Modernism and the
Spiritual in Russian Art
New Perspectives
EDITED BY LOUISE HARDIMAN AND NICOLA KOZICHAROW
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2. From Angels to Demons:
Mikhail Vrubel and the Search for a
Modernist Idiom
Maria Taroutina
In his 1911 biography of Mikhail Vrubel (1856–1910), the artist Stepan Iaremich
recounts a telling episode. In the spring of 1901, Iaremich had accompanied Vrubel to
the twelfth-century Church of St Cyril in Kyiv, where the latter had both restored and
recreated a large number of frescoes in 1884. Standing in front of his Lamentation mural
(fig. 2.1), Vrubel commented that “in essence, this is the kind of work to which I should
return”.1 At that point, Vrubel was based in Moscow and had already painted some
of his most celebrated masterpieces: Demon Seated (1890) (fig. 2.7), Portrait of Savva
Mamontov (1897), Pan (1899), Lilacs (1900), and The Swan Princess (1900) (fig. 11.11).
However, Vrubel himself felt that he had produced his best work during his stay in
Kyiv in the 1880s, a period which was largely dominated by his restoration work in
the Church of St Cyril and his sketches for the unrealised murals in the Cathedral of
St Vladimir.2 The art historian Nikolai Punin agreed with the artist’s self-assessment,
praising Vrubel’s Kyivan frescoes as some of his best work, in which he had “touched
upon the known problems of painting” with “such strength of spirit and insight […]
that the few existing pages that narrate Vrubel’s Kyivan period of creativity should
[…] grow into a huge body of literature, exclusively dedicated to [examining] the
meaning and significance of these compositions”.3
1 Mikhail Vrubel, quoted in Stepan Iaremich, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel’; zhizn’ i tvorchestvo
(Moscow: Knebel’, 1911), p. 55. “Вот к чему в сущности я должен бы вернуться.”
2 From 1887 to 1889, Vrubel had produced a large number of sketches for the interior decoration of the
St Vladimir Cathedral in Kyiv. Unfortunately, the jury that oversaw this project rejected almost all of
Vrubel’s designs.
3 Nikolai Punin, ‘K risunkam M. A. Vrubelia’, Apollon, 5 (May 1913), 5–15 (p. 7), http://www.v-ivanov.
it/issledovaniya_i_materialy/apollon. “В этих работах художник коснулся такой силой духа и
прозрения известных проблем живописи, что те немногии страницы которые повествуют
о киевском периоде творчества Врубеля, должны, на наш взгляд, возрасти в громадную
литературу, всецело посвященную смыслу и значению именно этих композиций.”
© 2017 Maria Taroutina, CC BY 4.0
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0115.02
38
Maria Taroutina
Although a few scholarly monographs have discussed this formative stage in
Vrubel’s career, the majority of the literature has focused instead on his ‘mature’
Moscow period, and especially on the large number of drawings, paintings, and
sculptures on the subject of the ‘Demon’, as well as the decorative work and folkloric
paintings that he produced at the artistic colonies of Abramtsevo and Talashkino.4
Still fewer studies have considered how and why Vrubel’s preoccupation with
religious subject matter came to influence his artistic outlook, evolving into an
important sub-theme within his oeuvre and culminating in the intriguing cycle
of biblical and apocryphal paintings made at the end of his life, which typically
have been dismissed as his weakest work and the result of the onset of mental
illness.5 And yet, in their unusual combination of modernist forms with mystical,
transcendental themes, these works ought to be understood as nineteenth-century
precursors to a particular strain of visionary modernism that found its full expression
in the paintings of the subsequent generation of artists such as Pavel Filonov, Vasily
Kandinsky, and Kazimir Malevich, to name but a few. Indeed, not only did Vrubel’s
sustained engagement with the Russo-Byzantine pictorial tradition catalyse the
production of some of his most radical and canonical works, including the Demon
paintings, but it also both anticipated and shaped the twentieth-century avant-garde
interest in icons by nearly thirty years.6
Vrubel was born in Omsk in 1856 into the family of a military lawyer. As a result
of his mixed parentage — his father was of Polish descent, while his mother came
from an old noble Russian family — Vrubel was intimately familiar with both Roman
Catholicism and Russian Orthodoxy.7
4 See: Aline Isdebsky-Pritchard, The Art of Mikhail Vrubel (1856–1910) (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research
Press, 1982); Nina Dmitrieva, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel′ (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR,
1984), pp. 32–56 and 67–90; Mikhail Alpatov, Zhivopisnoe masterstvo Vrubelia (Moscow: Lira, 2000),
pp. 87–112; Viktoria Gusakova, Viktor Vasnetsov i religiozno-natsional′noe napravlenie v russkoi zhivopisi
kontsa XIX–nachala XX veka (St Petersburg: Aurora, 2008), pp. 121–49.
5 For example, see Dmitrieva’s discussion of Vrubel’s late religious works in Mikhail Aleksandrovich
Vrubel’, pp. 82–84.
6 In the first two decades of the twentieth century a large number of Russian artists turned to the iconic
tradition as a source of pictorial and conceptual inspiration. Avant-garde engagement with iconic
representations ranged from a primitivising adaptation of iconic forms to thematic and iconographic
borrowings. For a detailed account of the widespread influence of icons on early twentieth-century
Russian art, see: Andrew Spira, The Avant-Garde Icon: Russian Avant-Garde Art and the Icon Painting
Tradition (Aldershot, Hampshire; Burlington, VT: Lund Humphries, 2008); Alter Icons: The Russian
Icon and Modernity, ed. by Jefferson J. A. Gatrall and Douglas Greenfield (University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010); Jane A. Sharp, Russian Modernism Between East and West:
Natal′ia Goncharova and the Moscow Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006),
pp. 143–95, 221–53; Margaret Betz, ‘The Icon and Russian Modernism’, Artforum 15, 10 (Summer
1977), 38–45; John Bowlt, ‘Neo-Primitivism and Russian Painting’, The Burlington Magazine, 116, 852
(March 1974), 133–40; Robin Milner-Gulland, ‘Icons and the Russian Modern Movement’, in Icons 88,
ed. by Sarah Smyth and Stanford Kingston (Dublin: Veritas Publications, 1988), pp. 85–96.
7 In a letter to his sister Anna, Vrubel mentions attending Catholic mass with his father. Letter from
Mikhail Vrubel to Anna Vrubel, October, 1872. Reprinted in E. P. Gomberg-Verzhbinskaia, Vrubel’:
Perepiska, vospominaniia o khudozhnike (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1976), p. 23.
2.1 Mikhail Vrubel, Angels’ Lamentation, 1884. Church of St Cyril, Kyiv.
Photograph © Ivan Krutoyarov, all rights reserved.
2.2 Mikhail Vrubel, Annunciation, 1884. Watercolour and oil paint, dimensions unknown.
Location unknown. Reproduced in Stepan Iaremich, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel’, zhizn i
tvorchestvo (Moscow: Knebel’, 1911), p. 22. Photograph © General Research Division, New
York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations, all rights reserved.
40
Maria Taroutina
However, he found organised religion to be restrictive and oppressive and in the
late 1880s began to express a profound doubt about the Christian faith. Instead, he
increasingly came to believe that the free pursuit of one’s artistic calling and individual
creativity was the most direct route to spiritual attainment and fulfillment, famously
stating towards the end of his life: “Art — this is our religion.”8 Although Vrubel had
initially pursued the study of law at St Petersburg University, upon graduation he
almost immediately enrolled as a full-time student at the Imperial Academy of Arts,
where he trained for four years under the direction of Professor Pavel Chistiakov
(1832–1919).
