Is there a relationship between Russian icons and Russian avant-garde art? Andrew Soira tackles this question and comes to some surprising conclusions. He demonstrates how icons underpin the development of 19th- and 20-th century Russian art.

Birth of a National Icon examines the emergence of the intellectual in fin-de-siècle France, setting this important phenomenon against the backdrop of an emerging mass democracy and concentrating on the key role played by the avant-garde.

"A collection of essays by eleven scholars of Russian history, art, literature, cinema, philosophy, and theology that track key shifts in the production, circulation, and consumption of the Russian icon from Peter the Great's Enlightenment to the post-Soviet revival of the Orthodox Church"--Provided by publisher.

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.

Icon and Devotion offers the first extensive presentation in English of the making and meaning of Russian icons. The craft of icon-making is set into the context of forms of worship that emerged in the Russian Orthodox Church in the mid-seventeenth century. Oleg Tarasov shows how icons have held a special place in Russian consciousness because they represented idealized images of Holy Russia. He also looks closely at how and why icons were made. Wonder-working saints and the leaders of such religious schisms as the Old Believers appear in these pages, which are illustrated in halftones with miniature paintings, lithographs and engravings never before published in the English-speaking world. By tracing the artistic vocabulary, techniques and working methods of icon painters, Tarasov shows how icons have been integral to the history of Russian art, influenced by folk and mainstream currents alike. As well as articulating the specifically Russian piety they invoke, he analyzes the significance of icons in the cultural life of modern Russia in the context of popular prints and poster design.

02 This gorgeous book presents and discusses the oils, works on paper, and other artistic creations of William Holman Hunt, one of the three major artistic talents of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. This gorgeous book presents and discusses the oils, works on paper, and other artistic creations of William Holman Hunt, one of the three major artistic talents of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood.

A major resource, collecting essays, articles, manifestos, and works of art by Russian artists and critics in the early twentieth century, available again at the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution