Full Description
Passage into the modern world left the Russian icon profoundly altered. It fell into new hands, migrated to new homes, and acquired new forms and meanings. Icons were made in the factories of foreign industrialists and destroyed by iconoclasts of the proletariat. Even the icon's traditional functions—whether in the feast days of the church or the pageantry of state power—were susceptible to the transformative forces of modernization. In Alter Icons: The Russian Icon and Modernity, eleven scholars of Russian history, art, literature, cinema, philosophy, and theology 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 Orthodoxy. Alter Icons shows how the twin pressures of secular scholarship and secular art transformed the Russian icon from a sacred image in the church to a masterpiece in the museum, from a parochial craftwork to a template for the avant-garde, and from a medieval interface with the divine to a modernist prism for seeing the world anew.
In addition to the editors, the contributors are Robert Bird, Elena Boeck, Shirley A. Glade, John-Paul Himka, John Anthony McGuckin, Robert L. Nichols, Sarah Pratt, Wendy R. Salmond, and Vera Shevzov.
Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Jefferson J. A. Gatrall
Part I: Empire of Icons
1. Strength in Numbers or Unity in Diversity? Compilations of Miracle-Working Virgin Icons
Elena Boeck
2. Between Purity and Pluralism: Icon and Anathema in Modern Russia, 1860-1917
Vera Shevzov
3. Nicholas II and the Russian Icon
Robert L. Nichols
Part II: Curators and Commissars
4. Anisimov and the Rediscovery of Old Russian Icons
Shirley A. Glade
5. Moments in the History of an Icon Collection: The National Museum in Lviv, 1905-2005
John-Paul Himka
6. How America Discovered Russian Icons: The Soviet Loan Exhibition of 1930-1932
Wendy R. Salmond
Part III: Intermedial Icon
7. Polenov, Merezhkovsky, Ainalov: Archeology of the Christ Image
Jefferson J. A. Gatrall
8. Avant-Garde Poets and Imagined Icons
Sarah Pratt
Part IV: Projections
9. Florensky and the Binocular Body
Douglas Greenfield
10. Florensky and Iconic Dreaming
John Anthony McGuckin
11. Tarkovsky and the Celluloid Icon
Robert Bird
Afterword
Vera Shevzov
Selected Bibliography
Contributors
Index