In early 1884, while still a student at the Academy, Vrubel was approached by
the distinguished art historian and archaeologist, Adrian Prakhov, who at the time
was looking for a young artist to help him carry out a large-scale restoration plan in
the twelfth-century monastery church of St Cyril. In order to secure the commission,
Vrubel was asked to produce a small work in the Byzantine manner. He painted
an Annunciation scene (fig. 2.2), which unfortunately has not survived, except for a
small black and white photograph that was originally reproduced in Iaremich’s
biography.9 Based on the Byzantine iconographic type of the ‘spinning Virgin’,
Vrubel’s work demonstrates an intimate familiarity with medieval prototypes, such
as the Annunciation mosaics in the eleventh-century St Sophia Church in Kyiv (fig. 2.3)
or the twelfth-century Annunciation icon in the Monastery of St Catherine on Mount
Sinai (fig. 2.4).10
As a student at the Imperial Academy of Arts, Vrubel would have had access to the
Academy’s Museum of Early Russian Art, which housed a vast collection of medieval
Byzantine and Russian icons at the time of the artist’s residency.11 These included
over one hundred and twenty twelfth-, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Byzantine
icons, as well as several mosaic fragments that Petr Sevastianov had brought over
from Mount Athos in 1860.12 In addition, the Academy also possessed a large arsenal of
copies and photographs of eleventh- and twelfth-century Byzantine icons, the mosaics
of St Sophia in Constantinople, and Manuel Panselinos’ thirteenth-century frescoes in
Mount Athos, as well as copies of the icons and frescoes in the twelfth-century Betania
and Gelati Monasteries in Georgia.
8 Anna Vrubel, ‘Reminiscences about the Artist’, in Gomberg-Verzhbinskaia, Vrubel’, p. 154.
“Искусство — вот наша религия.”
9
Iaremich, Vrubel’, p. 22.
10 The well-known Byzantinist, Nikodim Kondakov, published a photographic album in 1881 containing
one hundred images of mosaics and miniatures from illuminated manuscripts in the collections
of the St Catherine Monastery on Mount Sinai. See N. P. Kondakov, Vues et antiquités du Sinai par
M. le professeur Kondakoff et photographe J. Raoult (Odessa: [s.n.], 1881). However, it remains unclear
whether Vrubel would have had access to it. For a more detailed discussion of Kondakov’s career and
publications, see Chapter 8 of this volume.
11 For a history of the Academy’s museum and its collection, see Iu. A. Piatnitskii, ‘Muzei drevnerusskogo
iskusstva Akademii khudozhestv’, in Vizantinovedenie v Ermitazhe, ed. by V. S. Shandrovskaia
(Leningrad: State Hermitage Museum, 1991), pp. 14–19.
12 For a detailed account of Sevastianov’s expeditions to Mount Athos and his collection of Byzantine
art, see Iu. A. Piatnitskii, ‘P. I. Sevastianov i ego sobranie’, in ibid., pp. 19–24.
2.3 The Virgin Mary, 11th century. Mosaic. St Sophia Cathedral, Kyiv.
Photograph © Bridgeman Images, all rights reserved.
2.4 Annunciation, Late 12th century. Tempera and gold on panel, 63.1 x 42.2 x 3.2 cm. The Holy
Monastery of St Catherine, Sinai. Photograph © Bridgeman Images, all rights reserved.
42
Maria Taroutina
Lastly, the Academy owned a Russian translation of Adolphe Didron and Paul
Durand’s famous iconographic manual of Byzantine art, the Manuel d’iconographie
chrétienne grecque et latine; traduit du manuscrit byzantin “Le Guide de la Peinture” (Paris,
1845).13 Purportedly compiled in the eighteenth century by Dionysius of Fourna, a
monk from Mount Athos, the manual explained techniques of Byzantine painting and
described in detail the various iconographies of different religious figures and scenes.14
Although it is now difficult to determine which specific work Vrubel had used as a
model for his Annunciation, it is clear that he must have based it on an actual medieval
prototype. A comparison between the twelfth-century Sinai Annunciation and Vrubel’s
version demonstrates how intuitively the artist had understood the formal and
symbolic language of icons without any official training in icon painting. Rather than
‘inhabiting’ the pictorial space of the image, Vrubel’s figures seem to float against
an infinite, continuous background that signifies a sacred, symbolic, and timeless
realm. Vrubel avoided any directional lighting or shadows in his Annunciation, and his
elongation of the figures, the linear dynamism of their draperies, and the serpentine
twisting of the angel all closely resemble the Byzantine prototype. Instead of altering
the image along naturalistic lines with traditional modelling of the faces and the use of
chiaroscuro, as was practised at the time by Academy-trained artists, Vrubel adhered
much more closely to the formal language of the medieval icon. It is therefore not
surprising that Vrubel’s subsequent first-hand study of monumental medieval art in
Kyiv allowed him to internalise the iconic mode of representation still further, and in
a way that continued to shape his artwork throughout his career.
Many of Kyiv’s medieval churches and monasteries had suffered considerably
over the centuries, falling victim either to the Mongol invasions or to changing artistic
tastes, which had resulted in a widespread whitewashing and overpainting of some of
the earliest frescoes and mosaics. The St Cyril commission was thus part of a broader
restoration project initiated in the 1870s and 1880s to renovate the ancient churches
of Kyiv. As part of this commission, Vrubel was tasked with restoring close to one
hundred and fifty fragmented figures. In a period of just seven months, with the help
of student assistants from the Murashko School, Vrubel repainted large sections of
severely damaged murals such as The Annunciation, The Entry into Jerusalem, and The
Dormition of the Virgin, and created several wholly new compositions in place of the
old ones that had perished. Indeed, the Descent of the Holy Ghost (Pentecost), the Angels’
Lamentation (fig. 2.1), a medallion Head of Christ, Two Angels with Labara (fig. 2.5), and
the figure of Moses all seem to have been entirely Vrubel’s own creations.
13 Adolphe Didron and Paul Durand, Manuel d’iconographie chrétienne grecque et latine; traduit du
manuscrit byzantin “Le Guide de la Peinture” (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1845). See Anna Kornilova,
‘Iz istorii Ikonopisnogo klassa Akademii Khudozhestv’, in Problemy razvitiia zarubezhnogo i russkogo
iskusstva: sbornik nauchnykh trudov, ed. by Vera Razdol’skaia (St Petersburg: Institut Imeni I. E. Repina,
1995), pp. 73–77 (p. 76).
14 Dionisii Furnoagrafiot, Erminiia ili Nastavlenie v zhivopisnom iskusstve, sostavlennoe iermonakhom i
zhivopistsem Dionisiem Furnoagrafiotom, 1701–1733 god (Kyiv: Tip. Kievopecherskoi Lavry, 1868). For a
recent edition in English, see Paul Hetherington, ed., The ‘Painter’s Manual’ of Dionysius of Fourna: An
English Translation [from the Greek] with Commentary of Cod. Gr. 708 in the Saltykov-Shchedrin State Public
Library, Leningrad (London: Sagittarius Press, 1974).
2.5 Mikhail Vrubel, Two Angels with Labara, 1884. Fresco. Church of St Cyril, Kyiv.
Detail. Photograph © Ivan Krutoyarov, all rights reserved.
2.6 Angels. Last Judgment. 12th century. Mosaic. Santa Maria Assunta Cathedral,
Torcello. Detail. Photograph © Bridgeman Images, all rights reserved.
44
Maria Taroutina
Vrubel prepared for the commission by studying both the surviving medieval
murals in St Cyril and the paintings and mosaics at the monastery of St Mikhail and the
Cathedral of St Sophia. He also had access to Prakhov’s large collection of drawings,
sketches, photographs, and chromolithographs of medieval Byzantine and Russian art,
which the historian had acquired during his travels throughout the Russian empire,
Europe, the Middle East, and other formerly Byzantine territories.15 Vrubel would
spend many hours in Prakhov’s house studying these images and making copies from
them, which he would then incorporate into his designs for the restoration work at
St Cyril. For example, Vrubel based his two large frescoes of Two Angels with Labara
(1884) (located on the arch of the baptismal chapel) on the angels in the Last Judgment
mosaic in the Santa Maria Assunta Cathedral in Torcello (fig. 2.6).16
Although Vrubel’s composition is entirely his own original creation, he adopted
many of the formal features of the medieval work, including the agitated fluttering of
the draperies, the linear stylisation of the folds, and the dynamic movements and even
the facial features of the angels. Similarly, both the iconography and the composition for
the Descent of the Holy Ghost mural were inspired by a combination of both original and
photographic sources. Vrubel’s semi-circular arrangement of the disciples, as well as his
stylised streams of divine light emanating from the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, all
recall the Pentecost mosaic in the Cathedral of Monreale in Italy. However, the fluidity,
linearity, and movements of the figures seem more akin to the Pentecost fresco in the
Cathedral of St Sophia in Kyiv. Analogous to his first Annunciation painting, these frescoes
make manifest how closely Vrubel adhered to the medieval prototypes, imitating their
penchant for bright colour, flatness, pronounced outlining, and spatial ambiguity.
