Maria Taroutina
Yale-NUS College, Humanities Division, Faculty Member
- Russian & Soviet Art, Art History, Modernism (Art History), Nineteenth-century Art, Russian Studies, The Russian Silver Age, and 17 moreByzantine art, Byzantine Art and Archaeolgy, Byzantine Architecture, Russian and Slavic Studies, Russian avant-garde art, 19th- 20th- century Russian Art, Russian Medieval Art, Russian Art History, Art Theory and Criticism, Theory of Art, Art Theory and Politics, Art and image theory, Revivalism and historicism in architecture, particularly medievalism, Russian Revival Art, Orientalism (Art History), Orientalism in art, and Soviet avant-gardeedit
- Maria Taroutina is Associate Professor of Art History at Yale–NUS College in Singapore. Her first sole-authored book ... moreMaria Taroutina is Associate Professor of Art History at Yale–NUS College in Singapore. Her first sole-authored book monograph, The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival was awarded the 2019 USC Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies by ASEEES. Currently, she is working on a new book project titled "Exotic Aesthetics: Art, Race, and Representation in Russia in the Age of Empire." Additional information can be found here: https://www.maria-taroutina.com/edit
This volume features new research on Russia's historic relationship with Asia and the ways it was mediated and represented in the fine, decorative and performing arts and architecture from the mid-eighteenth century to the first two... more
This volume features new research on Russia's historic relationship with Asia and the ways it was mediated and represented in the fine, decorative and performing arts and architecture from the mid-eighteenth century to the first two decades of Soviet rule. It interrogates how Russia's perception of its position on the periphery of the west and its simultaneous self-consciousness as a colonial power shaped its artistic, cultural and national identity as a heterogenous, multi-ethnic empire. It also explores the extent to which cultural practitioners participated in the discursive matrices that advanced Russia's colonial machinery on the one hand and critiqued and challenged it on the other, especially in territories that were themselves on the fault lines between the east and the west.
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This book brings together thirteen scholars to introduce the newest and most cutting-edge research in the field of Russian and East European art history. Reconsidering canonical figures, re-examining prevalent debates, and revisiting... more
This book brings together thirteen scholars to introduce the newest and most cutting-edge research in the field of Russian and East European art history. Reconsidering canonical figures, re-examining prevalent debates, and revisiting aesthetic developments, the book challenges accepted histories and entrenched dichotomies in art and architecture from the nineteenth century to the present. In doing so, it resituates the artistic production of this region within broader socio-cultural currents and analyzes its interconnections with international discourse, competing political and aesthetic ideologies, and continuous discussions over identity.
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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... more
In The Icon and the Square, Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with the radical, leftist, and revolutionary avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century through a shared interest in the Byzantine past, offering a counternarrative to prevailing notions of Russian modernism.
Focusing on the works of four different artists--Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin--Taroutina shows how engagement with medieval pictorial traditions drove each artist to transform his own practice, pushing beyond the established boundaries of his respective artistic and intellectual milieu. She also contextualizes and complements her study of the work of these artists with an examination of the activities of a number of important cultural associations and institutions over the course of several decades. As a result, The Icon and the Square gives a more complete picture of Russian modernism: one that attends to the dialogue between generations of artists, curators, collectors, critics, and theorists.
The Icon and the Square retrieves a neglected but vital history that was deliberately suppressed by the atheist Soviet regime and subsequently ignored in favor of the secular formalism of mainstream modernist criticism. Taroutina's timely study, which coincides with the centennial reassessments of Russian and Soviet modernism, is sure to invigorate conversation among scholars of art history, modernism, and Russian culture.
Focusing on the works of four different artists--Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin--Taroutina shows how engagement with medieval pictorial traditions drove each artist to transform his own practice, pushing beyond the established boundaries of his respective artistic and intellectual milieu. She also contextualizes and complements her study of the work of these artists with an examination of the activities of a number of important cultural associations and institutions over the course of several decades. As a result, The Icon and the Square gives a more complete picture of Russian modernism: one that attends to the dialogue between generations of artists, curators, collectors, critics, and theorists.
