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.

The publication of this volume has been made possible by a grant from the Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute of Historical Research.

Hardiman and Kozicharow’s book will be a welcome addition to university library collections on Russian culture. It offers rewarding reading to anyone who studies, or simply enjoys, the richness of Russian modernism.

—Alexandra Smith, BASEES Newsletter (March 2019), p. 3

[...] the ten essays all offer valuable insights into the role of spirituality in Russian art. A great strength of the anthology on the whole is how it strikes a nice balance between indirectly addressing both specialists of Russian (art) history and its students. The essays paint a vivid picture of the various ways in which spirituality may be and has been approached, and also shed light on what the term means in different times and contexts. Read together, the essays in Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art exhibit how the concept of spirituality is intimately connected to even bigger themes, such as religious tradition, nationalism, ideology, and aesthetic innovation.

—Ingrid Nordgaard,  H-Net Reviews (October, 2018)

Though the territory it occupies is scarcely uncharted, this volume really does bring some fresh perspectives to it: it is good to note that its authors largely get away from the time-worn labels 'realism', 'symbolism', 'futurism', etc. It compares very favourably with its well-known predecessor Alter Icons (2010), even if its ambitions are fewer, and indeed with an earlier landmark volume of the same genre, Christianity and the Arts in Russia (1991). Gurianova quotes Matiushin (1913) 'Art is not an entertainment and not a temple right here in the middle of the marketplace, but a new understanding of world phenomena': here one can share the implicit excitement. 

—Robin Milner-Gulland, Journal of European Studies 48:2 (2018), pp. 205-208

© 2017 Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow. Copyright of each chapter is maintained by the author.

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Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow, Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2017, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0115

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Cover image: Mikhail Vrubel, Демон (сидящий) or Demon Seated (1890), detail, Wikimedia,