Upon completion of the restoration works in St Cyril, Prakhov asked Vrubel to
restore four mosaic archangels in the cupola of the Cathedral of St Sophia. One of the
angels had retained almost all of its original mosaic tesserae and served as a model
for the other three. Vrubel’s task involved the imitation of the mosaic tesserae in oil
paint so that from below the restored angels would be impossible to differentiate from
the original mosaic compositions.17 This experience was undoubtedly a formative one
for the artist, who, upon his return to work in other media, proceeded to adapt this
technique as part of his own signature style. For example, in one of his most significant
works, Demon Seated (fig. 2.7), which the artist began immediately after his sojourn
in Kyiv, the plethora of tiny, block-like, impasto brushstrokes, particularly on the
right-hand side of the painting (fig. 2.8), recall mosaic tesserae, and suggest depth and
volume, while simultaneously emphasizing the flatness of the picture plane.
15 Gusakova, Vasnetsov, p. 123.
16 There is some disagreement over the original source for these angels. Iaremich claims that Vrubel
based the composition on photographs of the Torcello mosaics in Adrian Prakhov’s collection.
However, Nikolai Prakhov recounts that Vrubel produced the design after he had returned from
his to trip to Italy, where he had seen the Torcello mosaics in situ. See Iaremich, Vrubel’, p. 54, and
Nikolai Prakhov, Stranitsy proshlogo: Ocherki-vospominaniia о khudozhnikakh (Kyiv: ObrazotvorchogoMistetsva i Muzichnoi Literatury U.S.S.R., 1958), p. 284.
17 Letter from Mikhail Vrubel to Adrian Prakhov, Summer 1884. Reprinted in Gomberg-Verzhbinskaia,
Vrubel’, p. 71.
2.7 Mikhail Vrubel, Demon Seated, 1890. Oil on canvas, 116 x 213.8 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photograph in the public domain. Wikimedia,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mikhail_Vrubel_-_Демон_(сидящий)_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg
46
Maria Taroutina
2.8 Mikhail Vrubel, Demon Seated, 1890. Detail. Oil on canvas, 116 x 213.8 cm.
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photograph by Maria Taroutina (2017), public domain.
The monumental figure of Satan is depicted in the immediate foreground of the
painting, occupying a compressed, almost claustrophobically shallow space with
very little by way of perspectival recession. Although Vrubel included a diminutive
mountain and sunset in the distant background, the large geometricised flowers on
the right-hand side of the painting emphasise the flatness of the canvas, breaking
down the impression of three-dimensional space. The disintegration of their legible
forms approaches abstraction so closely that at first glance it is difficult to identify the
indistinct angular shapes as flowers. By contrast, Vrubel’s treatment of the Demon’s
torso and tensely clasped hands accentuates the heavy solidity of the figure. The
Demon’s body registers as a bulky, imposing form, reminiscent of Michelangelo’s
nude figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
In its masterly combination of pictorial flatness with depth and volumetric solidity,
Vrubel’s Demon Seated recalls the paintings of Paul Cézanne, and especially the latter’s
Mont Sainte Victoire series (1900–04). Much like Cézanne, Vrubel used flat, overlapping
planes to create volume and space out of colouristic contrasts. His crystalline, textured
brushstrokes in many ways resemble the colour patches and tectonic facture that
2. Mikhail Vrubel and the Search for a Modernist Idiom
47
Cézanne had developed in his late works. In fact, in his book Of Diverse Arts (1962) the
Constructivist artist Naum Gabo went so far as to assert that not only were Vrubel’s
radical formal innovations in Demon Seated akin to those of Cézanne, but that the
former had, in fact, anticipated the latter by almost fifteen years in his formulation of a
vanguard visual syntax.18 In the illustration section of Of Diverse Arts, Gabo strategically
juxtaposed one of Cézanne’s Mont Sainte Victoire paintings from 1905 with a study that
Vrubel had executed for Demon Seated in 1890–91 in order to demonstrate that the
brushwork of the two artists was nearly identical, concluding that:
Vrubel freed the arts of painting and sculpture from the academic and realist schemata.
His genius is responsible for moulding the visual consciousness of our generation,
which came after him […]. His influence on our visual consciousness was as decisive as
Cézanne’s. Even Cubism was not entirely a surprise to us.19
By contrast, the critic Pavel Muratov felt that Vrubel and Cézanne were two
very different kinds of artists, both conceptually and stylistically.20 According to
Muratov, Cézanne was primarily interested in transcribing the ‘mundane’ realities of
everyday provincial life and emphasizing their materiality and solidity. He “painted
uncomplicated portraits, landscapes of his homeland and elementary, simple stilllifes”.21 Vrubel, on the other hand, had aspired towards capturing the immaterial,
the supernatural, and the divine in pictorial form. His works were meant to be
monumental and larger than life, at once reflecting novel ideological concepts and
timeless, universal themes.22 According to Muratov, these antithetical artistic goals
also expressed themselves on the level of form. Indeed, a closer analysis of Cézanne’s
and Vrubel’s brushwork reveals that despite superficial similarities — like the ones
outlined by Gabo — there were nonetheless significant structural differences in their
respective styles. Unlike Cézanne’s reliance on a systematised grid and passage, which
involved the seamless blending of intersecting and perpendicular planes into one
another, Vrubel’s brushstrokes tended to vary in size and direction, depending on their
structural role in the image (fig. 2.8). As such, they depart from Cézanne’s regularised
and geometricised blocks of colour to function more like the individual tesserae in a
mosaic composition. A few years after he had completed the St Cyril project, Vrubel
explained to Iaremich that his fascination with pictorial flatness and the materiality of
the painted surface had evolved out of his encounter with medieval Russo-Byzantine
art, which had taught him to achieve “an ornamental distribution of forms in order
to strengthen the flatness of the wall”.23 Moreover, as Aline Isdebsky-Pritchard has
18 Naum Gabo, Of Diverse Arts (New York: Pantheon Books, 1962), pp. 168–69.
19
Ibid., pp. 155–56.
20 Pavel Muratov, ‘Vrubel′’, Moskovskii ezhenedel′nik, 15 (10 April 1910), 45–50.
21
Ibid., p. 48.
22
Ibid.
23 Iaremich, Vrubel’, p. 52. “[…] при помощи орнаментального раположения форм усилить
плоскость стены.”
48
Maria Taroutina
argued, “the near-impossibility of Vrubel having seen Cézanne’s work […] when this
manner became fully developed […] precludes his dependence on the French artist’s
work”.24 On his trips to Europe, Vrubel appears to have missed both the first and
third Impressionist exhibitions (1874 and 1877) in which Cézanne had participated,
and Cézanne’s works did not enter Russian collections until 1904.25 Accordingly,
Vrubel seemed to have developed his peculiar modernist syntax simultaneously, but
independently, of the French modernist master by incorporating the lessons he had
learned from medieval representation into his own work.