The Icon and the Square retrieves a neglected but vital history that was deliberately suppressed by the atheist Soviet regime and subsequently ignored in favor of the secular formalism of mainstream modernist criticism. Taroutina's timely study, which coincides with the centennial reassessments of Russian and Soviet modernism, is sure to invigorate conversation among scholars of art history, modernism, and Russian culture.
Research Interests: Russian Studies, Art History, Art Theory, History of Museums, Nineteenth-century Art, and 14 moreByzantine Studies, Modernism (Art History), Byzantine Architecture, Byzantine Iconography, Medieval Art, Russian avant-garde art, Theology of Art, 20th century Avant-Garde, Byzantine art, Revivalism and historicism in architecture, particularly medievalism, Soviet avant-garde, Russian and Soviet art and culture, Russian Medieval Art, and Religious Revivalism
From the Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival is forthcoming with Pennsylvania State University Press. It charts the rediscovery and rigorous reassessment of the medieval Russo-Byzantine artistic... more
From the Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival is forthcoming with Pennsylvania State University Press. It charts the rediscovery and rigorous reassessment of the medieval Russo-Byzantine artistic tradition in Russia in the years 1860-1920. In particular, it argues that there was an intimate link between Byzantine revivalism and modernist experimentation, which ultimately contributed to the formation of the twentieth-century avant-garde movements.
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Byzantium/Modernism features contributions by fourteen international scholars and brings together a diverse range of interdisciplinary essays on art, architecture, theatre, film, literature, and philosophy, which examine how and why... more
Byzantium/Modernism features contributions by fourteen international scholars and brings together a diverse range of interdisciplinary essays on art, architecture, theatre, film, literature, and philosophy, which examine how and why Byzantine art and image theory can contribute to our understanding of modern and contemporary visual culture. Particular attention is given to intercultural dialogues between the former dominions of the Byzantine Empire, with a special focus on Greece, Turkey, and Russia, and the artistic production of Western Europe and America. Together, these essays invite the reader to think critically and theoretically about the dialogic interchange between Byzantium and modernism and to consider this cross-temporal encounter as an ongoing and historically deep narrative, rather than an ephemeral or localized trend. All interested in Byzantine, modern and contemporary art, and anyone concerned with image theory, historiography, and the philosophy of iconic representation. READERSHIP: For more information see http://www.brill.com/products/book/byzantiummodernism View full information on http://www.brill.com/
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Byzantium/Modernism features contributions by fourteen international scholars and brings together a diverse range of interdisciplinary essays on art, architecture, theatre, film, literature, and philosophy, which examine how and why... more
Byzantium/Modernism features contributions by fourteen international scholars and brings together a diverse range of interdisciplinary essays on art, architecture, theatre, film, literature, and philosophy, which examine how and why Byzantine art and image theory can contribute to our understanding of modern and contemporary visual culture. Particular attention is given to intercultural dialogues between the former dominions of the Byzantine Empire, with a special focus on Greece, Turkey, and Russia, and the artistic production of Western Europe and America. Together, these essays invite the reader to think critically and theoretically about the dialogic interchange between Byzantium and modernism and to consider this cross-temporal encounter as an ongoing and historically deep narrative, rather than an ephemeral or localized trend.
Contributors are Tulay Atak, Charles Barber, Elena Boeck, Anthony Cutler, Rico Franses, Dimitra Kotoula, Marie-José Mondzain, Myroslava M. Mudrak, Robert S. Nelson, Robert Ousterhout, Stratis Papaioannou, Glenn Peers, Jane A. Sharp and Devin Singh.
Contributors are Tulay Atak, Charles Barber, Elena Boeck, Anthony Cutler, Rico Franses, Dimitra Kotoula, Marie-José Mondzain, Myroslava M. Mudrak, Robert S. Nelson, Robert Ousterhout, Stratis Papaioannou, Glenn Peers, Jane A. Sharp and Devin Singh.
