the centenary of Vasilii Kandinskii's seminal text, ber das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art) (1910-12) one of the most influential works of Russian artistic thought in the context of international modernism. We propose this banner as a stimulus for a broader discussion of the intersection between spirituality and Russian art, which ranges beyond the extensive and enduring impact of Kandinskiis well-known manifesto for new directions in art. Through such exploration, we aim to highlight the current diversity and depth of Russian and Soviet art scholarship in Britain and overseas, while also providing a forum for the reassessment of one of its most frequently recurring and critical themes. The conference is the first to be held in Cambridge by the Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre (CCRAC). CCRAC was founded in May 2011 on the joint initiative of Dr Rosalind Blakesley of the University of Cambridge and Professor John Milner of The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Arising from significant research over many years among faculty and graduate students in both institutions, CCRAC aims to stimulate debate, support collaborative work, and generate and disseminate research on all aspects of the visual arts, architecture, design, and exhibitions in Russia and the Soviet Union.

Conference Programme

7 to 8 September 2012

The Old Library, Pembroke College

Day One 9.15 9.45 Registration 9.45 9.55 Welcome and Opening Remarks (Louise Hardiman/Nicola Kozicharow) 9.55 10.50 First Keynote Address

Wendy Salmond (Chapman University) Nikodim Kondakov, Ellis Minns, and The Russian Icon (1927): The Story of a Translation Chair: Rosalind Polly Blakesley

10.50 11.10 Break 11.10 12.30 Panel 1 Artists and the Iconic Tradition: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth

Centuries Chair: Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier Erin McBurney (The London School of Economics and Political Science) From Political Transgression to Spiritual Intercession: Visuality and Veneration in Eriksens Portraits of Catherine the Great, 1761-62 Pamela Davidson (The School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College, London) Aleksandr Ivanov and Nikolai Gogol: The Image and the Word in the Russian Tradition of Art as Prophecy

Maria Taroutina (Yale University) Angels and Demons: Mikhail Vrubels Modernist Rewriting of the Iconic Tradition

12.30 1.30 Lunch to be provided in the Thomas Gray Room, Pembroke College 1.30 2.30 Second Keynote Address

Oleg Tarasov (Russian Academy of Sciences) From the Icon to Russian Avant-Garde-Art: Spirituality and the Historic System of Signs Chair: Robin Milner-Gulland

2.30 2.35 Short Break 2.35 4.00 Panel 2 Religiosity, Spirituality, and the Russian Avant-Garde

Chair: John Milner

Maria Kokkori (The Art Institute of Chicago) Kazimir Malevichs God is Not Overthrown: Art, Church, Factory: new approaches to the spiritual in art

Myroslava M. Mudrak (The Ohio State University) Kazimir Malevich and the Liturgical Tradition of Eastern Christianity

Nina Gourianova (Northwestern University) Re-imagining the Old Faith: Larionov, Goncharova, and the spiritual traditions of Old Believers

4.00 5.30 Free time in Cambridge we recommend the following:

The Search for Immortality: Tomb Treasures of Han China at the Fitzwilliam Museum (across the street from Pembroke College) A Soviet Design for Life: The Catherine Cooke Collection of Twentieth-Century Russian Architecture and Design at the University Library (fifteen minutes walk from Pembroke College)

Icons at Girton College (bus or taxi needed). Among the highlights of this small collection are several icons featuring the Solovetskii monastery.

5.30 7.00 Wine Reception in the Thomas Gray Room, Pembroke College Day Two 9.45 11.05 Panel 3 The Russian Spiritual Tradition and the West

Chair: Galina Mardilovich

Nicola Kozicharow (University of Cambridge) Dmitrii Stelletskiis Frescoes at the Church of Saint-Serge, Paris and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad

Sebastian Borkhardt (University of Tbingen) Russian Messiah: On the Spiritual in the Reception of Vasilii Kandinskiis Art in Germany, 1910-1937

Scott Ruby (Hillwood Estate, Museum, & Gardens, Washington, DC) A Tale of Three Collectors: Russian Icons and the Search for the Spiritual

11.05 11.30 Break

11.30 12.20 Panel 4 Unconventional Approaches to the Spiritual in Russian Art Chair: Maria Mileeva

Nancy Perloff (Getty Research Institute) Calculated Spontaneity and the Ouspenskian Strain in Russian Futurism

Louise Hardiman (University of Cambridge) The Loving Labourer through Space and Time: Theosophy and the Promotion of Russian Arts and Crafts in Britain, c. 1900-1917

12.20 1.20 Lunch (not provided available in college or locally) 1.20 2.50 Panel 5 Religion, Art and the Soviet Response

Chair: Claire Knight

Tatiana Senkevitch (University of Toronto) The Spirit Gives Life: Pavel Florenskys Project of a Living Museum in the Age of (Soviet) Iconoclasm Natalia Murray (The Courtauld Institute of Art) The role of the red commissar Nikolay Punin in the re-discovery of icons Jaimee K. Comstock-Skipp (Williams College, USA) Bolshevik Brother or Islamic Other? Images of Religious Difference in Soviet Posters from the 1920s

2.50 3.00 Closing Remarks (Louise Hardiman/Nicola Kozicharow) 3.00 Conference ends