Vrubel’s modification of his own painterly style in response to his encounters
with medieval art radically departed from the practice of many of his contemporaries
and fellow Academicians, such as Viktor Vasnetsov and Mikhail Nesterov, who also
worked on church commissions and restoration projects, but who tended to transform
the iconic idiom into an academic style, rather than the other way around. Although
Vasnetsov and Nesterov adopted the iconography of medieval frescoes and icons,
their style principally remained that of naturalistic illusionism. Shedding what they
considered to be the ‘primitive’ stylisations of medieval icons and frescoes, these artists
saw themselves as modernising and improving the religious simplicity and naiveté of
Orthodox imagery. Thus, for example, in Vasnetsov’s painting of the Holy Trinity (1907)
for the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Warsaw (fig. 2.9), God and Christ are depicted
within a three-dimensional space, as evidenced by the naturalistic modelling of the
faces, the foreshortening of the figures’ bodies, and the play of light and shadows.
2.9 Viktor Vasnetsov, Holy Trinity, 1907. Preparatory sketch for the Alexander Nevsky
Cathedral in Warsaw. Oil on canvas, 268 x 400 cm. State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.
Photograph © Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Scala, all rights reserved.
24 Isdebsky-Pritchard, Art of Mikhail Vrubel, p. 86.
25
Ibid., p. 257 (note 51). For Russian collections of Modern French art, see: Beverly Whitney Kean, French
Painters, Russian Collectors: The Merchant Patrons of Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Russia (London:
Hodder & Stoughton, 1996); Albert Kostenevich, Impressionist Masterpieces and Other Important French
Paintings Preserved by the State Hermitage Museum (St Petersburg: Harry N. Abrams, 1995); Morozov,
Shchukin: the Collectors: Monet to Picasso: 120 Masterpieces from the Hermitage, St Petersburg, and the
Pushkin Museum, Moscow (exh. cat., Bonn: Bild-Kunst, 1993).
2. Mikhail Vrubel and the Search for a Modernist Idiom
49
They are, as it were, emerging out of the heavenly realm into the human world
through a ring of intertwined seraphim. Similarly, in his 1892 fresco of the Virgin
Mary with Christ Child in the Cathedral of St Vladimir, Nesterov depicted the figures
within an illusionistically rendered niche, complete with atmospheric background
and perspectival recession. Instead of being depicted frontally, both the Virgin and
Christ Child are rotated in space and do not return the viewer’s gaze. Typical of
narrative easel painting, their actions are circumscribed within the frame of the
painting and do not engage the outside world as in the case of icons.26 Vrubel, on the
other hand, understood that iconic visuality was part of a single, holistic aesthetic
and ideological system, which could not be altered without violating the very
essence of the iconic image.
In the late 1880s and early 1890s the continuing prominence of the Academy,
coupled with the new-found popularity of the Association of Travelling Art Exhibitions
(Peredvizhniki), ensured that the general public, the Holy Synod, and the official artistic
establishment all favoured a more naturalistic representational mode when it came to
contemporary church art.27 It is important to emphasise, however, that the Orthodox
Church did not indiscriminately accept all realist representations of biblical subjects.
For example, Ivan Kramskoi’s Christ in the Wilderness (1872), Polenov’s Christ and the
Adulteress (1886), and Nikolai Ge’s What is Truth? (1890) were all viewed as deeply
problematic — if not outright blasphemous — from an ecclesiastical standpoint, because
they reinterpreted the Christian narrative from historical, archaeological, secular, and
subjective perspectives that were often at odds with established theological doctrine.28
By contrast, although Vasnetsov replaced the hieratic qualities of Russo-Byzantine art
with mimetic pictorial effects, he nonetheless closely adhered to officially approved
Orthodox iconographies and compositions. Moreover, he repeatedly claimed that he
was a “sincere Orthodox believer”, who was genuinely committed to ensuring that
his religious paintings “did not in any way contradict either the High Christian or the
[Orthodox] Church ideal”.29 In other words, his works were ‘new’ and ‘up-to-date’ in
form, but ‘traditional’ and ‘timeless’ in content, and could therefore be sacralised as
modern iterations in the icon’s long evolution from the Middle Ages to the present
moment. One commentator of the period even went so far as to praise Vasnetsov’s
ability to “free” medieval iconic representations “from anatomical deformities, which
gave the figures their hideous aspect”.30 He continued:
26 For a detailed discussion of the cultural and conceptual role of the picture frame and its ever-changing
functions in Russian art see Oleg Tarasov, Framing Russian Art: From Early Icons to Malevich, trans. by
Robin Milner-Gulland and Antony Wood (London: Reaktion Books, 2011); for more on the frame in
relation to the icon see Tarasov’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 5, especially p. 116).
27 For a detailed discussion of this subject, see Sharp, Russian Modernism, pp. 238–53.
28 For a good overview of this topic, see Jefferson J. A. Gatrall, The Real and the Sacred: Picturing Jesus in
Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014), pp. 62–89.
29 Letter from Viktor Vasnetsov to Adrian Prakhov, Spring 1885. Reprinted in Viktor Vasnetsov: pis′ma,
novye materialy, ed. by Liudmila Korotkina (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo ‘ARS’, 2004), p. 58.
30 V. Svechnikov, ‘Tvorchestvo V. M. Vasnetsova i ego znachenie dlia russkoi religioznoi zhivopisi’,
Svetil′nik: religioznoe iskusstvo v proshlom i nastoiashchem, 67 (Moscow, 1913), 3–19 (p. 5).
2. Mikhail Vrubel and the Search for a Modernist Idiom
51
However, in the 1880s this was not yet the case. Accordingly, when Prakhov invited
Vrubel to submit designs for the interior decoration of the newly built St Vladimir
Cathedral, they were promptly rejected by the jury, who deemed them to be too
stylistically and iconographically unconventional to be included in the project. Instead,
the commission was given to Vasnetsov, Nesterov, the brothers Pavel and Alexander
Svedomsky, and the now largely forgotten Polish artist, Wilhelm Kotarbinsky, while
Vrubel was invited to execute only a few small decorative ornaments on the interior
columns of the cathedral. Retrospectively, it is not hard to see why the conservative
jury found Vrubel’s studies to be so problematic. In their compositional simplicity
and modernist succinctness, Vrubel’s unprecedented designs stood apart from the
mainstream of Russian nineteenth-century church decoration. Unlike the St Cyril
frescoes, where Vrubel adhered much more scrupulously to the medieval originals,
the St Vladimir sketches betray a focused search for a stylistic and conceptual
breakthrough. As in Demon Seated, in these works Vrubel employed medieval means
to modernist ends.
Prakhov himself recognised the originality of Vrubel’s proposed fresco cycle,
observing that his “superb sketches” required a cathedral in an entirely different and
“exceptional style”.34 For instance, in one version of the Lamentation (fig. 2.10), Vrubel
depicted the seated Virgin against a low horizon, towering above the flat, horizontal
body of Christ, which is virtually reduced to a single white line.
2.10 Mikhail Vrubel, Lamentation I, 1887. Sketch
for a mural in the St Vladimir Cathedral, Kyiv.
Pencil, watercolour, and whitewash on paper,
43.4 x 59.2 cm. State Museum of Russian Art,
Kyiv. Photograph © Fine Art Images/Heritage
Images/Scala, all rights reserved.
2.11 Mikhail Vrubel, Lamentation II, 1887. Detail.
Sketch for a mural in the St Vladimir Cathedral,
Kyiv. Pencil, watercolour, and whitewash on
paper, 43.4 x 59.2 cm. State Museum of Russian
Art, Kyiv. Photograph © Fine Art Images/
Heritage Images/Scala, all rights reserved.
34 N. A. Prakhov, ‘Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel′’, reprinted in Gomberg-Verzhbinskaia, Vrubel’,
p. 187. “Превосходные эскизы показал мне сегодня в соборе Михаил Александрович, но для
них надо построить собор совершенно в особенном стиле.”