Byzantium/Modernism features contributions by fourteen international scholars and brings together a diverse range of interdisciplinary essays on art, architecture, theatre, film, literature, and philosophy, which examine how and why... more
Byzantium/Modernism features contributions by fourteen international scholars and brings together a diverse range of interdisciplinary essays on art, architecture, theatre, film, literature, and philosophy, which examine how and why Byzantine art and image theory can contribute to our understanding of modern and contemporary visual culture. Particular attention is given to intercultural dialogues between the former dominions of the Byzantine Empire, with a special focus on Greece, Turkey, and Russia, and the artistic production of Western Europe and America. Together, these essays invite the reader to think critically and theoretically about the dialogic interchange between Byzantium and modernism and to consider this cross-temporal encounter as an ongoing and historically deep narrative, rather than an ephemeral or localized trend. Contributors are Tulay Atak, Charles Barber, Elena Boeck, Anthony Cutler, Rico Franses, Dimitra Kotoula, Marie-José Mondzain, Myroslava M. Mudrak, Robert S. Nelson, Robert Ousterhout, Stratis Papaioannou, Glenn Peers, Jane A. Sharp and Devin Singh.
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This article examines Ilia Repin's sustained engagement with European Orientalist painting and its impact on his oeuvre. Through close readings of three of his major works, Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom (1876), Ivan the Terrible and His... more
This article examines Ilia Repin's sustained engagement with European Orientalist painting and its impact on his oeuvre. Through close readings of three of his major works, Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom (1876), Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan (1885), and Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan (1880–91), it argues that Repin deployed Eastern motifs in order to unsettle entrenched East/West and self/other binaries that were prevalent in the Russian imperial context. A celebrated figure of the Russian national school, Repin was born and raised in Ukraine, and frequently turned to Ukrainian themes and subjects in his art. Considering Russia's turbulent political atmosphere in the 1880s and 1890s, and the evolving separation of Ukrainian and Russian imperial identities during this time, this essay posits that Repin harnessed the Orientalist idiom as a means to critique the Russian state, and to articulate an anti-imperial and anti-autocratic position.
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This essay examines the multiple discursive intersections between the theories of perception and representation articulated by Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944) and Pavel Florensky (1882–1937) in the first two decades of the twentieth century.... more
This essay examines the multiple discursive intersections between the theories of perception and representation articulated by Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944) and Pavel Florensky (1882–1937) in the first two decades of the twentieth century. More specifically, it traces Kandinsky’s latent interest in medieval visuality and resituates his well-known formulation of a new spiritual art in the form of abstraction within the realm of Orthodox theology and aesthetics as theorized by Florensky. This article thus proposes an entirely novel set of as yet unexplored interpretative possibilities for understanding Kandinsky’s oeuvre on the one hand, and the broader dialectical relationship between medieval revivalism and avant-garde experimentation on the other.
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This article focuses on a series of both iconic and little-known paintings, examining the diverse ways in which some of Russia's most prominent nineteenth-century artists such as Karl Briullov, Vasilii Polenov, and Il΄ia Repin... more
This article focuses on a series of both iconic and little-known paintings, examining the diverse ways in which some of Russia's most prominent nineteenth-century artists such as Karl Briullov, Vasilii Polenov, and Il΄ia Repin depicted Black subjects. Through a combination of close formal readings and broader analyses of the specific contexts in which these images were produced, the article probes a number of complex and interconnected topics such as Russian exceptionalism, imperialist aesthetics, and nationalist versus cosmopolitan pictorial sensibilities. The article likewise pays close attention to the conceptual and material continuities and discontinuities between the first and second halves of the nineteenth century and considers how these paintings might have contributed to the evolving Russian discourses on race, nationality, and empire in the “long” nineteenth century.
