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27 pages, 10066 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Avant-Garde versus Tradition, a Case Study—Archaic Ritual Imagery in Malevich: The Icons, the Radical Abstraction, and Byzantine Hesychasm

by Dennis Ioffe

Arts 2023, 12(1), 10; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12010010 - 09 Jan 2023

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2760

Abstract

Serving as a conceptual introduction to the ARTS special issue, the article discusses the importance of archaic imagery and poetics of a major avant-garde actor who often symbolizes the main axis of Slavic radical modernism in its Avant-garde phase. Kazimir Malevich has widely [...] Read more.

Serving as a conceptual introduction to the ARTS special issue, the article discusses the importance of archaic imagery and poetics of a major avant-garde actor who often symbolizes the main axis of Slavic radical modernism in its Avant-garde phase. Kazimir Malevich has widely explored religious archaic imagery in his oeuvre, engaging in a dialog with a historical tradition of representation. The article discusses Malevich’s iconic legacy, zooming in on the philosophy of Malevich’s suprematist imagery of peasants, Orthodox icons, and the ways of visualizing of an inner Hesychast prayer. In this context, the paper also analyzes Russian philosophy of language, imiaslavie and Hesychasm as it stemmed out from the creative perception of Byzantine philosophical lore developed by Gregory Palamas and several other thinkers. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Slavic and Eastern-European Visuality: Modernity and Tradition)

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61 pages, 27945 KiB

Open AccessArticle

“More than Just a Poet”: Konstantin Batiushkov as an Art Critic, Art Manager, and Art Brut Painter

by Igor Pilshchikov

Arts 2022, 11(6), 126; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11060126 - 14 Dec 2022

Viewed by 2191

Abstract

This paper focuses on the Russian Golden Age author Konstantin Batiushkov’s involvement with fine arts. He is recognized as an exquisite elegist, an immediate predecessor of Alexander Pushkin in poetry, and “a pioneer of Russian Italomania.” Much less known is that Batiushkov was [...] Read more.

This paper focuses on the Russian Golden Age author Konstantin Batiushkov’s involvement with fine arts. He is recognized as an exquisite elegist, an immediate predecessor of Alexander Pushkin in poetry, and “a pioneer of Russian Italomania.” Much less known is that Batiushkov was always deeply involved with painting, drawing, and sculpture—not only as a poet but as Russia’s first art critic, an ad-lib art manager, who worked on behalf of the President of the Russian Academy of Arts Aleksei Olenin, and an amateur artist. The paper offers addenda to the commentary on his essay devoted to the 1814 academic exhibition, commonly referred to as the earliest significant example of Russian art criticism. Many of Batiushkov’s extant paintings and drawings belong to the time when he was mentally insane. Since he was a self-taught artist, his visual works of this period can be categorized as early examples of art brut. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Slavic and Eastern-European Visuality: Modernity and Tradition)

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13 pages, 1505 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Andrei Sen-Senkov and the Visual Poetics of the Global Commonplace

by Evgeny Pavlov

Arts 2022, 11(6), 123; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11060123 - 07 Dec 2022

Viewed by 1240

Abstract

This article considers the visual poetics of the prominent contemporary Russian poet and poetry translator Andrei Sen-Senkov whose work is examined through the Deleuzian lens as a prime example of rhizomatic poetry. Senkov’s poetics is that of the commonplace: working with cultural cliches, [...] Read more.

This article considers the visual poetics of the prominent contemporary Russian poet and poetry translator Andrei Sen-Senkov whose work is examined through the Deleuzian lens as a prime example of rhizomatic poetry. Senkov’s poetics is that of the commonplace: working with cultural cliches, and primarily visual material, it embeds very private concerns within a global matrix, with astounding and often theoretically challenging results. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Slavic and Eastern-European Visuality: Modernity and Tradition)

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29 pages, 22808 KiB

Open AccessArticle

“You Can Do This”: Working with the Artistic Legacy of El Lissitzky

by Willem Jan Renders

Arts 2022, 11(6), 109; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11060109 - 23 Oct 2022

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Abstract

The collection of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven comprises works by some 800 modern and contemporary artists, and El Lissitzky is one of the most important among them. This special position for Lissitzky is not due simply to the number of his works [...] Read more.

