Overview

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.

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Maria Taroutina is Associate Professor of Art History at Yale-NUS College in Singapore and specializes in the art of imperial and early Soviet Russia. Her first book, The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival, was awarded the 2019 University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Taroutina has also co-edited three volumes, Byzantium/Modernism: The Byzantine as Method in Modernity (2015), New Narratives of Russian and East European Art: Between Traditions and Revolutions (2020), and Russian Orientalism in a Global Context: Hybridity, Encounter and Representation, 1740-1940 (2023). She is currently working on two new book projects: a monograph on Mikhail Vrubel and a study of Russian imperial visual culture, tentatively titled Exotic Aesthetics: Art, Race, and Representation in Imperial Russia.

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