Abstracts Sebastian Borkhardt (University of Tbingen) Russian Messiah: On the Spiritual in the Reception of Vasilii Kandinskiis Art in Germany, 1910-1937 But where today [] the breakthrough of abstract tendencies is taking place? [] Out of Russian spirit the new European religiousness has grown: Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy! From Russian artistry the longing for the pure arabesque as an expressive art form has arisen: Kandinsky! And now: is the Russian spirit not the shelter of mystic spirituality of all kinds and variations? Eckart von Sydow, Die deutsche expressionistische Kunst und Kultur (German Expressionist Art and Culture, 1920) Recent research has proved that Kandinskiis development of an abstract style was deeply influenced by the religious traditions of Russia such as icon painting. However, to Kandinskiis contemporaries in Germany these aspects were largely unknown. On the one hand, abstraction was described by them as meaningless or ornamental; on the other hand, in the 1910s and 1920s authors like Wilhelm Hausenstein and Eckart von Sydow traced Kandinskiis work back to general ideas of a Russian spirituality. In their writings Kandinskii is linked with concepts of the internal, the soul and transcendence. His art, in their view, refuses an intellectual approach: one can only approximate it empathically. Kandinskii himself contributed to this interpretation by ascribing to himself the role of an Eastern prophet. ber das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art, 1910-12) owed a great deal of its success to the mystically-oriented mood and the attempts at cultural self-definition in Germany. In contradistinction to the Romance countries Wilhelm Worringer in his study Formprobleme der Gotik (Form in Gothic, 1911) characterises German art as transcendental in its innermost being. According to Worringer, the striving for transcendence found its equivalent in abstraction until it was distorted by Renaissance classicism. In this sense, Russian spirituality became a source for the renewal of German art. Yet, in the 1920s the spiritual line in the perception of Kandinskiis work more and more gave way to anti-Russian defamation. The Nazi regime regarded abstraction not as an expression of spiritual aspirations, but as a symptom of complete madness. On the basis of contemporary writings I attempt to trace the role of spirituality in the reception of Kandinskiis art in Germany from around 1910 to 1933. It will be shown that the religious interpretation was closely interrelated with the political and cultural contexts of that time. Jaimee K. Comstock-Skipp (Williams College) Bolshevik Brother or Islamic Other? Representations of Muslims in Early Soviet Posters, 1917-1930 In the early Soviet period, actions toward particular religions were determined by political interests. Whereas Roman Catholics were particularly targeted due to their connections to the Vatican and foreign powers hostile to Communism and the Soviet regime, Muslims received milder treatment than other religious groups. This paper employs a postcolonial reading of select posters from the early Soviet period eliciting Bolshevik support from Muslim populations, and incorporates materials from poster collections in Tajikistan and from the Williams College Museum of Art. Posters were a way for Soviets to present and create proletarian identity aspiring to capture a collective ideal and also evidence tensions with the Islamic faith. With their rhetoric of brotherhood and equality, early posters from around 1920

emphasize and exaggerate Muslim differences, and the art draws on easily readable imagery that adopts Orientalist practices of viewing and constructing the Other. This exaggerated difference gets tempered to promote uniformity later in the decade, and the visual evidence can be linked to statements made by Soviet ideologists struggling to articulate a unified Soviet nation with a single Soviet culture. Bolshevik Brotherhood rhetoric is part of a distinctly gendered discourse that posits class and gender agreement. However racial uniformity proves to be a more difficult difference to elide. Are Slavs and Tatars, for example, half- or step-brothers? In the later posters, differences demarcating Orientalness disappear. Scholars have long exposed the falsehood of the Brotherhood mutually coming together, instead positing that it is really the outer edges of the empire, the younger, uncivilized brothers, that must make the move to assimilate themselves to the elder brother. But closer contact with Islamic practices in the periphery also brought about a change in the center through this exposure. Rather than wagging my finger at the hollow promises of Soviet brotherhood and equality, this paper illuminates how Islamic thought helped inform the very discourse of Soviet Brotherhood by analyzing its manifestation in visual pictorial form. Pamela Davidson (The School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College, London) Aleksandr Ivanov and Nikolai Gogol: The Image and the Word in the Russian Tradition of Art as Prophecy The pervasive Russian image of the artist as a prophet is generally regarded as a verbal construct, rooted in and developed through literary tradition. And indeed, there are ample grounds to support such a view, as the image can be traced through a chain of texts from the late eighteenth century onwards. Originating in the writings of Derzhavin and Lomonosov, it first became widespread during the period after the Napoleonic wars leading up to the Decembrist uprising, when it flourished in the verse of Zhukovsky, Glinka, Kiukhel'beker, Iazykov and Pushkin. Its subsequent metamorphosis from an agent of social and political change into a religious, theurgic force was largely facilitated by Gogol. By the time it reached Dostoevsky, Vladimir Solovev, the Symbolists and their successors, it had already become a canonical image, embodying an uncontested literary truth. The purpose of this paper is not to dispute this view, but to enrich it by considering a hitherto neglected but significant contributing factor: the role of the visual arts in building up the view of the artist as a prophet. For this purpose I will focus on a specific case-study that marked a crucial turning-point in the formation of the tradition: the relationship between Aleksandr Ivanov (1806-1858) and Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) from the time of their first meetings in Rome in the late 1830s until Gogols death in 1852. Throughout this period Ivanov was settled in Rome, working on his magnum opus The Appearance of the Messiah to the People (1833-1857), while Gogol was toiling away on Dead Souls (1835-1852, first part published in 1842), revising his short story The Portrait (second version published in 1842), and penning Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1845-1846, published in 1847). The notion of the prophetic message of art is crucial to all four of these works in different ways. It is particularly rewarding to analyse the way that Ivanovs visual treatment of this theme interacted with and influenced Gogols literary development of the image of the artist as prophet. While deriving considerable support from each others ideas and artistic practice, the two men differed in their approaches to the relative value of the image and the