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Taking cue from Dmitry Sarabyanov's seminal publications on the Stil' Modern and turn-of-the-century Russian visual culture, the present article resituates Mikhail Vrubel's oeuvre " between East and West " by demonstrating that the artist... more
Taking cue from Dmitry Sarabyanov's seminal publications on the Stil' Modern and turn-of-the-century Russian visual culture, the present article resituates Mikhail Vrubel's oeuvre " between East and West " by demonstrating that the artist moved beyond the narrowly circumscribed nationalist agenda typically attributed to the work he produced at the Abramtsevo and Talashkino artistic colonies. In addition to indigenous sources, Vrubel also assimilated a number of external artistic influences such as Jugendstil, medieval Gothic and Renaissance ceramics, Japanese and Chinese porcelain , and Egyptian and Assyrian art. Through a close analysis of Vrubel's orientalist paintings, as well as his cycle of folkloric works such as Mikula Selyaninovich and the Volga (1896), I demonstrate that his aesthetic program crossed multiple boundaries: geographical, temporal, material, and institutional. Through a complex renegotiation of the global and the local, the past and the present, and the traditional and contemporary , Vrubel arrived at a strikingly modernist visual syntax, which paved the way for an entire generation of avant-garde artists such as Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Liubov Popova, Vladimir Tatlin, and Naum Gabo, among others. Using Vrubel as a case study, this article thus proposes to rethink the opposing binary categories of avant-gardism and revivalism, historicism and innovation, Orientalism and Occidentalism, regionalism and cosmopolitanism, as they have been applied to the trajectory of modern Russian art—a set of ostensibly fixed dichotomies that Dmitry Sarabyanov had repeatedly and successfully challenged in his own work.
Research Interests:
This essay examines the multiple discursive intersections between the theories of perception and representation articulated by Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944) and Pavel Florensky (1882–1937) in the first two decades of the twentieth century.... more
This essay examines the multiple discursive intersections between the theories of perception and representation articulated by Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944) and Pavel Florensky (1882–1937) in the first two decades of the twentieth century. More specifically, it traces Kandinsky's latent interest in medieval visuality and resituates his well-known formulation of a new spiritual art in the form of abstraction within the realm of Orthodox theology and aesthetics as theorized by Florensky. This article thus proposes an entirely novel set of as yet unexplored interpretative possibilities for understanding Kandinsky's oeuvre on the one hand, and the broader dialectical relationship between medieval revivalism and avant-garde experimentation on the other.
Research Interests:
This article examines Russian Orientalist visual and material culture and its entanglement with, first, imperialist ambitions and racial ideologies and, second, institutional critique and anticolonial resistance. Given the country’s... more
This article examines Russian Orientalist visual and material culture and its entanglement with, first, imperialist ambitions and racial ideologies and, second, institutional critique and anticolonial resistance. Given the country’s perpetually conflicted self-identification as neither fully European nor Asian, the demarcations between the ‘self’ and the ‘other,’ first theorized by Edward Said, remained ambiguous and elusive in the Russian context, resulting in an Orientalist mode that was prone to hybridity, syncretism, and even self-Orientalization. Through close readings of several representative artworks by Vasilii Vereshchagin, Ilia Repin, and Mikhail Vrubel, among others, the article argues that the instability and rupture inherent in Russian Orientalism open up new modes of studying art in the age of empire that hold important implications for current calls to decolonize art history. Finally, it provides a brief overview of the historiography on Russian Orientalist art and concludes with a discussion of the latter’s ongoing relevance to contemporary Russian culture and politics.
Research Interests:
Although traditionally associated with the ascendance of National Romanticism, Slavic folklore, and the Neo-Russian style in painting, architecture, and the decorative arts, the Abramtsevo artistic circle was also privy to the inception... more
Although traditionally associated with the ascendance of National Romanticism, Slavic folklore, and the Neo-Russian style in painting, architecture, and the decorative arts, the Abramtsevo artistic circle was also privy to the inception and production of a number of manifestly Orientalist works, such as Vasilii Polenov’s Christ and the Adulteress (1888), Mikhail Vrubel’s ceramic sculptures of The Assyrian, The Egyptian Girl, The Pharaoh, and The Libyan Lion (1890s), and the costumes and set designs for the theatrical productions Judith (1878, 1898), Joseph (1880, 1881, 1887, 1889), The Black Turban (1884, 1887, 1889), King Saul (1890), and To the Caucasus (1891). In addition, a
series of hybrid works that fused elements of the exotic with national thematic and stylistic content, such as Viktor Vasnetsov’s Underwater Kingdom (1884) and Mikhail Vrubel’s Princess Volkhova (1898), were likewise produced under the auspices of Savva Mamontov and the Abramtsevo community, thus blurring the boundaries between
native and foreign, local and global, self and other, and Slavophilia and Orientalia. The present article posits that an understanding of the romanticized, Neo-Russian artistic and theatrical productions, and the nationalist polemics of the Abramtsevo artistic circle is necessarily incomplete without a detailed examination of the various Orientalist crosscurrents which informed and structured many of the group’s artworks throughout the 1880s and 1890s—a narrative that has been largely left out of scholarly accounts of the movement.