The collection of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven comprises works by some 800 modern and contemporary artists, and El Lissitzky is one of the most important among them. This special position for Lissitzky is not due simply to the number of his works in the collection. In addition, his oeuvre, ideas and artistic objectives correspond closely with the museum’s engagement with experimentation, radical creativity and public participation. As one of the most dynamic artists of his time, over the years Lissitzky has become more and more important to the museum. He was anything but a creator of static, self-contained works. His creativity was powerful and open to many, a mass of plans and projects bristling with life. Inspired by Lissitzky, the Van Abbemuseum was keen to make that verve and vitality tangible for today’s public. The primary way to do that was to research, show and discuss his original works, but in many cases it was possible to go one step further and reconstruct what was lost or finish what the artist had started. Also, Lissitzky’s works were a source of inspiration for a number of contemporary artists. In this article I will discuss how these works came to Eindhoven and give examples of how the Van Abbemuseum treated this artistic legacy in exhibitions, reconstructions, constructions and new artworks. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Slavic and Eastern-European Visuality: Modernity and Tradition)

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15 pages, 5633 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Representation of Corpus Patiens in Russian Art of the 1920s

by Nataliya Zlydneva

Arts 2022, 11(5), 105; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11050105 - 20 Oct 2022

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Abstract

Similar to the Russian historical avant-garde of the 1910s, which predicted the war and the social revolution of 1917, the late avant-garde of the 1920s anticipated the advent of the totalitarian terror and the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s. In figurative painting, this [...] Read more.

Similar to the Russian historical avant-garde of the 1910s, which predicted the war and the social revolution of 1917, the late avant-garde of the 1920s anticipated the advent of the totalitarian terror and the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s. In figurative painting, this manifested itself in a specific visual “lexicon” and modality (bodily violence and the fragmented body, frustration, motifs of loss, death and general catastrophe), as well as in the expressive style (that inherited but not duplicated the models of European expressionism). In addition to proposing an analytical classification of semantics and poetics of the painting of the 1920s, the present article discusses the issue of the representation of political power in visual art and the presence of archaic roots in the corpus patiens (lat.) motifs. It examines artefacts made by eminent as well as little-known painters of the late avant-garde, including Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Tyshler, Kliment Redko, Georgy Rublev, Aleksandr Drevin, Boris Golopolosov and others. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Slavic and Eastern-European Visuality: Modernity and Tradition)

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21 pages, 6758 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Visuality of Hortus Mirabilis in Krystyna Miłobędzka’s Poetry—A Study of Selected Examples

by Dorota Walczak-Delanois

Arts 2022, 11(5), 104; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11050104 - 18 Oct 2022

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Abstract

Krystyna Miłobędzka (born 1932) is one of the most interesting and unique phenomena of the Polish poetry scene of the 20th and 21st centuries. Two characteristics of her poetry, the visual character of her many poems and her preoccupation with the concept of [...] Read more.