word in creating new forms of religious art; at times they almost seemed to be competing for the role of chief prophet, leading to a crisis point in their relationship around 1848. Nina Gourianova (Northwestern University) Re-imagining the Old Faith: Larionov, Goncharova, and the spiritual traditions of Old Believers Most of the early Russian avant-gardes visual and literary works share the important theme of unbounded freedom, understood as freedom from metaphysical rationality, and from the established canon of Western aesthetics. It is a concept that extends back to Kandinskys The Spiritual in Art, which emphasizes freedom to act and create, and cultivates the interest in artistic sources outside of conventional doctrines, turning to folk, medieval and primitive art. The move to dismiss cultural Eurocentrism was common to the universal tendencies of Western modernism, which sought inspiration in African (Picasso) or Polynesian (Gauguin) art, but in Russia, it was an especially complex and sensitive issue. This aspiration to distance oneself from Western tradition was an attempt to build cultural and intellectual autonomy and redefine Russian identity. For over two centuries, ever since Peter the Great had commissioned European artists en masse to work and teach in Russia, and to introduce Russian society to the concept of secular painting, which had not existed there before, professional Russian art had been consciously oriented toward the West. This imposed Eurocentrism had become official aesthetic dogma, replacing the Russian iconic canon, even in religious art. The philosophical and aesthetic orientation of the early Russian avant-garde was expanding in time, rather than in space, and instead of geographically exploring the found traditions of primitive cultures, Russian Neoprimitivists and Futurists were drilling through the layers of time, returning to the semi-forgotten roots of their own past. This direction was to a great extent determined by Larionovs and Goncharovas turn to folk art aesthetics, along with the Old Russian and Byzantine icons and manuscripts. These traditions were neglected from the eighteenth century onward, considered low by the cultural and theological dogma of the institutionalized Russian Church. The only social groups that internalized and preserved the tradition were the so-called Old Believers, still treated as religious heretics by the Synod, and it comes as no surprise that Mikhail Larionovs family belonged to one of the strongest branches of this movement, the Pomors, who had a significant community in Moscow. In this presentation, I intend to demonstrate the crucial influence of the Old Believers spiritual tradition on the early avant-gardes interest in icons, and their engagement with the Pre-Petrine iconography and religious thought. Louise Hardiman (University of Cambridge) The Loving Labourer through Space and Time: Theosophy and the Promotion of Russian Arts and Crafts in Britain, c. 1900-1917 As John Bowlt and a number of other scholars have documented, a fascination with esoteric spirituality and the occult was widespread among Russian artistic communities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These explorations led artists to seek inspiration beyond the mainstream tradition of Russian Orthodoxy and were particularly influential upon the Symbolist and Avant-Garde movements. Scholarly research to date has principally

focussed on these areas. My paper provides another example of the intersection between Russian fin-de-sicle art and non-conventional religion, in an area of artistic practice not yet considered within this debate. It discusses a little-known historical link between the Theosophical movement of the late nineteenth century and the Russian arts and crafts movement, namely, the efforts of a Russian migr to Britain, Aleksandra Loginovna Pogosskaia (1848-1921) to combine Theosophical teachings with her goal of promoting Russian arts and crafts internationally. Fundamentally, both movements had the shared aim of expanding their global reach in order to alter public opinion; however, I shall also illustrate that, both practically and intellectually, there were other commonalities of approach which help to explain the connection. Maria Kokkori (The Art Institute of Chicago) Kazimir Malevichs God is Not Overthrown: Art, Church, Factory: New Approaches to the Spiritual in Art Kazimir Malevich arrived in Vitebsk in November 1919 where he stayed for three years and that was perhaps the most productive period in his theoretical and philosophical life. He taught at the Vitebsk Art School; he participated to exhibitions; in debates about the making and meaning of contemporary art; and he wrote and published some of his most important books like: On the New Systems in Art, Suprematism: 34 drawings and God is not overthrown: Art, Church, Factory. This paper focuses on Malevichs book God is Not Overthrown: Art, Church, Factory where the artist associates his suprematist researches with esoteric ideas. In his book, Malevich explores the cosmic unity, the bonds between metaphysical ideas and science and presents his concept of the spiritual experience, including the fourth dimension, the relation between excitation and thinking, life and infinity, economy and rhythm, spirituality and materiality, the absolute and the struggle for existence, the religious motion or God as will, reason and perfection, how factory influences the mans consciousness, the interrelationship between spirituality, religion, science, art and factory, as well as theories concerning the metaphysical resonances of suprematism art. In this paper, I shall look at the dialogue between the spiritual and suprematist utopias. I shall argue that Malevichs book was published at a particular moment of transition in Russian art, embodying several strands of aesthetic discourse surrounding abstraction, suprematism, constructivism and spiritual in art at the time. Nicola Kozicharow (University of Cambridge)Dmitrii Stelletskii's Frescoes at Saint-Serge and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad Between 1925 and 1927, the Russian migr artist Dmitrii Stelletskii executed the frescoes, icons, and iconostasis for the parish church of the Saint-Serge Theological Institute in Paris. After the Russian Revolution and subsequent Civil War led to the diaspora of one and half million Russian citizens, Saint-Serge became one of the most important centres of the Russian Orthodox church outside the Soviet Union. Stelletskiis interior at Saint-Serge was one of the most significant commissions of his career and resonated with a crucial concern of many Russians in emigration: the preservation of Russian culture before the Revolution. This paper will discuss the interior of Saint-Serge, especially how Stelletskii converted a nineteenth-century Gothic building into a Russian Orthodox church while still remaining faithful to the Orthodox canon. The frescoes, which have been largely ignored by scholarship,