52
Maria Taroutina
A diminutive cross is visible against the setting sun in the distant background,
referencing the Crucifixion. Two cypress trees on the right-hand side of the image
rhythmically repeat the vertical silhouette of the Virgin’s body. The resolutely
perpendicular placement of the Virgin in relation to the horizontal Christ echoes
the configuration of the cross, signalling the underlying spiritual geometry of the
composition. Although Vrubel did not portray Christ and the Virgin with traditional
haloes, the setting sun on the horizon, strategically rendered just above Christ’s head,
metaphorically doubles as a luminous nimbus. Thus, instead of employing standard
Orthodox iconography, Vrubel relied on purely compositional devices to signal the
sacred nature of the depicted scene. Similarly, rather than emphatic gesturing and
outward signs of emotion, typical of lamentation scenes, Vrubel depicted the Virgin
with a stoic facial expression in a moment of quiet meditation, exemplifying a
particularly ‘modern’ sensibility of interiority and controlled grief. The solid, vertical,
upward thrust of the Virgin’s body is striking in its reticent minimalism, while the
entire scene is rendered with just a few, unmodulated strokes of colour within a
flattened, shallow space.
In another variant of the Lamentation (fig. 2.11), Christ and the Virgin are situated
indoors with two windows just above the Virgin’s head dominating the entire design.
Rather than occupying the centre of the image, Christ and the Virgin are again relegated
to the bottom edge of the composition. In his treatment of the Virgin’s garments and
face, Vrubel began to explore the mosaic-like fragmentation of form into distinct
colour patches, which he would develop more fully in his subsequent paintings Demon
Seated and the Portrait of Savva Mamontov. The two windows, rendered as flat, white
geometric planes against a monochromatic, dark background, have an almost protoSuprematist quality. Composed of passages of negative space — brilliant white blank
paper — they become the visual focal point of the composition. Their role as ‘windows’
suggests an opening into another spatial register, inviting the viewer to look through
them, but simultaneously frustrating this desire with their flat opacity. Since Vrubel did
not submit this particular work to the jury for the St Vladimir commission, these blank
windows cannot simply be understood as architectural features in the cathedral, around
which Vrubel structured his design. Instead, they seem to serve a purely pictorial and
metaphorical function in the image. In their striking, white luminosity, they were
perhaps intended to function symbolically as gateways into the holy realm, to which
human beings do not have direct access except through the mediation of Christ and the
Virgin, who are accordingly depicted in the immediate foreground of the image and
closest to the viewer. Akin to the gold background of icons, these windows serve as a
material reminder of the separation between this world and the one that lies beyond.
In his choice of stark, rectangular forms, Vrubel may have even been drawing on the
holy geometries of Orthodox iconography, where Christ was often depicted enthroned
against a background of three large geometrical shapes: a red diamond, a blue-black
2. Mikhail Vrubel and the Search for a Modernist Idiom
53
oval, and a red rectangle. The same visual effect was repeated by Vrubel in his design
for the Resurrection (fig. 2.12), in which Christ is shown emerging out of a grave, framed
by a stylised mandorla of simplified geometric shapes.
2.12 Mikhail Vrubel, Resurrection, 1887. Central panel of a triptych; side panels depict
figures of angels. Sketch for a mural in the St Vladimir Cathedral, Kyiv.
Photograph © Bridgeman Images, all rights reserved.
Lastly, the visual impenetrability of the windows in the Lamentation scene may also
suggest the essential unknowability of the realm beyond, signalling Vrubel’s own
existential doubts and long-term interest in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche.35
Unlike Vasnetsov’s fanciful starry night sky in the Holy Trinity, Vrubel’s designs gesture
towards a Nietzschean — and by extension, a quintessentially modern — attitude
towards faith and religion, marked by doubt, ambiguity, self-questioning, and
introspection. Needless to say, this stance was antithetical to official Church doctrine,
which demanded that iconic representations affirm rather than question the
35 For an in-depth study of Vrubel’s sustained interest in Nietzsche, see Aline Isdebsky-Pritchard, ‘Art
for Philosophy’s Sake: Vrubel Against “the Herd”’, in Nietzsche in Russia, ed. by Bernice Glatzer
Rosenthal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 219–48.
54
Maria Taroutina
metaphysical realities they depict. However, by the opening decade of the twentieth
century, a new generation of artists and Symbolist poets and writers began publicly
to endorse the extraordinary originality and compositional inventiveness of Vrubel’s
St Vladimir sketches, signalling a change of direction in Russian aesthetic tastes and
spiritual sensibilities. To these younger viewers, Vrubel’s searching, dialectical, ‘free’
approach to religious representation appeared to be more sincere, substantive, and
resonant with modern reality. In addition, it struck them as being paradoxically closer
to the spiritual ethos of the medieval prototypes, in contrast to what was perceived as
Vasnetsov’s and Nesterov’s passive, mechanical imitation of ossified Orthodox dogma.
Thus, writing in 1900, Alexandre Benois expressed his profound disappointment with
the works of Vasnetsov and Nesterov in the St Vladimir Cathedral:
[At the time of their creation] the St Vladimir frescoes aroused considerable pride among
the Russian public as only the contemporaries of Raphael and Michelangelo might have
been proud of these masters’ creations in the Vatican […]. However, once I encountered
the St Vladimir murals in situ, I abandoned all of my previous illusions. I was deeply
saddened […] the problem was that [Vasnetsov] took more upon himself than he could
manage! […] The falsehood inherent in the St Vladimir murals signified not the personal
deception on the part of the artist, but rather the deception, deadly and terrible, of our
entire spiritual culture.
I was even more disappointed with the frescoes of my ‘friend’ Nesterov. His altarpiece
of the Nativity betrayed both flagrantly bad taste and a sweet-and-flabby sensibility,
which the artist tried to masquerade as something delicate and fragrant […]. However,
after having seen this Nativity, I fully understood that Nesterov was irretrievably lost to
genuine art.36
Only Vrubel received unconditional praise from Benois:
I went […] to the St Cyril Church, specifically for the purpose of acquainting myself
with Vrubel’s works. I dedicated almost three hours to the close scrutiny of his frescoes
and even if I did not leave the church with some kind of sense of indefinable joy, I was
nonetheless amazed by the sheer technical mastery with which the very unusual ‘local
images’ of the iconostasis were painted […] and by what I would call the ‘inspired
36 Alexandre Benois, Moi vospominaniia, Vols. IV, V (Moscow: Nauka, 1980), p. 275. “Владимирским
собором русские люди той эпохи гордились так, как разве только современники Рафаэля и
Микеланджело могли гордиться фресками обоих мастеров в Ватикане […]. Однако, увидав
роспись Владимирского собора на месте, я простился с какими-либо иллюзиями. Я был
глубоко огорчен […] беда была в том, что [Васнецов] взялся за задачу, которая была ему
не по плечу! […] Фальшь, присущая ‘стенописи’ Владимирского собора, не личная ложь
художника, а ложь, убийственная и кошмарная, всей нашей духовной культуры. Еще более я
был огорчен во Владимирском соборе своим ‘другом’ Нестеровым. Его запрестольная картина,
изображающая ‘Рождество Христово’, выдает и ужасающий дурной вкус и нечто сладковатодряблое, что художник пытается выдать за нежно-благоухающее […]. Однако, пoсле того,
что я увидал это ‘Рождество’, я понял, что Нестеров безвозвратно потерян для подлинного
искусства.”
2. Mikhail Vrubel and the Search for a Modernist Idiom
55
intelligence’ with which [Vrubel] restored the Old Byzantine frescoes […] and created the
entirely new ones […]. Everywhere a deep reverence towards antiquity is harmoniously
combined with the creative outbursts of a free imagination.37
If Vrubel, instead of Vasnetsov, would have been able to execute on a monumental scale
his ideas [for the Cathedral of St Vladimir] […] then probably […] we would have been
the only place in the world in contemporary times, where on the walls of God’s cathedral
there would have appeared a truly living and truly inspired logos.38
Writing over two decades after Benois, the leftist art critic Nikolai Tarabukin went
further, claiming that Vrubel was single-handedly responsible for bringing about an
aesthetic re-evaluation of the iconic representational idiom in the twentieth century:
At the time that Vrubel began his works [in Kyiv], there were no archaeological
discoveries of […] and scholarship on ancient [Russo-Byzantine] mural painting, which
are accessible to us today. The turning point in attitudes towards the ancient past of
Russian art occurred after Vrubel. In his oeuvre, Vrubel himself turned out to be a
pioneer of Russo-Byzantine art, as a result of which the art of the past appeared to the
gaze of the contemporary world in a totally different light.39
Tarabukin’s assertion was, of course, inaccurate, given that scholars such as Nikodim
Kondakov and Prakhov had already begun to publish their research on medieval
Byzantine and Russian art and architecture as early as the 1870s and 1880s. However,
as already mentioned, at that moment public taste was still largely rooted in a
naturalistic tradition of painting, and it was not until the twentieth century that icons
began to enjoy a much broader aesthetic appreciation. Consequently, just as Dmitriev
had suggested a decade earlier, Tarabukin had not been entirely wrong in claiming
that Vrubel’s artistic consciousness and worldview already belonged to the twentieth
rather than the nineteenth century.
