Icon comes from the Greek word for religious images of all kinds, in all materials, and of every dimension. Objects of worship but also objets d’art, icons are linked to the Orthodox faith but also to the history of art. They are the tokens of a worldview that has inspired theologians as well as artists. In this regard, Jean-Claude Marcadé reminds us of the importance of Kandinsky’s discovery of painted and printed icons in those izbas of Northern Russia in which the painter says he learned “not to look at the picture sidelong, but to move within the picture, to live in the picture.” He offers us the keys to understanding the contemporary debate within post-Soviet Russia, where the dual status of icons remains of topical interest. Some Orthodox believers would like to see these venerated images returned to the churches, whereas they had previously been moved to museums where one sometimes see the faithful come to pray. Taking the writings of Nicolai Tarabukin (1889-1956) and Father Pavel Florensky (1882-1937) as their starting points, Marcadé, a great specialist of Russian art, as well as Igor Sokologorsky, a philosopher, study the interpretative aspect of these forms in traditional as well as modern art.
Laurence Bertrand Dorléac
Seminar of March 5th 2009
NICOLAÏ TARABOUKINE (1889-1956):
“THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ICON” (1916-1935)
JEAN-CLAUDE MARCADÉ
Icons and Art in the Twentieth Century
Icons have played a key role in the liturgical, theological, and intellectual life of Russia, and this is true in the field of Russian music, as well. Let us recall, among other things, that Kandinsky–that “modernist” par excellence of the twentieth century–said that he already had an existential familiarity with the synthesis of the arts (what at the end of the nineteenth century was called Gesamtkunstwerk or synesthesia) in the izbas of the Vologda Oblast and “in the Moscow churches, and especially in the cathedral of the Dormition and the church of St. Basil the Blessed.”
“In these magical houses I experienced something I have never encountered again since. They taught me not to look at the picture sidelong, but to move within the picture, to live in the picture. . . . The “red” corner (red is the same as beautiful in old Russian) thickly, completely covered with painted and printed icons of the saints, burning in front of it the red flame of a small pendant lamp, glowing and blowing like a knowing, discreetly murmuring, modest, and triumphant star, existing in and for itself. When I finally entered the room, I felt surrounded on all sides by painting, into which I had thus penetrated. The same feeling had previously lain dormant within me, quite unconsciously, when I had been in the Moscow churches, and especially in the cathedral of the Dormition and the church of St. Basil the Blessed.”`
The choice of these two Moscow churches is no accident. For, both of them are lined with frescos or wall paintings to which are added the wall of iconostases covered with icons.
Malevich. Head of a Peasant (two versions, late 1920s).
The link between icons and the Russian avant-garde manifested itself in a striking way, one could say exoterically, during the Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0, 10 in Petrograd in late 1915, when Malevich installed his “Suprematism of Painting” as the “Red/Beautiful Corner” of Russian Orthodox houses with, as central icon, the Quadrangle (what later on people took to calling the “Black Square against White Background”), which he called “the icon of our times.” This gesture was not meant to signify that it was to be an Orthodox icon, with its liturgical-cultural function (in the sense of the Seventh Ecumenical Council of Nicaea II, a tradition that has remained intact in the Eastern Church). For, ecclesiastical icons make no sense without the conjunction of the human and the divine in the incarnation of Christ. From this Orthodox point of view, the Malevichian icon, which could be said to manifest only a deus absconditus, is incomplete and has an air of Monophysitism about it.
The Art Historian Nicolai Tarabukin (1889-1956)
Tarabukin is known as a great Soviet art historian who, beginning in 1917, devoted his studies to the innovative arts, and quite particularly to left-wing art (the avant-garde), teaching during the 1920s at Proletkult (Proletarian Culture), at Vkhutemas (Higher Art and Technical Studios), at GAKhN (the State Academy of Artistic Sciences), and at the Meyerhold Theater. In France, people are familiar with translations of his brochures from the very early 1920s: L’expérience de la théorie de la peinture (Towards a Theory of Painting)and Du chevalet à la machine (From the Easel to the Machine), which analyze Soviet Constructivism and Productivism. Most of Tarabukin’s books, like those on the Gothic-Renaissance-Baroque, and the remarkable essay on Vrubel did not appear during his lifetime. The same goes for The Philosophy of Icons, which remained in manuscript form until 1999.
Transfiguration (16th century, Berat Church, Albania).
This work may seem to be a surprising one to come from a theorist and historian of art known rather for his rigorous study of forms and styles who relegated the thematic aspect of works to the background. And this choice of subject matter is all the more surprising as, in contrast to Father Pavel Florensky, Tarabukin was a layman–a believer, certainly, but someone whose experience with prayer, he tells us, was “weak.” And yet here we have a man who declares, in the Second Letter of his Philosophy of Icons (entitled “The Meaning of Icons”):
“When applied to religious creativity, aesthetic criteria become, quite suddenly, extraordinarily impoverished and narrow-minded; such criteria can shed light on but a tiny portion of its brilliant content. The aesthete or the philosopher who goes about analyzing religious creativity aesthetically appears a rather pitiful figure of a man, like one who tries to measure the volume of the sea with a dipper. One can, and one should even, speak of an icon aesthetics, but that is but one tiny feature of a very profound content, one problem in a larger whole. Moreover, that feature is conditioned by this whole; the former can be understood only by starting from the latter. And this whole is the religious meaning of the icon.”
School of Rublev. Nativity(Moscow, c. 1410-1430).
Philosophical and Theological Context
The main part of The Philosophy of Icons is made up of fourteen Letters addressed to his “dear friend,” which is reminiscent of the epistolary format of Father Florensky’s theological dissertation, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters (1914). There is no doubt that the passages in that treatise on art and mathematics gave Tarabukin a decisive impetus to write The Philosophy of Icons, even though he himself was neither a philosopher nor a theologian. Another impulse was to be given to the young Tarabukin by the famous lectures of Prince Yevgeny Trubetzkoy, which appeared between 1915 and 1918 and which took their title from his first lecture, “Speculation in Colors, on Russian Icons and their Place in the Destiny of Russia.” Finally, when he completed his text–clearly sometime in the late 1920s or the early 1930s–Tarabukin undertook a dialogue with Florensky’s Imaginary Numbers in Geometry (1922) and Lev Lossiev’s Dialectic of Myth (1930), traces of which are to be found in The Philosophy of Icons. The head-on opposition to Western art, from the Gothic onward, which is to be found among all Russian authors writing about icons (and particularly in Florensky), becomes in Lossiev and in Tarabukin a violent rejection of Western religious art.
Various Approaches to Icons