Krystyna Miłobędzka (born 1932) is one of the most interesting and unique phenomena of the Polish poetry scene of the 20th and 21st centuries. Two characteristics of her poetry, the visual character of her many poems and her preoccupation with the concept of the garden-world, are worth a closer look. Miłobędzka’s poetry refers to the topoï of the garden-world in single poems and cycles of poetic texts. Her hortus mirabilis, inserts itself into the sphere of the metaphysical reflection of nature, giving Miłobędzka’s poetry a specific dynamic in which the “I”—the gardener—has a significant role as an observer, and as a creator of entities. The activity of looking, which happens, in fact, in all types of verbs and aspects, is in this specific sphere (look, watch, see), fundamental to defining oneself in the world and the world’s relationship to oneself. In this perspective, the image of the garden from childhood, is confronted by a necessary new visualization. The temporal aspect of the garden is at the center of existence, in the cyclical return of nature’s laws of rebirth and death, which are relevant to the personal, singular perspective of the end in many of Miłobędzka’s volumes. In Anaglify (Anaglyphs), some poems particularly fit the issue of visuality in poetry, not only at the conceptual level, the place granted to observation, the poet-particular observer, but the poem itself. They are conceived as graphic and pictorial realizations. Poems from the volume dwanaście wierszy w kolorze (twelve poems in color) or wszystkowiersze (omnipoems) are special cases of these. The selected words are conceived in color, and their arrangement on the space of the page has meaning. The parallel between looking and writing, which Miłobędzka consistently uses in her writing method and poetically admits, is also very important. Although her poetic diction alludes to historical avant-garde and linguistic poetry achievements, her lyrical savoir-faire is characterized by a certain new minimalist construction and a separate, recognizable style. Miłobędzka’s innovativeness lies in combining seemingly distant and sometimes poetically opposite categories: full, ambiguous image-in-poem and asceticism by means of expression, such as a minimal number of words. Her poetry is deeply rooted in perceiving, seeing, watching, and contemplating the world—faithful to its physicality but also open to the most essential questions of philosophy asking about existence and its limits. This new visibility of elements is reflected in authentic poetic delight and in the “visualizing” form, where the poem also becomes an image on the plane of a sheet of paper or becoming one side of the house wall as a mural poem. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Slavic and Eastern-European Visuality: Modernity and Tradition)

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26 pages, 9281 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Andrey Bely as an Artist vis-à-vis Aleksandr Golovin: How the Cover of the Journal Dreamers Was Created

by Monika Spivak

Arts 2022, 11(5), 99; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11050099 - 30 Sep 2022

Viewed by 1932

Abstract

Samuil Alyanski, the owner and founder of the Alkonost publishing house (1918–1923), as early as 1918 had decided to issue a journal called Dreamers’ Notes, meant to bring together the Symbolist writers remaining in Russia after the October Revolution, primarily Aleksandr Blok, Vyacheslav [...] Read more.

Samuil Alyanski, the owner and founder of the Alkonost publishing house (1918–1923), as early as 1918 had decided to issue a journal called Dreamers’ Notes, meant to bring together the Symbolist writers remaining in Russia after the October Revolution, primarily Aleksandr Blok, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and Andrei Bely. Despite the generally accepted view based on the memoirs of Alyanski, Andrei Bely played a leading role in the creation of the journal including the design of the cover commissioned by Alyanski from the famous Modernist artist Aleksandr Golovin. This article analyzes the sketches that Andrei Bely proposed as an idea for the journal cover as well as establishing their connection with the writer’s visionary drawings from the period of life when he was close to Rudolf Steiner and with book graphics from the period of his collaboration with the publishing house Alkonost. At first cursory glance, there is little in common between the cover of Dreamers’ Notes drawn by Golovin in the Modernist style and the sketches of Andrei Bely who was trying to make the journal а platform for Anthroposophy. However, as demonstrated in the article, all of Bely’s ideas were utilized by Golovin in creating his own artistic masterpiece. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Slavic and Eastern-European Visuality: Modernity and Tradition)

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21 pages, 14939 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Sergei Sigei and Aleksei Kruchenykh: Visual Poetry in the Russian Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde

by Willem G. Weststeijn

Arts 2022, 11(5), 98; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11050098 - 29 Sep 2022

Viewed by 1881

Abstract

One of the characteristic features of the Russian Avant-garde is the close connection between painting and poetry. Futurist poets (Vladimir Maiakovskii, Aleksei Kruchenykh) were educated as artists, their books were illustrated by the famous painters of their time (Mikhail Larionov, Nataliia Goncharova). Some [...] Read more.