reflected Stelletskiis deep knowledge of the medieval Russian style, and his specific allusions to celebrated churches such as the Church of the Nativity of the Virgin at the Ferapontov Monastery helped establish a connection between Russian migrs and their cultural and religious past. This paper will also explore contemporary responses to Stelletskiis work at Saint-Serge in order to consider further the relevance of his designs to the Russian migr community who continued to hope for a future return to their homeland. Erin McBurney (The London School of Economics and Political Science) From Political Transgression to Spiritual Intercession: Visuality and Veneration in Eriksens Portraits of Catherine the Great, 1761-62 This paper will examine the portrait iconography of Catherine the Great at a critical moment in her reign, immediately before and after her seizure of the Russian throne in 1762. I will suggest that Catherine appropriated native Russian religious imagery to articulate secular political imperatives as she sought to consecrate her rule: she lacked any legal or dynastic claim to the Russian throne as a German-born usurper and regicide. Vigilius Eriksens Catherine II in Mourning, 1761-2 (Tretiakov Gallery) and Catherine II Astride Brilliante, c. 1762 (Hermitage) are dramatically different representations of the Empress yet both works reference important visual and symbolic aspects of the Orthodox icon tradition, blurring the boundaries between portrait and icon. In the former, the small scale is suggestive of maternal piety and suffering; the single figure in mourning attire becomes representative of a nations grief at the death of the daughter of Peter I, the Empress Elizabeth. A mere six months later, the masculine, militaristic figure of the Empress astride evokes historic mounted warrior saints such as Alexander Nevsky and Dmitrii Donskoi. Catherine has transformed herself into the protector of Orthodoxy and the saviour of the Russian Army, two constituents whose support would be vital to the success of her coup. In this transitional period, the Empress relied on the visual language of icons to construct a symbolic liturgy of state that inspired veneration, imbued her reign with political sanctity and initiated what Voltaire would later describe as the Cult of St. Catherine. Myroslava M. Mudrak (The Ohio State University) Kazimir Malevich and the Liturgical Tradition of Eastern Christianity The eerie, transparent palette of a handful of Kazimir Malevichs paintings completed around 1907 has largely been classified as Symbolist in nature. Indeed, the paintings subtle pastel tones and subdued colours, complemented by the calligraphic fluidity of their linear handling, belie the direct influence of Maurice Denis and show intimate familiarity with the gauzy paintings of the Blue Rose. Moreover, the depiction of ceremonial scenes showing figures partaking in ritualistic processions points to the elusive dream imagery of Viktor Borisov-Musatovs singularly poetic panneaux. Retreating into themes of ritual and mystery, and rendered mostly in fresco, Malevichs paintings also seek to capture the transcendent, but deviate from the oneiric imagery of the Symbolists to embody an altogether different sensibilityone rooted in Orthodox Christianity. Inspired by the iconography of incarnation, these paintings reveal objects and themes closely associated with Eastern liturgical practicethe icon, the shroud (plashchanytsia), the religious processionand insist on communal presentness and the full participatory attention of the beholder. Just as the Byzantine liturgy demands that the faithful Be Attentive!an exhortation peppered throughout the divine serviceso Malevichs paintings engage the communal spectator to become attendant to the mystery revealed. Malevichs iconic self-portrait modelled on the icon of the Pantocrator serves as a pivotal eschatological image. This, and works such as The Triumph of Heaven

or Prayer, which characterize his early period, suggest a somewhat anomalous and largely unexplored chapter in Malevichs oeuvre, yet they constitute the beginning of a cycle that will come to full fruition at the end of his life as Malevich returns to figural representation. This paper argues for an overt display of Orthodox faith practices in Malevichs art, in which the icon plays a central role. Natalia Murray (The Courtauld Institute of Art) The Role of the Red Commissar Nikolay Punin in the Re-Discovery of Icons Nikolay Punin (1888-1953) still remains an enigma both in Russia and the West, seen by many as a red commissar, being the right hand of Anatoly Lunacharsky. His role in defining post-revolutionary art and his support for avant-garde artists (especially the Futurists) are much better known than his contribution to the re-discovery, the study and indeed preservation of Russian icons. After graduating from St. Petersburg University, Punin worked in the department of the Old Russian Art at the Russian Museum, which embodied a Museum of Christian Relics (formerly part of the Academy of Arts) as its base. The purchase of the famous collection of Greek and Russian icons from Nikolay Likhachev provided the Russian Museum with the largest collection of icons in Russia. From 1913 onwards, icons preoccupied Punins work and imagination. In a letter to his future wife, Anna Arens in 1913, he proclaimed that icon-painting is such a mature form of art, in front of which the whole of European art (perhaps only with the exception of the Renaissance) are toys. In 1914 Punin was promoted to become secretary of the Society for the Research of Old Russian Painting, and a member of the editing committee of the periodical The Russian Icon (Russkaya Icona). His most significant article on icons was written in 1915, dedicated to one of the most mystical (and indeed canonized) Russian artists, Andrey Rublev. It first appeared in the prestigious journal Apollon in 1915, and a year later was published as a separate booklet, and became one of the first descriptions of the artistic style of this unique artist, as well as of the tradition from which it was born. Even after the October revolution, when icons fell from favour, Punin continued to stress their importance for Russian art, fighting for their preservation. In 1918 in his article A spoonful of Antidote [Lozhka protivoyadiya], Anatoly Lunacharsky wrote: Not for nothing does the fighting Futurist Punin sweat for all he is worth in order to save the traditions of icon painting in Mstera Punin died a few months after Stalins death - in August 1953 in a camp beyond the Arctic Circle, condemned for refusing to cease lecturing on 20th Century art and especially on Czanne. He was only 64 years old, but had managed to fit several lives into this relatively short time a colourful life in Imperial Russia, revolution, three arrests, two World wars, the siege of Leningrad and the Gulag. Russian icons and their preservation occupied an important part of his rich life. Nancy Perloff (Getty Research Institute) Calculated Spontaneity and the Ouspenskian Strain in Russian Futurism