37
Ibid., pp. 276–77. “Я побывал в […] Кирилловском монастыре, специально для того, чтоб
ознакомиться в нем с работами Врубеля. Посвятил я этому обозрению часа три и если
и не покинул собор в состоянии какого-то восторга, то все же я был поражен тем, с каким
мастерством написаны очень своеобразные ‘местные образа’ в иконостасе […] и с каким, я бы
сказал, ‘вдохновенным остроумием’ [Врубель] реставрировал древние фрески […] а местами
заново сделал к ним добавления […]. Всюду пиетет к старине гармонично сочетается с
порывами творчества свободной фантазии.”
38 Alexandre Benois, ‘Vrubel′’, Mir Iskusstva, 10–11 (1903), 175–82 (p. 179). “Но, если-бы Врубелю,
вместо Васнецова, досталось воплотить в грандиозных размерах свои замыслы […] то,
наверное… единственно у нас, в настоящее время и в целом мире, появились-бы на стенах
Божьего храма истинно-живые, истинно-вдохновенные слова.”
39 See Nikolai Tarabukin, Vrubel′ (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1974), p. 135. “В то время, когда Врубель
приступал к своим работам [в Kиеве], не было тех реставрационных открытий […], ни тех
исследований о древней стенописи, которые доступны ныне нам. Перелом во взглядах на
прошлое русского жусства произошел после Врубеля. В своем творчестве Врубель сам оказался
пионером наследия русско-византийского искусства, в результате чего былое предстало взору
современности совершенно в ином виде.”
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Maria Taroutina
Vrubel’s exposure to medieval mosaics and frescoes in Kyiv not only influenced
his oeuvre stylistically, but also made a lasting thematic impact on his art,
prompting the artist to turn to uncanny subject matter and to explorations of the
darker aspects of human psychology. In fact, in the course of the restoration works,
Vrubel spent much of his time studying and sketching the mentally ill patients of
a small psychiatric clinic that had been set up in some of the disused buildings of
the former monastery, not far from the church. He found that the patients’ physical
expression of inner turmoil formed a useful parallel to the scenes of religious ecstasy
that he was depicting in the St Cyril frescoes.40 By contrast, during his student years
at the Academy Vrubel had predominantly depicted literary, historical, and classical
subject matter. It was only after his time in Kyiv that the artist devoted himself
almost exclusively to supernatural themes. Even long after the completion of the St
Cyril project, Vrubel continued to depict biblical and religious subjects, developing
his own particular brand of Symbolism filled with supernatural and mythological
beings, fairies, woodland creatures, angels, and demons. In this way, his encounter
with the medieval Russo-Byzantine artistic tradition not only contributed to the
evolution of his painterly style, but also to his conceptual and theoretical approach
to art. In fact, after the rejection of his sketches from the St Vladimir project, Vrubel
seemed to transfer his frustrated aspirations for monumental religious painting into
his Demon series. In a telling letter to Vrubel’s sister, the artist’s father explained
that Vrubel conceptualised the Demon not so much as an “evil spirit”, but one
“that is suffering and insulted, but nevertheless a spirit that is powerful […] [and]
noble” — a characterisation of the Demon that Vrubel’s subsequent biographers and
critics would come to read as an avatar for the artist himself.41
Vrubel produced his first Demon sketches in 1885 while he was still in the process
of restoring the Church of St Cyril. In his monograph on Vrubel, Tarabukin argued
that there was a direct correlation between the Demon series and the St Cyril frescoes,
even on the level of iconography. According to Tarabukin, the physiognomy of the
St Cyril Virgin gradually evolved into that of the Demon, and he claimed that the
latter became the antithesis of the former.42 Indeed, a comparison between Vrubel’s
sketches of the Virgin’s head and that of the Demon (figs. 2.13 and 2.14) reveals shared
facial features such as the downward slant of the round, large, expressive eyes, the
long, uneven ridge of the nose, the full plump lips, and even the tilt of the head.
40 Dora Kogan, M. A. Vrubel′ (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1980), p. 72.
41 Letter from Aleksandr Vrubel to Anna Vrubel, 11 September 1886. Reprinted in GombergVerzhbinskaia, Vrubel’, p. 118.
42 Tarabukin, Vrubel’, p. 21.
2.13 Mikhail Vrubel, Study for the Virgin, 1884. Pencil and gouache on paper, 43 x 32.3 cm.
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photograph © Bridgeman Images, all rights reserved.
2.14 Mikhail Vrubel, Head of Demon, 1890. Watercolour on cardboard, 23 x 36 cm. State
Museum of Russian Art, Kyiv. Photograph © Bridgeman Images, all rights reserved.
58
Maria Taroutina
The Virgin’s face was thus transformed into a slightly hardened and more virile
visage of the Demon. By contrast, Iaremich thought that the facial features of Vrubel’s
Moses, rather than the Virgin, were directly translated into the early Demon works.43
In either case, there seemed to be an explicit link between the iconographic types
that Vrubel had developed for the St Cyril commission and that of the Demon. In
the years 1887 to 1900 a distinct stylistic and thematic evolution occurred in Vrubel’s
work, wherein the figure of the Demon became an amalgamation of all of the artist’s
previous experiences with religious art and public monumental painting. The lines
of demarcation between the angelic, the demonic, and the Christological thus became
increasingly blurred in these years to the point of being wholly interchangeable.
For example, the iconographic and physiognomic type of the Angel (fig. 2.15),
which Vrubel had initially developed for the St Vladimir project in 1887, was
gradually transformed by the artist into the prototype for the Demon. In fact,
subsequent scholars have variously labelled Vrubel’s Study of a Head (fig. 2.16) as
either the Head of an Angel, dated 1887, or alternatively the Head of the Demon, dated
1890.44 Similarly, the same pencil drawing from 1904 has also been variously titled
The Demon or The Seraph in different publications, indicating the slippage in fixed
iconographic meaning.45 Of course, given the fact that the Demon was himself an
angel at one point, this iconographic continuity was certainly appropriate to the
subject matter and the duality that was already implicit in the nature of the ‘fallen’
angel. It is therefore not surprising that the subjects overlap in Vrubel’s oeuvre
from the start of his artistic career until the end, becoming more prominent in his
late paintings. For example, the largest of Vrubel’s late paintings, The Six-Winged
Seraphim of 1904, is closely related to his 1902 magnum opus, Demon Cast Down (fig.
2.17) both in facial type and the emphasis on the beautiful, coloured wings which
envelop both figures.
43 Iaremich, Vrubel’, p. 54.
44 Nina Dmitrieva dates the work to 1887 and calls it the Head of an Angel (see Dmitrieva, Vrubel’, p. 52).
Petr Suzdalev also identifies this work as the Head of an Angel, but dates it to 1889 (see Petr Suzdalev,
Vrubel′ (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1991), p. 158). Meanwhile Irina Shumanova and Evgeniia
Iliukhina identify the same drawing as the Head of the Demon and date it to 1890 in Irina Shumanova
and Evgeniia Iliukhina, ‘Prorok i mechtatel″: M. A. Vrubel′ i V. E. Borisov-Musatov’, Nashe Nasledie,
77 (2006), 140–57.
45 The drawing was titled The Demon in the journal Apollon, 5 (May 1913), pages not numbered, and The
Seraph in the 1957 State Tretyakov Gallery Vrubel exhibition catalogue (Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel’:
Vystavka Proizvedennii, ed. by O. A. Zhivova (exh. cat., Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1957), p. 160) and the 1976
catalogue of the exhibition ‘Le Symbolisme en Europe’ (Le Symbolisme en Europe: Exposition Rotterdam,
Museum Boymans-van Beuningen (exh. cat., Paris: Editions des Musées Nationaux), p. 240.)
2.15 Mikhail Vrubel, Angel with a Candle, 1887. Watercolour, pencil, and varnish on
paper, 69 x 26 cm. State Museum of Russian Art, Kyiv. Photograph © Bridgeman
Images, all rights reserved.
2.16 Mikhail Vrubel, Head of an Angel, 1887 or Head of the Demon, 1890. Charcoal and
red crayon on paper, 41 x 68 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photograph © Bridgeman
Images, all rights reserved.
60
Maria Taroutina
However, Demon Cast Down also alludes to Christ’s suffering and sacrifice by showing
the demon wearing what looks like a crown of thorns on his head, a traditional
symbol of Christ’s Passion. Moreover, according to the reports of his friends, Vrubel
was planning to exhibit his Demon Cast Down in Paris under the title Icône, clearly
aligning this work with the spiritual and aesthetic realm of religious art.46 Even on
the level of form, Vrubel wanted Demon Cast Down to resemble an icon, and he had
meticulously applied a metallic bronze powder to the demon’s wings, which would
catch the light, producing a glowing, reflective effect typical of an icon. The painter
Konstantin Bogaevsky recalled that when he saw the painting on the first day of its
display at the World of Art exhibition in 1902:
It produced a strong impression on me, which I can compare to no other. It glowed
as if it were made of precious gems, so that everything around it seemed grey and
unsubstantial […]. Vrubel’s ‘Demon’ has darkened severely, the colours which once
shone on the canvas have paled; the bronze powder which was used for the peacock
feathers has become green […].47
References to Christ have also been read into Vrubel’s Demon Seated, whose intense
self-reflection, clasped hands, and poignant isolation in an empty landscape have
often been compared to Ivan Kramskoi’s painting Christ in the Wilderness (1872), which
shows an emaciated and haggard-looking Christ, deep in thought and contemplating
His onerous fate in a rocky, desert setting.48 In his later years, Vrubel claimed to
greatly admire this work, as well as Nikolai Ge’s Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane
(1888) because of the latter’s ‘demonic’ qualities.49 Vrubel’s unconventional merging
of the conceptual and formal boundaries between Christ and Satan, the angelic and
the demonic, the profane and the iconic, and damnation and redemption reflects a
particularly modern, fin-de-siècle mentality, characterised by a feeling of alienation
from the Christian experience and a sense of the disintegration of previously fixed
and stable identities and institutions, including those of conventional morality and the
religious establishment.
46
Janet Kennedy, ‘Lermontov’s Legacy: Mikhail Vrubel’s Seated Demon and Demon Downcast’,
Transactions of the Association of Russian-American Scholars in the US, Vol. 15: On Russian Art (New
York: Association of Russian-American Scholars in the USA, 1982), 163–84 (p. 176).
47 Letter from Konstantin Bogaevskii to Sergei Durylin, 12 January 1941. Quoted in Sergei Durylin,
‘Vrubel′ i Lermontov’, Literaturnoe Nasledstvo, 45–46 (Moscow-Leningrad, 1948), 541–622 (p. 594).
“Впечатление она произвела на меня большое, ни с чем несравнимое. Она сияла точно
драгоценными каменьями, и все остальное на выставке рядом с нею казалось таким серым и
незначительным […]. ‘Демон’ Врубеля сильно почернел, сияющие когда-то краски на холсте
потухли; бронзовый порошок, который был вкраплен в павлиньи перья позеленел […].”
48 Isdebsky-Pritchard, The Art of Mikhail Vrubel, p. 100; Mikhail Allenov, Mikhail Vrubel′ (Moscow: Slovo,
1996), p. 87.
49 Isdebsky-Pritchard, The Art of Mikhail Vrubel, p. 97.
2.17 Mikhail Vrubel, Demon Cast Down, 1902. Oil on canvas, 139 x 387 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photograph in the public domain.
Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vrubel_Fallen_Demon.jpg
62
Maria Taroutina
In addition, it was precisely in the years that Vrubel first began to work on his Demon
in the mid-1880s that he also produced a series of paintings illustrating Christ’s
Passion, which he subsequently destroyed leaving only a charcoal sketch of Christ in
the Garden of Gethsemane (1888). It was at this moment that Vrubel first experienced
something of a personal religious crisis. Writing to his sister Anna in December 1887,
he complained that while he was working on his paintings of Christ “with all his
might” he began to feel a profound sense of malaise towards his Christian identity, an
emotion that continued to plague him until the end of his life and especially during
his illness.50 Given Vrubel’s interest in the writings of Nietzsche, it would seem that in
his conception of Christ, the demon, and the figure of the prophet, Vrubel envisioned
a heroic individual — even a martyr — whose rebellion against the conventional
morality and dominant trends of his times seemed to mirror Vrubel’s own artistic
struggles. From his university years, the artist had rejected mainstream religiosity
and especially its formulation in the works and theories of Leo Tolstoy, which Vrubel
claimed resulted in the oppression of the human spirit and the creative impulse.
Whether or not Vrubel saw himself in prophetic terms as an avant-garde martyr to
conservative artistic tastes is unclear, but he was certainly understood as such by many
of his contemporaries, such as Aleksandr Blok, Benois, and Muratov. Both of Blok’s
articles, ‘To the Memory of Vrubel’ and ‘On the Present State of Russian Symbolism’,
imply the fusion of self-sacrifice and prophetic vision as the condition for Vrubel’s art;
the same idea is expressed by Muratov in his essay, ‘About High Art’.51 Similarly, in
his 1910 article on Vrubel for the journal Speech (Rech’), Benois concluded that “Vrubel
was more than just an artist — he was a prophet, a seer, a demon”.52
Vrubel’s dedication to the prophetic, the visionary, and the iconic reached its
apogee in the years leading up to his premature death in 1910, and almost all of his
major late works exclusively deal with Biblical subjects and the supernatural. In the
years 1904 to 1905 he painted The Six-winged Seraphim (1904), Angel with a Sword (1904),
the Head of the Prophet (1904–05), the Prophet (1904–05), Head of John the Baptist (1905),
and The Vision of the Prophet Ezekiel (1906), among others. In many ways, this final
cycle of religious works can be interpreted as a symbolic summation or culmination
of the central stylistic and thematic preoccupations that characterised Vrubel’s entire
career. For example, in its iconic frontality, pronounced linearity, and vivid palette,
the watercolour of the Head of John the Baptist (fig. 2.18) again recalls the artist’s St Cyril
murals, such as his fresco of Moses and the Head of Christ.
50
Ibid., p. 77.
51 Aleksandr Blok, ‘Pamiati Vrubel′ia’, Iskusstvo i pechatnoe delo, 8–9 (1910), 307–09; ‘О sovremennom
sostoianii russkogo simvolisma’, Apollon, 8 (1910), 21–30, http://www.v-ivanov.it/issledovaniya_i_
materialy/apollon; Pavel Muratov, ‘O vysokom khudozhestve’, Zolotoe runo, 12 (1901), 75–84.
52 Alexandre Benois, ‘Vrubel′’, Rech′, 91 (April, 1910). Reprinted in Aleksandr Nikolaevich Benua:
Khudozhestvennye Pis′ma, 1908–1917, Gazeta ‘Rech′’. Vol. I: 1908–1910, ed. by Iu. N. Podkopaeva, et al.
(St Petersburg: Sad Iskusstv, 2006), pp. 409–11 (p. 411).
