The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018
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.
Winner of the University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
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.
Winner of the University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
"Taroutina’s prose is elegant and clear, making this scholarly volume accessible to all specialists in Russian art and culture. While one of the book’s major interventions is in redefining the features of Russian modernism, Taroutina’s conclusion makes an expansive turn, both temporally and spatially...It also seeks to
provide a model by which other national traditions could be interrogated—through the forms of revivalism, religion, regionalism, and nationalism. Whether this model can extend to such a global reach remains to be seen, but this erudite and effective volume has laid an excellent foundation." – Katherine M. H. Reischl, Slavic Review |
Maria Taroutina’s The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival is a sorely needed addition to the current scholarship on Russian art. It also offers a broader contribution to our understanding of the role of revival movements within modernism....The Icon and the Square is an invaluable contribution to the field. Taroutina provides a powerful framework for understanding the intellectual history of the icon and the uses to which it was put by modern artists. - Sarah Warren, Modernism/modernity |
"Well written and richly illustrated, it gives a comprehensive sense of the way in which the Byzantine ground of Russian national identity was laid throughout the nineteenth century, without which some of the most influential manifestations of world modernism could never have flowered the way they did." - Andrew Spira, The Burlington Magazine |
"Maria Taroutina's beautifully illustrated and informative book demonstrated convincingly that the story is much more multifarious and complicated than has so far been shown... The Icon and the Square will change our understanding of the epoch." - Per-Arne Bodin, The Russian Review |
"An achievement of this book is that it paves the way for further study by laying a solid methodological groundwork that invites further analysis of its core themes, perhaps with regard to more contemporary art. Although primarily aimed at an academic audience, Taroutina’s clarity of prose makes it also suitable for general readers, albeit perhaps those with a vested interest in the topic."
-Kamila Kocialkowska, H-SHERA
"In the 1909 essay ‘New Paths in Art,’ artist and writer Léon Bakst observed that Russian art could move forward only by turning back to the aesthetics of antiquity, national folklore, and even prehistory. In her audacious analysis, Maria Taroutina places luminaries of both Symbolism and the avant-garde, such as Goncharova, Malevich, Tatlin, and Vrubel, in a wide temporal framework and persuasively establishes a harmonious correlation between their radical stance and bygone cultures.” - John E. Bowlt, editor of Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902-1934 |
“This remarkable account tackles longstanding and resilient binaries to reveal ways in which some of the most innovative members of Russia's avant-garde willingly engaged with the cultural and political establishment and deployed medieval visual practice to galvanize modernist discourse in highly unexpected and suggestive ways.” - Rosalind Polly Blakesley, author of The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia, 1757-1881 |
“Brilliantly complicates and expands our largely secular, future-oriented understanding of Russian modernism by revealing the myriad affinities that bound avant-garde artists and critics to the values of the Russo-Byzantine revival. The historiographic questions raised in this paradigm-shifting study are central to the emerging field of global modernist studies, while those interested in medieval culture and its modern revivals will find much to stimulate new thinking.”
- Wendy Salmond, author of Konstantin Makovsky: The Tsar's Painter in America and Paris |
“Nowhere was modernist experimentation with new forms more dramatic and radical than in Russia. Maria Taroutina demonstrates how the reach toward abstraction was deeply connected with a search for the “spiritual in art.” The pioneering artists in this study found stimuli in medieval icons, mosaics, and frescoes; at the same time, official efforts to promote national culture focused on these Russo-Byzantine sources. Extensively documented, this book offers insights into both conservative and modernist motivations, activities, and ideas that made up the densely woven tapestry of Russian modernism.”
- Alison Hilton, author of Russian Folk Art |
Mikhail Vrubel From the Academy to the Avant-Garde. Reaktion Books, 2026.
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel (1856–1910) was one of Russia’s most innovative fin de siècle artists, bridging symbolism, art nouveau, and the emerging currents of modernism. This biography traces Vrubel’s career from his formative years at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg to his untimely death, revealing how his visionary work anticipated the formal and conceptual breakthroughs of the twentieth century. Vrubel’s paintings, drawings, and designs are examined alongside contemporaneous movements in France, Germany, Austria, and Britain, highlighting his role in a transnational artistic dialogue. Featuring high-quality reproductions, previously unpublished works, and extensive original research, this first English-language monograph in over forty years reassesses Vrubel’s legacy and situates him as a crucial precursor to the Russian avant-garde, illuminating his enduring influence on modern art.
"In this eloquent text, Maria Taroutina makes a wholly persuasive case for counting Mikhail Vrubel among the great artists of the nineteenth century. His idiosyncratic, compelling works in multiple media bear the unmistakable imprint of originality, foreshadowing the visionary modernism of Kandinsky and Malevich. Offering new readings of individual works while sketching the largest of contexts, this richly rewarding book fills a significant lacuna in the English-language history of art."
- Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, Yale University
Russian Orientalism in a Global Context: Hybridity, Encounter, and Representation, 1740-1940, co-edited with Allison Leigh. Manchester University Press, 2023.