The artists book, Mirskontsa (Worldbackwards), published in Moscow in 1912, was the first of the Russian Futurist books to cultivate an aesthetic of calculated spontaneity. Collaborating poets and painters modified the cover and the contents of each copy, with the result that no single book in this edition of 220 was authoritative, and each was unique. This curious impulse to resist permanence and to embrace the idea of infinite beginnings finds expression in the books title, a neologism conceived by the two poets, Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexei Kruchenykh. Composed of three words strung together, the neologism can be translated literally as mir (world), s (from), kontsa (the end) world from the end. Although the compound word worldbackwards is typically chosen as the English title, mirskontsa is in fact more playfully ambiguous and multi-layered in meaning. In addition to indicating a straight time reversal, it invokes the end of the world which can occur at any moment in the future (the apocalypse) as well as the reversal back to the beginning of the world, that is, to the ancient world and the prehistoric past. This paper will argue that the Futurists aesthetic of calculated spontaneity, with its implications of reversibility, noncausality, and the simultaneous existence of present with past and future relates directly to the hyperspace philosophy of P. D. Ouspensky, who popularized the theory of the fourth dimension in Russia. Indeed, by connecting the higher consciousness of the fourth dimension with the Futurists interest in process, rather than progress, we articulate their particular Ouspenskian strain of spirituality. Working together on their artists books, Futurist poets and painters drew inspiration from a spirituality based not in laws and internal truths, but in chance and the accidental. Scott Ruby (Hillwood Estate, Museum, & Gardens) A Tale of Three Collectors: Russian Icons and the Search for the Spiritual In early 20th-century America, a taste for Russian icons developed among a number of pioneer collectors who pursued their acquisition with vigour and enthusiasm. In particular three notable collectors emerge: George Hann, of Sewickley, Pennsylvania; Marjorie Merriweather Post of Washington, DC, and Dominique de Menil of Houston, Texas. George Hanns collection of Russian icons began in 1935 before the exportation of such works were prohibited in the late 1930s. In 1938, Hann rebuilt his stately home, Treetops, to accommodate the collection which became integral to its decor. Scholars and student from all over the world came to Treetops to study this rare body of material, which late in his life received some controversial criticism. Like Hann, Marjorie Merriweather Posts fascination with Russian icons, liturgical vessels, and vestments began in the 1930s. She travelled to the Soviet Union with her husband, the newly appointed Ambassador, Joseph E. Davies in 1937-38. There they discovered icons, which as Wendy Salmond points out, became the most evocative mementos of their Soviet sojourn. The Soviet experience planted the seed for Posts future Russian art collection, which remained a life-long collecting quest. Dominique de Menil also became fascinated with Russian icons early in her life during a trip to Russia with her father in 1933. However it was not till much later that she began to collect Russian and Byzantine icons. In the 1980s she and her husband bought a superlative and rare collection in London that forms the core of the Menils icon collection today. What was it about the Russian icon that attracted or inspired these collectors? Was it a spiritual or artistic quest that drew them to this subject? Included in my analysis are select

examples to illustrate the types of pieces acquired, which may reveal insights into their owners tastes and predilections. Tatiana Senkevitch (University of Toronto) The Spirit Gives Life: Pavel Florenskys Project of a Living Museum in the Age of (Soviet) Iconoclasm The role of museums as repositories of spiritual and material culture in nation-building is one of the leading themes in art-historical discourses of today. My paper concerns Pavel Florenskys project of creating a living museum in the Trinity-Sergius Monastery, known as the Lavra, the center of Russian Orthodox spirituality, in the wake of the one of the most violent periods of iconoclasms in modern history. Pavel Florensky, along with Pavel Kapterev and Yuri Olsufiev, contributed a number of reports, proposals, accounts, and descriptions of icons to the Commission for the Preservation of Monuments of Art and Antiquities at the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, created in January of 1918. Subjected to repressive, anti-religious measures from the young Soviet government, the commission, led by Florensky, advocated a creation of a singular and visionary religious, historical, and cultural site: a museum allowing for an organic fusion of images, objects, and architectural structures that retained their proper liturgical function, together with certain valuable artistic exampla that would acquire the status of works of art, in Hans Beltings sense. Florenskys idea of transforming the Lavra into a kind of state-protected site for the Penates of Russian spirituality had several aspects. It would secure, at least in some measure, the preservation of the religious mission of the Lavra. More important, it would serve as a cultural foundation for the new secular state with its inchoate notions of historical preservation and national heritage. This was an audacious but theologically grounded, anti-iconoclastic measure. Drawing on the precedents of iconoclasm throughout the history of art, my paper will demonstrate how Florenskys (and his trusted colleagues) program of deposing sacred images under the auspices of secularized museum institutions aimed at preventing a complete annihilation of irreplaceable Christian relics and the destruction of precious icons. In the spirit of St. Pauls dictum that the spirit gives life, Florensky envisioned, through the preservation of the materiality of the icons, the chance for the ensuing resurrection of spiritual value linked to those icons that had been severed from the living body of church by the anti-religious legislature of the new Soviet government. Florenskys reports addressed to the Commission for Preservation from 1918-19 will be read in the context of his contemporaneous theoretical essay, The Church Rite as a Synthesis of Arts and current art theorys interest in the living image (Bredekamp et al.). Maria Taroutina (Yale University) Angels and Demons: Mikhail Vrubels Modernist Rewriting of the Iconic Tradition While examining his 1884 St. Cyril frescos, Mikhail Vrubel lamented in 1901 that this is the kind of work to which I should return.1 Accordingly, in the years leading up to his premature death in 1910, the artist obsessively revisited Biblical subjects again and again, and produced a number of paintings exploring religious themes. My paper argues that rather than a sporadic or chance occurrence, Vrubels engagement with the medieval iconic tradition was a defining feature in his career. In particular, I demonstrate that it became a crucial formal and conceptual catalyst in Vrubels Modernist evolution, which anticipated the twentieth-century

avant-garde interest in Russian icons by nearly thirty years. Resisting the dominant naturalistic style of the Peredvizhniki, Vrubel saw in medieval Russian art an important indigenous forebear of an anti-Realist and proto-abstract painting that seemed to presage his own artistic experimentation. Consequently, he began to sketch medieval mosaics and frescos in Kiev in the early 1880s, imitating their penchant for bright color, flatness, pronounced outlining and spatial ambiguity. In his Seated Demon, he even reproduced the mosaic tesserae in oil paint, creating the flat, all-over effect characteristically associated with Paul Czanne. Vrubels most radical dissolution of form that approaches near abstraction is especially evident in his late religious works, which I contend is not coincidental. Apart from its stylistic influence, the iconic tradition also had a considerable thematic impact on Vrubels art, prompting him to develop an opaque, often disturbing, but unique brand of fin-de-sicle Symbolism. Instead of the socially responsible and easily legible art of the Peredvizhniki that depicted contemporaneous, everyday happenings, Vrubels paintings explored the irrational and uncanny side of human experience, delving into religious mysticism, the occult and the supernatural. I therefore argue that Vrubels pioneering revision2 of the iconic tradition, paved the way both for the formal innovations and the radical transcendentalism of subsequent avant-garde artists such as Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky. 1 Stepan Yaremich, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel, Zhizn i Tvorchestvo (Moscow: Knebel, 1911), p. 55. 2 Nikolai Tarabukin, Vrubel (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1974), p. 135.

Keynote Biographies Wendy R. Salmond is a scholar of Russian and early Soviet art, architecture, and design. She received her BA from the University of Otago, New Zealand, and her MA and PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, and now teaches in the Department of Art at Chapman University, Orange, California. Her research explores the intersection of diverse cultural traditions in Russia and in the formation of national identity. She has written and lectured extensively on the Arts and Crafts movement and Art Nouveau in Russia, and on Russian modernism. Professor Salmond has been a visiting curator at Hillwood Museum and Gardens in Washington DC and a guest curator of exhibitions at Hillwood (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. Her current project is a book tracing transformations in the perception and function of icons in late Imperial and early Soviet Russia, from objects of devotion to works of art. Oleg Tarasov is a scholar of Russian art and cultural history. He gained a BA in History from Moscow State University in 1980, and was awarded a PhD in History from the Institute of Slavic Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1984. Since then, he has continued to work as a senior researcher in the Institute. In 1997, he gained a higher PhD (Doctor of Sciences) in History of Art at Moscow State University. His publications on Russian art and cultural history include the monographs Icon and Devotion: Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia (London, 2002) and Framing Russian Art: From Early Icons to Malevich (London, 2011), and his articles and book chapters include: Russian Icons and the Avant-garde: Tradition and Change in The Art of Holy Russia: Icons from Moscow, 1400 1600 (exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1998), The Russian Icon and Culture of the Modern: The Renaissance of Popular Icon Painting in the Reign of Nicholas II, Experiment, 7 (2001), Florenskij, Malevic e la semiotica dellicona, La Nuova Europa, I (2002) and Die Ikonen von Palech: Kunst und Handwerk in Mythos Palech. Katalog zur Ausstellung in der Kunsthalle Recklinghausen 12.Dezembre 2010 bis 6.Februar 2011 (Bnen, Westfalen, 2010).

Speaker Biographies Sebastian Borkhardt studied History of Art, Slavonic Philology and Religious Studies in Tbingen and Saint Petersburg. After completing his MA in 2011, he started his doctoral research at the University of Tbingen, supported by the Landesgraduiertenfrderung (State Graduate Funding) of Baden-Wrttemberg. Thesis title: Kandinskij und Russland: Zur Bedeutung der russischen Herkunft Vasilij Kandinskijs in der Rezeption und Erforschung seines Werks in Deutschland und Russland (Kandinskii and Russia: On the Role of the Russian Roots of Vasilii Kandinskii in the Reception and Study of His Work in Germany and Russia). Supervisor: Professor Eva Mazur-Keblowski. Co-Supervisor: Professor Ada Raev (University of Bamberg). Jaimee Comstock-Skipp received her MA degree from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art in 2012. She obtained a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, with a major in Near Eastern Studies specializing in Islamic Civilizations. Her interests include Islamic art and architecture, Orientalism, visual culture, and the Arabic, Persian, and Tajiki languages. She has researched Worlds Fairs, ladies fashion turbans in

interwar America, Quranic and Persian manuscripts, and the influence of Persian painting on European artists at the turn of the twentieth century. Her research relates cultural theory to visual culture so as to trace the diffusion of Orientalist tropes across time and place. Preferring to study visual material that exists outside the classification of the fine arts, her work asserts that cultural expression is not limited to solely the classical. Pamela Davidson is Professor of Russian literature at UCL (University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies). After studying Russian, French and Italian at Cambridge, she carried out postgraduate research at Oxford on the reception of Dante in the work of the Russian Symbolist poet and philosopher Viacheslav Ivanov. She lectured at the Universities of Birmingham and Surrey until 1993, when she joined SSEES. Her research interests and publications embrace comparative literature, modernist poetry, the relationship between religion and culture, Russian literary demonism and prophecy. Nina Gourianova is Associate Professor at Northwestern University, USA. She re-examines in her research the wide spectrum of questions concerning the cultural, poetical, social, and political environment as expressed in Russian culture. 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 and mutual influence of aesthetics and politics. Gourianova has authored several books, published in Russia, Europe, and the United States. A well-recognized expert on the Russian avant-garde throughout the world, she served as the primary curatorial consultant to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) on the exhibition of Russian Futurist and Constructivist books in 2002, and has participated in the organization of many exhibitions, including Amazons of the Avant-garde and Kazimir Malevich at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Her most recent book, The Aesthetics of Anarchy, published by California University Press, explores the question of creative freedom. Louise Hardiman is a doctoral research student at the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge, specializing in nineteenth and twentieth century Russian art. Her thesis research, supervised by Dr Rosalind Polly Blakesley, examines cultural exchange between the British and Russian arts and crafts revival movements and her dissertation, provisionally entitled Netta Peacock and British Engagement with the Russian Decorative Arts, 1870-1917, is planned for completion in 2013. Louise obtained her first degree in Jurisprudence (Oxford, 1989) and gained an MA in Russian Studies from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London in 2005. Louise has two articles on topics related to British-Russian cultural exchange forthcoming in 2012. She is also a member of the advisory group of the Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre (CCRAC). Maria Kokkori received her PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2008 where her thesis focused on the examination of paintings by Kazimir Malevich, Ivan Kliun and Liubov Popova c.1905-1925. She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute with a focus on Russian constructivist works by Aleksandr Rodchenko. During 2009-2011 she was a research fellow of the Malevich Society in New York. Her project investigated Kazimir Malevichs teaching activities at the Vitebsk Art School in Belarus between 1919 and 1923. She is the author of various articles on the art and design of Russian avant-garde artists. Since January 2012, she has been a Research Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago. Nicola Kozicharow is a PhD candidate in the History of Art Department at the University of Cambridge. She is supervised by Dr Rosalind P. Blakesley, and her dissertation title is

Dmitrii Stelletskii and Filipp Maliavin in Emigration: Dreaming of Russia and Resisting Change. Her research engages with Russian migr artists in France between the wars, and the post-emigration careers of Stelletskii and Maliavin are her main focus. Her article Racy of the Soil: Filipp Maliavins London Exhibition of 1935 will appear in the forthcoming publication A People Passing Rude: British Responses to Russian Culture. A Collection of Essays, (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012). She received her MPhil in History of Art from Cambridge University (2011), MA in History of Art from University College London (2007), and BA in History of Art and Slavic Studies from Brown University (2006). She is also a member of the Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre (CCRAC) advisory board. Erin McBurney graduated from Yale College and then served as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. She worked at the Russian Research Center (now the Davis Center) at Harvard University and for the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. She is now completing her PhD at Columbia under Richard Wortman in the field of 18th-century Russian history and is a guest teacher in early modern history at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Myroslava Maria Mudrak is Professor of History of Art at The Ohio State University. Her teaching covers the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with special emphasis on avant-garde and abstract art. She has devoted her scholarly interests to the study of art in East Central Europe, Ukraine, and Russia, concentrating on the modernist period of the early twentieth century. Her seminal work, New Generation and Artistic Modernism in Ukraine (1986), was awarded the Kovaliw Prize for Ukrainian Studies. Other publications include essays on Ukrainian Dada and Dissidence, the Ukrainian Studio of Plastic Arts in Prague, Panfuturism, the Semiotics of Suprematism in the Art of the Neue Slowenische Kunst, Slovenia and David Burliuks Futurism. Most recently, she curated and wrote the catalogue for the exhibition, From the Lotus to the Sickle: the Art of Borys Kosarev (New York-Kyiv-Kharkiv, 2011-2012). Natalia Murray was born in St Petersburg where she read Art History at the Academy of Fine Arts before taking the PhD course at the State Hermitage Museum. In 1998 she moved to England; over the past five years she has been lecturing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian art at the Courtauld Institute of Art and at the University of Sussex. Natalias biography of Nikolay Punin, The Unsung Hero of the Russian Avant-Garde. The Life and Times of Nikolay Punin (1888-1953), was published by Brill Academic Publishers in June 2012. At present, Natalia is writing her second PhD thesis, at the Courtauld Institute, on the development of proletarian art in Russia after the 1917 Revolution, and its various forms of expression in the street decorations of Petrograd. Nancy Perloff is curator of modern and contemporary collections at the Getty Research Institute. Her exhibitions include Monuments of the Future: Designs by El Lissitzky and Tango with Cows: Book Art of the Russian Avant-Garde, 19101917. The latter traveled to the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University in fall 2011. Author of Art and the Everyday: Popular Entertainment and the Circle of Erik Satie (1991) and coeditor with Brian M. Reed of Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow (2003), Nancy is currently working on a book publication entitled Books to Look at, Books to Listen to: the Great Russian Avant-Garde Experiment. Scott Ruby is Associate Curator of Russian and Eastern European Art at the Hillwood Estate, Museum and Gardens in Washington, DC. Dr Ruby holds a PhD from the Courtauld

Institute of Art, London. Dr Ruby recently gave a paper at the Louvre Museum in Paris in conjunction with their exhibition, Holy Russia. His paper explored the development of Russian religious imagery in the course of the seventeenth century. He is currently working on a catalogue for an exhibition on Catherine the Great, as well as an exhibition on Konstantin Makovskii, for 2013-14. Tatiana Senkevitch received her PhD in Art History from the University of Michigan in 2005. She specializes in Baroque Art and Architecture, in various forms of the Neo-Baroque, and in twentieth century Russian art and architecture. She has also written on perspectival theory in early twentieth century theory, the Bologna school of painting, commemoration of the Poltava Battle, and allegories of power. She was a recipient of a Getty Research Institute Fellowship. She has taught as a Lecturer at the University of Southern California, Cornell University, and University of Toronto. Currently, she is working on a book which examines the formation of academic theory in relation to public art institutions in France. Maria Taroutina is a PhD candidate in the History of Art Department at Yale University. She is a scholar of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and has focused her research primarily on the architecture, painting and sculpture of Imperial Russia. Her dissertation, entitled From the Tessera to the Square: Russian Modernism and the Neo-Byzantine Revival argues that there was an intimate link between Byzantine Revivalism in Russia and Modernist experimentation in the years 1870-1920. She is a contributing author to Evgeny Steiners Orientalism/Occidentalism: The Languages of Culture vs. the Languages of Description and Cathleen Chaffees Eye on a Century: Modern and Contemporary Art from the Collection of Charles B. Benenson. Maria is currently working on a co-edited volume of essays on the subject of Byzantine Revivalism in European art and architecture in the Modern Age.