One of the characteristic features of the Russian Avant-garde is the close connection between painting and poetry. Futurist poets (Vladimir Maiakovskii, Aleksei Kruchenykh) were educated as artists, their books were illustrated by the famous painters of their time (Mikhail Larionov, Nataliia Goncharova). Some of the Futurists designed their own books and did all kinds of typographical experiments. One of the most productive writers, designers, editors and publishers of such books was Aleksei Kruchenykh (1886–1968), who only recently has been given honour where it is due. One of his admirers is the Neo-avant-garde poet-artist Sergei Sigei (1947–2014), who was the first to publish some of Kruchenykh’s hitherto unpublished works and in many respects repeated, changed, and further developed his forerunner’s experiments with typographical signs and book production. Some of Sigei’s unique handmade books are dedicated to Kruchenykh. Sigei, the leader of the group of the ‘transfurists’ (Ry Nikonova, Boris Konstriktor, A. Nik, Vladimir Erl’) may be considered the main representative of the Russian Neo-avant-garde. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Slavic and Eastern-European Visuality: Modernity and Tradition)

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17 pages, 22533 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Digital High: The Art of Visual Seduction?

by Alexander Zholkovsky

Arts 2022, 11(5), 97; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11050097 - 28 Sep 2022

Viewed by 2555

Abstract

The paper focuses on the structure of an advertising image for a 2010s computer company in the neo-capitalist Moscow, Russia. The analysis looks back to the pioneering studies of advertising as a commercial “applied art” by Sergei Eisenstein, Leo Spitzer and Roland Barthes. [...] Read more.

The paper focuses on the structure of an advertising image for a 2010s computer company in the neo-capitalist Moscow, Russia. The analysis looks back to the pioneering studies of advertising as a commercial “applied art” by Sergei Eisenstein, Leo Spitzer and Roland Barthes. The picture’s plot and composition are shown to be a consistent and sophisticated near-artistic design that uses textual puns, poetic topoi and visual stereotypes (in particular, sex appeal) for the promotion of the advertised merchandise (a smartphone). The psychological naturalization of the design is clarified with references to the insights of Sigmund Freud, Heinz Kohut and Gerard Genette into the dynamics of narcissism. In a widening circle, the contextualization of the design involves: the literary topos of using birds in love poetry (made famous by its treatment in the lyrics of the Roman poet Catullus) and in painterly variations on the theme; the narcissist discourse of a modern Russian poet (Eduard Limonov); and the grand pictorial tradition of portraying a nude (Venus) before the mirror (relevant classical canvases are considered briefly). Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Slavic and Eastern-European Visuality: Modernity and Tradition)

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14 pages, 1559 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Visions of Disrupted Chronologies: Sergei Eisenstein and Hedwig Fechheimer’s Cubist Egypt

by Leanne Rae Darnbrough

Arts 2022, 11(5), 92; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11050092 - 21 Sep 2022

Viewed by 1615

Abstract

By juxtaposing two ostensibly divergent characters, the Jewish art historian and Egyptologist Hedwig Fechheimer (1871–1942) and Soviet filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), this paper investigates how both approaches folded time, creating Cubist chronologies. Fechheimer adapted the philological focus of her Berlin School [...] Read more.

By juxtaposing two ostensibly divergent characters, the Jewish art historian and Egyptologist Hedwig Fechheimer (1871–1942) and Soviet filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), this paper investigates how both approaches folded time, creating Cubist chronologies. Fechheimer adapted the philological focus of her Berlin School contemporaries to create an ahistorical, anti-teleological grammar of ancient Egyptian art which espoused an artistic affinity between the Egyptians and the Cubist movement. Eisenstein, who held a copy of one of Fechheimer’s books in his personal library, took a similar approach in the development of his critiques of historical allegory. This paper looks specifically at two shots of a sphinx during the bridge sequence in the 1927 film October to demonstrate how they correspond to Fechheimer’s views on Egyptian art and also function peculiarly within the film. Ultimately, I aim to demonstrate how the interpellations of the sphinx demonstrate a particular critique of historicity that Eisenstein later expands upon in his Ivan the Terrible films. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Slavic and Eastern-European Visuality: Modernity and Tradition)

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20 pages, 1362 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Bridge and Narrativization of Vision: Ambrose Bierce and Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrey Astvatsaturov

Arts 2022, 11(5), 89; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11050089 - 19 Sep 2022

Viewed by 2179

Abstract

The article contains a comparative study of the visual poetics observed in the literary texts of American writer Ambrose Bierce and Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov. In particular, the study focuses on Bierce’s short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and Nabokov’s three [...] Read more.