2. Mikhail Vrubel and the Search for a Modernist Idiom
63
2.18 Mikhail Vrubel, Head of John the Baptist, 1905. Watercolour and pencil on paper,
21.3 x 17.6 cm. State Russian Museum, St Petersburg. Reproduced in Zolotoe runo, 1906,
1, Colour inset. Photograph by Maria Taroutina (2017), public domain.
Similarly, The Six-winged Seraphim, also known as Azrael or the Angel of Death (fig.
2.19), harks back to Vrubel’s Demon paintings in its striking grandeur, monumentality,
and ambiguous duality. In terms of iconography, The Six-winged Seraphim closely
resembles the Demon Seated with his long black hair, powerful neck, blue-grey
complexion, hollow eyes, and large peacock wings. Just like Vrubel’s Demon, Azrael
is an ambiguous, conflicted figure. Crowned with a lustrous diadem and holding
a glowing red censer in his left hand, the angel is the source of heavenly light and
salvation on the one hand. However, on the other hand, he is simultaneously the
harbinger of death, wielding a large, ominous dagger in his right hand, and signifying
suffering and destructive intent. Just like the Demon, who was once an angel, Azrael
appears as a liminal figure who stands on the threshold of heaven and hell, embodying
both the angelic and the demonic, or redemption and damnation. On a formal level,
The Six-winged Seraphim combines many of the techniques that Vrubel first used in
Demon Seated and Demon Cast Down. Vrubel’s modelling of form on the angel’s face
and neck repeats the interlocking, contrasting colour patches that he used to build up
the bulky body of Demon Seated. In their regularity and geometricity, these blocks of
paint resemble mosaic tesserae even more than in Demon Seated and appear to have
been applied with a palette knife, rather than a paintbrush (fig. 2.20).
2.19 Mikhail Vrubel, The Six-winged Seraphim (Azrael), 1904. Oil on canvas, 131 x 155
cm. State Russian Museum, St Petersburg. Photograph © Fine Art Images/Heritage
Images/Scala, all rights reserved.
2. Mikhail Vrubel and the Search for a Modernist Idiom
65
2.20 Mikhail Vrubel, The Six-winged Seraphim (Azrael), 1904. Detail. Oil on canvas, 131 x 155 cm.
State Russian Museum, St Petersburg. Photograph by Maria Taroutina (2017), public domain.
Meanwhile, the expressive swirl of crystalline brushstrokes on the angel’s wings
and garments recalls the fragmented, chaotic mass of peacock feathers in Demon
Cast Down. Measuring 131 by 155 cm., this work is one of the largest of Vrubel’s late
paintings — his penultimate, poignant attempt at monumental religious art.
The Vision of the Prophet Ezekiel (fig. 2.21) is considered to be Vrubel’s last work and
approaches near abstraction in its radical dissolution of form. Executed on cardboard
in mixed media — charcoal, watercolour, and gouache — it depicts a heavenly vision
as described in the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel. In the bottom right-hand corner of
the image, the face of a bearded man — presumably Ezekiel — is depicted looking up
at a tall, fearsome angel who holds a downward pointing sword in his right hand. Next
to the angel is another floating masculine face, but one that lacks a clearly identifiable
body. The pronounced spatial ambiguity of this work is produced by a multiplicity
of layered, shifting fragments of form that splinter into infinite depths and yet insist
on returning to the surface of the picture plane. An explosion of angular, faceted
shapes destabilises the figure-to-ground relationship so that it becomes difficult to tell
where one form projects forward and another recedes into the background, producing
a dynamic all-over effect. The only stable visual anchor in the whole composition
is the angel’s dark head in the central, upper register of the image. Otherwise, the
intermingling of segments of wings, limbs, and dissolving faces creates a complicated,
disorienting web of form that approaches abstraction more closely than in any other
of Vrubel’s late works.
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Maria Taroutina
2.21 Mikhail Vrubel, The Vision of the Prophet Ekeziel, 1905. Charcoal, watercolour,
and gouache on cardboard. 102.3 x 55.1 cm. State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.
Photograph © Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Scala, all rights reserved.
In fact, it is as though Vrubel’s initial experimentation with the ‘abstract’ qualities of
Russo-Byzantine art in the Church of St Cyril had come full circle and had reached its
most logical conclusion both in terms of style and subject matter, heralding a new era
in Russian art. Adrian Prakhov’s son, Nikolai, went so far as to read the beginnings
of Rayonism — an early abstract art movement inaugurated by Mikhail Larionov in
around 1913 — in the fragmented, energetic, linear shards of The Vision of the Prophet
Ezekiel. Indeed, Larionov himself claimed that Vrubel exerted more influence on him
than Cézanne.53 As a number of scholars have written, many members of the younger
generation of artists passed through Kyiv in the early 1900s and were deeply affected
by their encounters with Vrubel’s St Cyril frescoes. Liubov Popova’s visit to the church
in 1909 left her “vanquished” by Vrubel’s “incinerating” talent.54 Similarly, Aleksandr
Rodchenko asserted that in the early 1910s he “painted like Vrubel”, while Vladimir
Tatlin prized and avidly collected Vrubel’s artwork.55 Other budding avant-garde
talents who had encountered Vrubel’s work in Kyiv in the early 1900s include Natalia
53 Isdebsky-Pritchard, Art of Mikhail Vrubel, p. 88.
54 Dmitry Sarabianov and Natalia Adaskina, Popova (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1990), p. 14.
55 German Karginov, Rodchenko (London: Thames & Hudson, 1979), p. 10; Liubov′ Rudneva, ‘Vladimir
Tatlin — Tridtsatye gody’, in Vladimir Tatlin: Leben, Werk, Wirkung: ein internationales Symposium, ed.
by Jürgen Harten (Cologne: Dumont, 1993), pp. 459–63 (p. 462).
2. Mikhail Vrubel and the Search for a Modernist Idiom
67
Goncharova, Aleksandra Ekster, Aleksandr Archipenko, David Burliuk, and Kazimir
Malevich, among others.
Yet, whether or not Vrubel’s religious works contributed to the advent of
abstraction in Russia in the new century is almost impossible to ascertain with any
certainty. However, what is clear is that Vrubel’s radical rewriting of the RussoByzantine artistic idiom, as well as his combination of formal innovation with visionary
transcendentalism, paved the way for artists such as Malevich and Kandinsky, for
whom spirituality and abstraction came to represent two sides of the same modernist
coin. Dmitriev summed it up best, describing Vrubel as:
Аn artist who managed to raise above the heads of his contemporaries the future
‘necessity’ of art […] already perceived his significance before and more astutely than
anyone else. […] Vrubel, in the last years of his life, had already arrived at a conception
of art, which we are only now beginning to approach. Consequently, our reappraisal
is not the result of the fashion of the day. We are merely trying to follow the path that
Vrubel had indicated to us.56
As paradoxical as it may sound, by embracing the artistic traditions of the past, Mikhail
Vrubel was able to anticipate many of the formal and conceptual innovations of the
future. Moreover, in their brooding, unorthodox nature, his apocryphal paintings
epitomised the modern move away from institutionalised religion towards new
spiritual and philosophical possibilities that would be subsequently embraced by a
younger generation of writers and thinkers such as Blok, Mikhail Kuzmin, Dmitry
Merezhkovsky, Zinaida Gippius, and Mikhail Bulgakov. Thus, speaking at Vrubel’s
funeral in 1910, Blok poetically asserted that in his art and life Vrubel had followed
“the sounds of heaven” instead of the “boring songs of earth” — sounds that had
inspired the artist to produce his iconic Demon — a “symbol of the age”.57
56
57
Dmitriev, ‘Zavety Vrubel′ia’, p. 15. “Художник, провидящий через головы современников
будущее ‘нужное’ в искусстве […] он и раньше всех, и верней всех, осознал свое значение.
[…] Врубель в последние годы жизни подошел к тому же толкованию смысла искусства, к
которому ныне подходим мы. Таким образом наша переоценка — не результат моды дня. Мы
лишь пытаемся следовать по пути, указанному самим Врубелем.”
Blok, ‘Pamiati Vrubelia’, p. 308.