Russian Orientalism in a Global Context: Hybridity, Encounter, and Representation examines the various ways in which Russia’s artistic praxis was impacted by encounters—both real and imagined—with the cultures and representational and material traditions of the so-called East or Vostok. Following the Napoleonic wars, the Russian Empire’s aggressive expansionist campaigns led to the annexation of vast new lands in the Caucasus and Central Asia, resulting in the large-scale assimilation of religiously and ethnically diverse groups of people. However, 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. Accordingly, the present volume reconsiders the enduring and often fraught relationship between Russia and her non-Western neighbors and the ways in which artists, architects, and designers engaged with this relationship from the mid-eighteenth century until the 1930s. More specifically, Russian Orientalism in a Global Context 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 and cultural identity. 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.
"Scholars of Russian and Soviet art have firmly established their fields as essential provocations to the discipline rather than niche areas lurking in the margins of the mainstream (a Western-centric dismissal that long awaited all but the Avant Garde). If ever there was a volume illustrating the success of that coming-of-age, it is this: an expertly conceived set of essays that confirms the imperative of the imperial Russian and Soviet experience to any serious scholar of Orientalism and the visual arts. Maria Taroutina’s introduction lays out the agency and challenge of Orientalism in visual media across two centuries of Russian and Soviet rule. Available as an open-access pdf, this piece, like much of Taroutina’s scholarship, will excite readers from undergraduates to authorities with the opportunities that Russian material uniquely presents."
-Rosalind P. Blakesley, Russian Review |
"The book is framed by an excellent foreword, introduction and afterword. Maria Taroutina’s introduction addresses the complex relationship between Russian art and the “Orient,” the nature of which changed with time, and which included both the justification for imperial domination and calls for cultural decolonization. The book provides new insights and a wealth of information for scholars and students in the fields of Russian, Eurasian, and east European studies, as well as art historians. It can be used in its entirety in graduate and undergraduate courses on the Russian empire or Russian Orientalism or be subdivided into chapters for courses on particular time periods in the his-tory of Russia or the Soviet Union."
-Anna Aydinyan, Slavic Review |
""This collection of essays considers Orientalism in Russian art history from several angles: if art historians might consider Russian art to be Oriental; how Russian artists exoticized eastern Others both within and outside the Russian Empire and Soviet Union; and how Soviet Russian artists adapted Asian styles to express spiritual or political ideas. This is a rich but difficult field of inquiry for art historians because the Oriental in Russia is both “other” and “us” on several levels. The multivalent uses of Orientalism in, about, and by Russians undermines the coherence of categorizing art into “Western” versus “Eastern” or “global.” The volume illustrates its arguments, using well produced color plates and black-and-white images in every essay."
-Shoshana Keller, The Journal of Asian Studies |
"The volume has more than 50 high quality black-and-white figures and 16 superb coloured plates. The essays are meticulously researched and thematically arranged to offer a book that, despite its wide scope, delves deeply into a number of key concepts in art history and postcolonial theory while retaining a conceptual coherence and unity. This publication is a credit to the publisher, the Manchester University Press, and makes a valuable addition to its series Rethinking Art’s Histories. -Kamran Karimullah, The Muslim World Book Review |
New Narratives of Russian and East European Art: Between Traditions and Revolutions. Routledge, 2020.
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.
"The chronological and geographical coverage of the present volume from the 1830s to the 2010s and from Russia to Italy and the Baltics to the Balkans is truly remarkable. And while the publication does not pretend to be a general history or epochal outline, it brings to light many previously un-discussed or heavily ideologized issues."
- Giorgi Papashvili, H-SHERA, H-Net Reviews
Byzantium/Modernism: The Byzantine as Method in Modernity. Brill Academic Publishers, 2015
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.
"This volume demonstrates firmly that the intercorrelations between Byzantium/Byzantinism and modernism extend beyond simple revivalism and reconstructionalism and can be both intrinsically complicated and surprisingly ambiguous. The mosaic approach in this book is highly effective."
- Przemysław Marciniak, YILLIK: Annual of Istanbul Studies
Abramtsevo and Its Legacies: Neo-National Art, Craft and Design. Guest issue of Experiment: A Journal of Russian Culture 25 (2019). Brill Academic Publishers, 2019.
Abramtsevo and Its Legacies: Neo-National Art, Craft and Design is a guest issue of Experiment: A Journal of Russian Culture, which features twenty articles on the subject of national themes and neo-romantic tendencies in the fine, decorative, and performing arts, as well as in fashion, art education, private and public collections, exhibitions, and displays.
Experiment (EXPT), an annual journal devoted to Russian culture, focuses on the movements of the early twentieth century. These include both traditional and non-traditional avenues of academic inquiry, such as studio painting and graffiti, sculpture and ballroom dancing, architecture and commercial advertising. Supervised by an editorial board of international stature, Experiment emphasizes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing upon archival sources while promoting and documenting the history of the Russian arts. The journal recognizes the achievements both of Imperial and Soviet Russia and is published under the auspices of the Institute of Modern Russian Culture at the University of Southern California.