The article contains a comparative study of the visual poetics observed in the literary texts of American writer Ambrose Bierce and Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov. In particular, the study focuses on Bierce’s short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and Nabokov’s three short stories “Details of a Sunset”, “Aurelian”, and “Perfection”, in all three of which a number of narrative tools, images, and motifs borrowed from Bierce’s text can be found. The representation of the bridge and the narrativization of mystical insight are regarded as the principal features of the correlative imagery systems. These features are analyzed in order to discover Bierce’s and Nabokov’s understandings of the artist, visual imagination, and the freedom of will. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Slavic and Eastern-European Visuality: Modernity and Tradition)

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31 pages, 17472 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Metaphor and the Material Object in Moscow Conceptualism

by Mary A. Nicholas

Arts 2022, 11(5), 88; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11050088 - 19 Sep 2022

Viewed by 2605

Abstract

Discussions of conceptual art both East and West have focused on the notion of “dematerialization” of the artwork and the substitution of “art as idea” for concrete works of art. Yet such an approach oversimplifies the role of materiality in works of conceptual [...] Read more.

Discussions of conceptual art both East and West have focused on the notion of “dematerialization” of the artwork and the substitution of “art as idea” for concrete works of art. Yet such an approach oversimplifies the role of materiality in works of conceptual art generally and underestimates the transformative role of the concrete object in early Moscow conceptualism in particular. An examination of the Nest, an influential group of artists active from 1974 to 1979, as well as other analytical conceptualists who highlighted materiality in their unofficial art practice suggests that their use of concrete objects and realized metaphors revolutionized late-Soviet unofficial art, moving it from an outdated modernist model of artistic autonomy to a more dynamic and engaged postmodernism. Their previously underappreciated contribution to the evolution of global conceptualism expands our picture of the movement as a whole and provides needed context for late-Soviet art and the post-Soviet period that followed. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Slavic and Eastern-European Visuality: Modernity and Tradition)

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20 pages, 11232 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Trickster in Drag: Vlad Mamyshev-Monroe’s Aesthetic of Camp

by Mark Lipovetsky

Arts 2022, 11(5), 87; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11050087 - 13 Sep 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1998

Abstract

The article discusses an artistic method of the post-Soviet artist Vlad Mamyshev-Monroe (1969–2013) as the nexus of several traditions embedded in modernist legacy. His main genre is remastered (scratched) photographs depicting him impersonating various historical and fictional characters, from Marylyn Monroe (whom he [...] Read more.

The article discusses an artistic method of the post-Soviet artist Vlad Mamyshev-Monroe (1969–2013) as the nexus of several traditions embedded in modernist legacy. His main genre is remastered (scratched) photographs depicting him impersonating various historical and fictional characters, from Marylyn Monroe (whom he considered his alter ego) to Hitler, Jesus Christ, and Putin. His art and artistically designed image creatively develop the tradition of modernist life-creation (zhiznetvorchestvo), which he enriches by camp, thus becoming a pioneer of this elusive sensibility in post-Soviet culture. Camp, in turn, facilitates Mamyshev-Monroe’s self-fashioning as the trickster whose transgressivity and ambivalence absorb his queerness and drag spectacles, and whose hyperperformativity manifests itself in his performative art. The article analyzes how Mamyshev-Monroe appropriates various cultural material in the trickster’s way by using camp for its critique and deconstruction. The case of Mamyshev-Monroe is especially important since it demonstrates the limits of the trickster’s transgression that resists its instrumentalization by the authoritarian state. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Slavic and Eastern-European Visuality: Modernity and Tradition)

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15 pages, 10402 KiB

Open AccessArticle

New Anthropology in Works of Vasily Chekrygin

by Ekaterina Bobrinskaya

Arts 2022, 11(5), 86; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11050086 - 13 Sep 2022

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Abstract

The article considers the concept of new anthropology in the works of Vasily Chekrygin in the context of the scientific and philosophical ideas of his time. Chekrygin’s anthropology drew on the new concepts of life, discoveries made in biology and chemistry and new [...] Read more.