Chair Biographies

Rosalind Polly Blakesley is Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Pembroke College. She is a specialist in the Arts and Crafts Movement and in the art of Imperial Russia. Her publications include Russian Art and the West: Russian Art and the West: a Century of Dialogue in Painting, Architecture and the Decorative Arts (co-editor and contributor, 2007); The Arts and Crafts Movement (2006); An Imperial Collection: Women Artists from the State Hermitage Museum (co-editor and contributor, 2003); and Russian Genre Painting in the Nineteenth Century (under her maiden name of Rosalind P. Gray, 2000). She is now working on a new book entitled Painting and Patronage in Imperial Russia: Creating a National School, 1757-1881, for which she received a Leverhulme Research Fellowship from 2009-2010. Claire Knight is completing her PhD at the University of Cambridge on late Stalin era cinema, using popular feature films to analyse the postwar recentralisation of political, ideological, and cultural authority under Stalin. Her work engages with Stalin epics, rural films, Hollywood and Nazi trophy films, and the filmed theatrical productions known as filmy-spektakli. Claire is currently Modern European History Lecturer at Kings College London. Galina Mardilovichis a PhD candidate in History of Art and a Gates Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge. Her dissertation Printmaking in Late Imperial Russia, supervised by Dr Rosalind Polly Blakesley, examined the development of modern Russian

printmaking within the broader context of Russian art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This past year, Galina was the Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she investigated Western influences on the Russian treatment of the printed medium. This autumn, she will begin a collaborative project, The Power of Print: Dutch Propaganda for a New Russia, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Her forthcoming article, Ivan Shishkin as Etcher: Thirty-Two States of Gurzuf will be published by Print Quarterly in 2013. Maria Mileeva has recently completed her PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she currently teaches courses on Russian twentieth century art at both graduate and undergraduate level. Her doctoral thesis examined exhibitions of Western art in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s with a particular focus on the history of the State Museum of New Western Art (GMNZI), Moscow. Previously, she read Art History at Jesus College, Cambridge. Maria has also worked as an Assistant Curator of Cold War Modern: Design 1945-1970, held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London in Autumn 2008. Her research interests include cultural exchange between Russia and the West over the course of the 20th century, with particular focus on the politics of international exhibition design and the construction of art historical narratives as a means of defining national identity and cultural policy. Her latest research project explores the discourse of centre and periphery in Soviet cultural and institutional history by looking at a network of regional art museums in the peripheral outposts of Tbilisi, Yerevan, Baku, Kiev, Kharkov, Saratov and Kazan. She is the administrator of the Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre (CCRAC). John Milner specialises in nineteenth and twentieth century art in Russia and France. He studied at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London University, and took his doctorate there in Russian Constructivism. Currently he tutors MA and PhD students at The Courtauld Institute, while preparing books and exhibitions, most recently El Lissitzky at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. He has also worked on numerous and remarkable model constructions of unrealised Lissitzky projects, in collaboration with architectural model maker Henry Milner. John Milner has been Visiting Professor at The Courtauld Institute of Art since 2007. He leads a Masters course in Contacts and Contexts in Russian Art 1905-1945 and tutors doctoral students in aspects of twentieth century Russian art. Robin Milner-Gulland FBA, FSA is Professor Emeritus and a 50th Anniversary Honorary Fellow of the University of Sussex, where he taught for 40 years in the School of European Studies. He learned Russian in National Service, and subsequently at Oxford and Moscow Universities. He has published on a wide range of topics within Russian and related cultural history (all periods), literature (particularly on Khlebnikov, Kharms and Zabolotsky) and art history; he has also written on English early-medieval art and archaeology, and is a trustee of the Sussex Archaeological Society, for whom he is editing a series of books. Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier teaches history of Russian art at Columbia University, New York. She holds a PhD from Columbia in Russian cultural history. Before taking up art, she worked and wrote on Soviet foreign policy. Her art publications include Russian Realist Art: the State and Society: The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition, biographies of Ilia Repin and Valentin Serov, and an anthology of documents on Russian Realism.

Acknowledgements This conference is jointly organised by Louise Hardiman (University of Cambridge) and Nicola Kozicharow (University of Cambridge) and has been made possible through the generous support of The British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES), the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge, and the George Macaulay Trevelyan Fund, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. The conference organisers would also like to thank Rosalind Polly Blakesley, Robin Milner-Gulland, Cinthia Willaman (conference assistant), Maria Mileeva, Galina Mardilovich, John Milner, Evelyn Heathcoat-Amory, Rachel Parikh, Stan Finney, Franc Davies, Marisa Grove, Neil Mayo, Ken Smith, and the Pembroke College staff for their help and support.

Conference Organisers Details

Louise Hardiman PhD Candidate in History of Art Trinity Hall Cambridge CB2 1TJ lah45@cam.ac.uk

Nicola Kozicharow PhD Candidate in History of Art Pembroke College Cambridge CB2 1RF nlek2@cam.ac.uk

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