series of hybrid works that fused elements of the exotic with national thematic and stylistic content, such as Viktor Vasnetsov’s Underwater Kingdom (1884) and Mikhail Vrubel’s Princess Volkhova (1898), were likewise produced under the auspices of Savva Mamontov and the Abramtsevo community, thus blurring the boundaries between
native and foreign, local and global, self and other, and Slavophilia and Orientalia. The present article posits that an understanding of the romanticized, Neo-Russian artistic and theatrical productions, and the nationalist polemics of the Abramtsevo artistic circle is necessarily incomplete without a detailed examination of the various Orientalist crosscurrents which informed and structured many of the group’s artworks throughout the 1880s and 1890s—a narrative that has been largely left out of scholarly accounts of the movement.
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In 1911 Vasily Kandinsky published the first edition of ‘On the Spiritual in Art’, a landmark modernist treatise in which he sought to reframe the meaning of art and the true role of the artist. For many artists of late Imperial Russia –... more
In 1911 Vasily Kandinsky published the first edition of ‘On the Spiritual in Art’, a landmark modernist treatise in which he sought to reframe the meaning of art and the true role of the artist. For many artists of late Imperial Russia – a culture deeply influenced by the regime’s adoption of Byzantine Orthodoxy centuries before – questions of religion and spirituality were of paramount importance. As artists and the wider art community experimented with new ideas and interpretations at the dawn of the twentieth century, their relationship with ‘the spiritual’ – broadly defined – was inextricably linked to their roles as pioneers of modernism.
This diverse collection of essays introduces new and stimulating approaches to the ongoing debate as to how Russian artistic modernism engaged with questions of spirituality in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Ten chapters from emerging and established voices offer new perspectives on Kandinsky and other familiar names, such as Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Larionov, and Natalia Goncharova, and introduce less well-known figures, such as the Georgian artists Ucha Japaridze and Lado Gudiashvili, and the craftswoman and art promoter Aleksandra Pogosskaia.
Prefaced by a lively and informative introduction by Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow that sets these perspectives in their historical and critical context, Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives enriches our understanding of the modernist period and breaks new ground in its re-examination of the role of religion and spirituality in the visual arts in late Imperial Russia. Of interest to historians and enthusiasts of Russian art, culture, and religion, and those of international modernism and the avant-garde, it offers innovative readings of a history only partially explored, revealing uncharted corners and challenging long-held assumptions.
This diverse collection of essays introduces new and stimulating approaches to the ongoing debate as to how Russian artistic modernism engaged with questions of spirituality in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Ten chapters from emerging and established voices offer new perspectives on Kandinsky and other familiar names, such as Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Larionov, and Natalia Goncharova, and introduce less well-known figures, such as the Georgian artists Ucha Japaridze and Lado Gudiashvili, and the craftswoman and art promoter Aleksandra Pogosskaia.
Prefaced by a lively and informative introduction by Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow that sets these perspectives in their historical and critical context, Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives enriches our understanding of the modernist period and breaks new ground in its re-examination of the role of religion and spirituality in the visual arts in late Imperial Russia. Of interest to historians and enthusiasts of Russian art, culture, and religion, and those of international modernism and the avant-garde, it offers innovative readings of a history only partially explored, revealing uncharted corners and challenging long-held assumptions.