The article considers the concept of new anthropology in the works of Vasily Chekrygin in the context of the scientific and philosophical ideas of his time. Chekrygin’s anthropology drew on the new concepts of life, discoveries made in biology and chemistry and new ideas of matter. A paradoxical fusion of scientific and occult thought, coupled with ideas of Christian anthropology, formed a crucial component of Chekrygin’s works. The artist produced his anthropological project at the intersection of two cultural paradigms: that of Christianity, on the one hand, and science and the occult, on the other. This blend of such heterogeneous concepts was not an accidental fact of the artist’s biography. It makes it possible to see certain problems and antinomies that were fundamental to the Russian culture of the 1910s through the early 1920s. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Slavic and Eastern-European Visuality: Modernity and Tradition)

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20 pages, 3591 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Metaphysics of Presence and the Invisible Traces: Eduard Steinberg’s Polemical Dialogues

by Irina Sakhno

Arts 2022, 11(5), 85; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11050085 - 09 Sep 2022

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Abstract

The article examines the paintings by Eduard Steinberg, a Soviet non-conformist painter from the 1950s to the 1980s from the standpoint of the plastics of his language. The author focuses on Steinberg’s polemical dialogues with the greatest names in Russian and European avant-garde [...] Read more.

The article examines the paintings by Eduard Steinberg, a Soviet non-conformist painter from the 1950s to the 1980s from the standpoint of the plastics of his language. The author focuses on Steinberg’s polemical dialogues with the greatest names in Russian and European avant-garde art, including both common points and disagreements. By analyzing the painter’s texts through the prism of poetics of the invisible and the ontology of traces, the author observes Steinberg’s early art of the 1960s and 1970s as an attempt to create a symbolic language and attach an ideographic status to art. Through simultaneous use of two artistic strategies—mystical and religious symbolism, coupled with metageometry Steinberg arrives at optical formalism and spectator dialectics, vying to see the invisible and record the polysemantic nature of the symbolic sign. The article analyzes the influence Vladimir Veisberg and his “invisible painting” had on Steinberg, including the “white on white” style, as well as Giorgio Morandi’s still-life vision of metaphysical painting. The author believes that by relying on analogies and reminiscences, Steinberg refers his audience to his predecessors and joins them in an intertextual dialogue. A special place here belongs to Kazimir Malevich with his radicalism, his trend towards metasymbolism and the language of the basic forms—the circle, square and cross. All of these are close to Steinberg’s geometric plastics of the 1970s and 1980s. Staying true to the pure forms of Suprematism, Steinberg builds up an aesthetics of the geometric forms of his own, where abstract art comes together with the ontological progress towards God. The Countryside series (1985–1987) shows influence of Кazimir Malevich’s Peasant Cycle, some principles of icon painting and Neo-Primitivist art. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Slavic and Eastern-European Visuality: Modernity and Tradition)

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11 pages, 230 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Physical and Metaphysical Visualities: Vasily Rozanov and Historical Artefacts

by Henrietta Mondry

Arts 2022, 11(4), 70; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11040070 - 06 Jul 2022

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Abstract

In Russian modernism, the work of writer Vasily Rozanov (1856–1919) presents an understudied case of constructing a worldview based on the study of the parallel history of human physicality and artefacts, which he articulated within the framework of the physical and metaphysical. I [...] Read more.

In Russian modernism, the work of writer Vasily Rozanov (1856–1919) presents an understudied case of constructing a worldview based on the study of the parallel history of human physicality and artefacts, which he articulated within the framework of the physical and metaphysical. I argue that Rozanov widened the domain of what was viewed as “compelling visuality” at his time, in line with the subjective synthesising principles of his worldview. He looked in art for the manifestations of that which he considered to be eternal and trans-historical: the mystery of the metaphysical roots of human sexuality. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Slavic and Eastern-European Visuality: Modernity and Tradition)

16 pages, 2671 KiB

Open AccessArticle

1905 and Art: From Aesthetes to Revolutionaries

by Christina Lodder

Arts 2022, 11(3), 65; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11030065 - 15 Jun 2022

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Abstract

This article examines the impact that the experience of the 1905 Revolution had on the political attitudes of professional artists of various creative persuasions and on the younger generation who were still attending art schools. It inevitably focuses on a few representatives and [...] Read more.

This article examines the impact that the experience of the 1905 Revolution had on the political attitudes of professional artists of various creative persuasions and on the younger generation who were still attending art schools. It inevitably focuses on a few representatives and argues that Realists as well as more innovative artists like Valentin Serov and the World of Art group became critical of the regime and began to produce works satirizing the Tsar and his government. These artists did not, however, take their disenchantment further and express a particular ideology in their works or join any specific political party. The author also suggests that the Revolution affected art students like Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova, who subsequently became leaders of the avant-garde and developed the style known as Neo-Primitivism. The influence of 1905 can be seen in their pursuit of creative freedom, the subjects they chose, and the distinctly anti-establishment ethos that emerged in their Neo-Primitivist works around 1910. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Slavic and Eastern-European Visuality: Modernity and Tradition)

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13 pages, 3428 KiB

Open AccessArticle

“Wings of Freedom”: Petr Miturich and Aero-Constructivism

by John E. Bowlt

Arts 2022, 11(3), 52; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11030052 - 20 Apr 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2438

Abstract

The article focuses on the aerodynamic experiments of Petr Vasil’evich Miturich (1887–1956), in particular his so-called letun, a project comparable to Vladimir Tatlin’s Letatlin, but less familiar. Miturich became interested in flight during the First World War, elaborating his first flying [...] Read more.

The article focuses on the aerodynamic experiments of Petr Vasil’evich Miturich (1887–1956), in particular his so-called letun, a project comparable to Vladimir Tatlin’s Letatlin, but less familiar. Miturich became interested in flight during the First World War, elaborating his first flying apparatus in 1918 before constructing a prototype and undertaking a test flight on 27 December 1921—which might be described as an example of Russian Aero-Constructivism (by analogy with Italian Aeropittura). Miturich’s basic deduction was that modern man must travel not by horse and cart, but with the aid of a new, ecological apparatus—the undulator—a mechanism which, thanks to its undulatory movements, would move like a fish or snake. The article delineates the general context of Miturich’s experiments, for example, his acquaintance with the ideas of Tatlin and Velemir Khlebnikov (in 1924 Miturich married the artist, Vera Khlebnikova, Velemir’s sister) as well as the inventions of Igor’ Sikorsky, Fridrikh Tsander, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and other scientists who contributed to the “First Universal Exhibition of Projects and Models of Interplanetary Apparatuses, Devices and Historical Materials” held in Moscow in 1927. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Slavic and Eastern-European Visuality: Modernity and Tradition)

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12 pages, 7620 KiB

Open AccessEssay

All the Missiles Are One Missile Revisited: Dazzle in the Work of Zofia Kulik

by Sarah Wilson

Arts 2022, 11(6), 116; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11060116 - 11 Nov 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1423

Abstract

This essay revisits one of Polish artist Zofia Kulik’s most important ‘photocarpets’, produced in a moment of hope, retrospection yet continuing war in 1993; seen by an international public in 1997. Visually, its composition is dominated by late Soviet sculptures symbolising Mother Russia [...] Read more.

This essay revisits one of Polish artist Zofia Kulik’s most important ‘photocarpets’, produced in a moment of hope, retrospection yet continuing war in 1993; seen by an international public in 1997. Visually, its composition is dominated by late Soviet sculptures symbolising Mother Russia and military aggression, yet the composition, ‘kilim-like’, with an additional reference to Polish Catholicism, involves bilateral and rotational symmetries which undermine significations of power and might with various other symbols: bodies, naked or draped, and Polish TV screenshots from both the military and entertainment worlds. ‘Dazzle’, the camouflage-related military term is also related to tears and (repressed) mourning. The female artist’s attitude to gender is crucial. The piece is both a ‘revisualisation’ and ‘rewriting’, relating both to the author’s previous texts on the artist from 1999 and 2001, and Kulik’s own rediscovery of her Ukrainian heritage, which reframes her own vision and understanding of the piece in 2022. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Slavic and Eastern-European Visuality: Modernity and Tradition)

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