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The decorative oeuvre of Mikhail Vrubel from the 1890s to early 1900s was doubly transgressive: it moved beyond the confines of a “minor” art on the one hand, and a narrowly regional and nationalist agenda on the other. The ceramic medium... more
The decorative oeuvre of Mikhail Vrubel from the 1890s to early 1900s was doubly transgressive: it moved beyond the confines of a “minor” art on the one hand, and a narrowly regional and nationalist agenda on the other. The ceramic medium in particular allowed Vrubel the aesthetic and conceptual freedom to articulate some of his most revolutionary and innovative ideas, resulting in a distinct and original visual syntax, which sowed the seeds for subsequent Russian modernist movements, including the neoprimistivist, constructivist, and productivist avant-gardes—a link that has been rarely examined by scholars. More specifically, this essay considers how and why Vrubel had failed to finish his monumental panel Mikula Selianinovich and Volga (1896) for the Nizhnii Novgorod Fair of 1896 on account of his artistic frustrations with the piece, but was able to successfully recreate the same work three years later as a decorative majolica fireplace (1899–1900), which ultimately garnered him a gold medal at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 and elicited widespread praise both in the Russian and French press
In Imperial Russia, as well as during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, artists from across the empire (and later, the U.S.S.R.) were claimed by centralising state cultural policy as “Russian” with little or no acknowledgment of... more
In Imperial Russia, as well as during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, artists from across the empire (and later, the U.S.S.R.) were claimed by centralising state cultural policy as “Russian” with little or no acknowledgment of regional specificity. Yet many artists thus described were from colonised lands such as Poland, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Central Asia, and the Baltic States: they include, for example, such notable figures as Alexander Orlovsky, Ivan Aivazovsky, Marie Bashkirtseff, Alexandra Exter, Ilia Repin, Arkhip Kuindzhi, and Kazimir Malevich, to name but a few. While some artists reconciled local and imperial identities, others contested Russian nationalist hegemony. However, historians have often failed to recognise artists’ mixed ethnicities or the regionally embedded nature of their art, thus perpetuating a homogenizing Russo-centric narrative. Accordingly, the complexities and elisions of this imperial history require urgent reassessment, especially in light of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war. Building on recent initiatives to de-centre and decolonise the study of Russian art, this panel invites papers which examine the ways in which artists questioned, challenged, and revised the imperial status quo. How did cultural practitioners negotiate and, at times, subvert the Russian state’s self-mythologizing, its oscillation between reform and repression, and its fraught relationships with both the East and the West? How might the separate art histories of nations such as Ukraine be productively decoupled from those of the imperial centre, while still acknowledging their historical entanglement?
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In 1871, at the height of Russia’s colonial military campaigns in Central Asia, Vasilii Vereshchagin painted The Apotheosis of War: To All Great Conquerors, Past, Present and Future. This work shows a pyramid of human skulls dominating a... more
In 1871, at the height of Russia’s colonial military campaigns in Central Asia, Vasilii Vereshchagin painted The Apotheosis of War: To All Great Conquerors, Past, Present and Future. This work shows a pyramid of human skulls dominating a barren, desert landscape, while crows and vultures feast on the remains of decaying human flesh. The once flourishing but now destroyed and desolate ancient city of Samarkand is visible in the distant background. In the wake of Vladimir Putin’s unconscionable invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow featured Vereshchagin’s painting on its official Instagram account in a veiled condemnation of the regime’s actions. Accordingly, this panel invites papers that examine artistic resistance to Tsarist, Soviet, and Post-Soviet colonial and neo-colonial ambitions from the enlightenment period to the present day. How did Russian, East European, and Eurasian artists contest systems of power and oppression and to what extent did they contribute to anti-imperial and anti-autocratic discourses? In what ways did artists from the so called imperial outposts—spanning from the Baltics and Ukraine in the West, to Georgia, Armenia, Uzbekistan and Russia’s Far East—interrogate, challenge, and revise their positionality as Russia’s colonial “others”? Finally, how did artists and cultural practitioners critique and subvert the Russian state’s self-mythologizing, its vacillation between reform and repression, its fraught relationship with both the East and the West, and its aspirations for prominence and recognition within global politics—issues that have become especially urgent in our present moment?
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Research Interests: Religion, History, Philosophy, Art History, Art, and 5 moreLiterature, Spirituality, Modernism, Russia, and Acb
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This article examines Russian Orientalist visual and material culture and its entanglement with, first, imperialist ambitions and racial ideologies and, second, institutional critique and anticolonial resistance. Given the country’s... more
This article examines Russian Orientalist visual and material culture and its entanglement with, first, imperialist ambitions and racial ideologies and, second, institutional critique and anticolonial resistance. Given the country’s perpetually conflicted self-identification as neither fully European nor Asian, the demarcations between the ‘self’ and the ‘other,’ first theorized by Edward Said, remained ambiguous and elusive in the Russian context, resulting in an Orientalist mode that was prone to hybridity, syncretism, and even self-Orientalization. Through close readings of several representative artworks by Vasilii Vereshchagin, Ilia Repin, and Mikhail Vrubel, among others, the article argues that the instability and rupture inherent in Russian Orientalism open up new modes of studying art in the age of empire that hold important implications for current calls to decolonize art history. Finally, it provides a brief overview of the historiography on Russian Orientalist art and concludes with a discussion of the latter’s ongoing relevance to contemporary Russian culture and politics.
Research Interests:
The decorative oeuvre of Mikhail Vrubel from the 1890s to early 1900s was doubly transgressive: it moved beyond the confines of a “minor” art on the one hand, and a narrowly regional and nationalist agenda on the other. The ceramic medium... more
The decorative oeuvre of Mikhail Vrubel from the 1890s to early 1900s was doubly transgressive: it moved beyond the confines of a “minor” art on the one hand, and a narrowly regional and nationalist agenda on the other. The ceramic medium in particular allowed Vrubel the aesthetic and conceptual freedom to articulate some of his most revolutionary and innovative ideas, resulting in a distinct and original visual syntax, which sowed the seeds for subsequent Russian modernist movements, including the neoprimistivist, constructivist, and productivist avant-gardes—a link that has been rarely examined by scholars. More specifically, this essay considers how and why Vrubel had failed to finish his monumental panel Mikula Selianinovich and Volga (1896) for the Nizhnii Novgorod Fair of 1896 on account of his artistic frustrations with the piece, but was able to successfully recreate the same work three years later as a decorative majolica fireplace (1899–1900), which ultimately garnered him a gold medal at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 and elicited widespread praise both in the Russian and French press
Research Interests:
Taking cue from Dmitry Sarabyanov’s seminal publications on the Stil Modern and turn-of-the-century Russian visual culture, the present article resituates Mikhail Vrubel’s œuvre “between East and West” by demonstrating that the artist... more
Taking cue from Dmitry Sarabyanov’s seminal publications on the Stil Modern and turn-of-the-century Russian visual culture, the present article resituates Mikhail Vrubel’s œuvre “between East and West” by demonstrating that the artist moved beyond the narrowly circumscribed nationalist agenda typically attributed to the work he produced at the Abramtsevo and Talashkino artistic colonies. In addition to indigenous sources, Vrubel also assimilated a number of external artistic influences such as Jugendstil, medieval Gothic and Renaissance ceramics, Japanese and Chinese porcelain, and Egyptian and Assyrian art. Through a close analysis of Vrubel’s orientalist paintings, as well as his cycle of folkloric works such as Mikula Selyaninovich and the Volga (1896), I demonstrate that his aesthetic program crossed multiple boundaries: geographical, temporal, material, and institutional. Through a complex renegotiation of the global and the local, the past and the present, and the traditional and contemporary, Vrubel arrived at a strikingly modernist visual syntax, which paved the way for an entire generation of avant-garde artists such as Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Liubov Popova, Vladimir Tatlin, and Naum Gabo, among others. Using Vrubel as a case study, this article thus proposes to rethink the opposing binary categories of avant-gardism and revivalism, historicism and innovation, Orientalism and Occidentalism, regionalism and cosmopolitanism, as they have been applied to the trajectory of modern Russian art—a set of ostensibly fixed dichotomies that Dmitry Sarabyanov had repeatedly and successfully challenged in his own work.
Research Interests:
Although traditionally associated with the ascendance of National Romanticism, Slavic folklore, and the Neo-Russian style in painting, architecture, and the decorative arts, the Abramtsevo artistic circle was also privy to the inception... more
Although traditionally associated with the ascendance of National Romanticism, Slavic folklore, and the Neo-Russian style in painting, architecture, and the decorative arts, the Abramtsevo artistic circle was also privy to the inception and production of a number of manifestly Orientalist works, such as Vasilii Polenov’s Christ and the Adulteress (1888), Mikhail Vrubel’s ceramic sculptures of The Assyrian, The Egyptian Girl, The Pharaoh, and The Libyan Lion (1890s), and the costumes and set designs for the theatrical productions Judith (1878, 1898), Joseph (1880, 1881, 1887, 1889), The Black Turban (1884, 1887, 1889), King Saul (1890), and To the Caucasus (1891). In addition, a series of hybrid works that fused elements of the exotic with national thematic and stylistic content, such as Viktor Vasnetsov’s Underwater Kingdom (1884) and Mikhail Vrubel’s Princess Volkhova (1898), were likewise produced under the auspices of Savva Mamontov and the Abramtsevo community, thus blurring the boundaries between native and foreign, local and global, self and other, and Slavophilia and Orientalia. The present article posits that an understanding of the romanticized, Neo-Russian artistic and theatrical productions, and the nationalist polemics of the Abramtsevo artistic circle is necessarily incomplete without a detailed examination of the various Orientalist crosscurrents which informed and structured many of the group’s artworks throughout the 1880s and 1890s—a narrative that has been largely left out of scholarly accounts of the movement.
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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... more
In The Icon and the Square, Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with the radical, leftist, and revolutionary avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century through a shared interest in the Byzantine past, offering a counternarrative to prevailing notions of Russian modernism. Focusing on the works of four different artists--Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin--Taroutina shows how engagement with medieval pictorial traditions drove each artist to transform his own practice, pushing beyond the established boundaries of his respective artistic and intellectual milieu. She also contextualizes and complements her study of the work of these artists with an examination of the activities of a number of important cultural associations and institutions over the course of several decades. As a result, The Icon and the Square gives a more complete picture of Russian modernism: one that attends to the dialogue between generations of artists, curators, collectors, critics, and theorists. The Icon and the Square retrieves a neglected but vital history that was deliberately suppressed by the atheist Soviet regime and subsequently ignored in favor of the secular formalism of mainstream modernist criticism. Taroutina's timely study, which coincides with the centennial reassessments of Russian and Soviet modernism, is sure to invigorate conversation among scholars of art history, modernism, and Russian culture.
Research Interests: Russian Studies, Art History, Art, Art Theory, History of Museums, and 15 moreByzantine Studies, Modernism (Art History), Byzantine Architecture, Byzantine Iconography, Medieval Art, Russian avant-garde art, Theology of Art, Nineteenth Century Art, Icon, Byzantine art, Soviet avant-garde, Russian and Soviet art and culture, ICON, Russian Medieval Art, and Religious Revivalism
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Philosophy, Art History, Art Theory, Philosophy of Art, and 13 moreMysticism, Dialectic, Modernism, Abstraction, Russian avant-garde art, Wassily Kandinsky, Literary studies, Iconicity, Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky, Byzantine art, Historical Studies, Medieval Revivalism, and Representation Politics
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This essay examines Ilia Repin's sustained engagement with European Orientalist painting and its impact on his oeuvre. Through close readings of three of his major works, Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom (1876), Ivan the Terrible and... more
This essay examines Ilia Repin's sustained engagement with European Orientalist painting and its impact on his oeuvre. Through close readings of three of his major works, Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom (1876), Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan (1885), and Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan (1880–91), it argues that Repin deployed Eastern motifs in order to unsettle entrenched East/West and self/other binaries that were prevalent in the Russian imperial context. A celebrated figure of the Russian national school, Repin was born and raised in Ukraine, and frequently turned to Ukrainian themes and subjects in his art. Considering Russia's turbulent political atmosphere in the 1880s and 1890s, and the evolving separation of Ukrainian and Russian imperial identities during this time, this essay posits that Repin harnessed the Orientalist idiom as a means to critique the Russian state, and to articulate an anti‐imperial and anti‐autocratic position.