From Realism to the Silver Age ― New Studies in Russian Artistic Culture

This volume of 13 essays presents rigorous new research by western and Russian scholars on Russian art of the 19th and early-20th centuries. Over More than three decades after the publication of Elizabeth Valkenier’s pioneering monograph, Russian Realist Art, this impressive collection showcases the latest methodology and subjects of inquiry, expanding the parameters of what has become an area of enormous intellectual and popular appeal. Major artists including Ilia Repin, Valentin Serov, and Wassily Kandinsky are considered afresh, as are the Peredvizhnik and Mir iskusstva movements and the Abramtsevo community. The book also breaks new ground to embrace subjects such as Russian graphic satire and children’s book illustration, as well as stimulating aspects of patronage and display.

Collectively, the essays include a range of approaches, from close textual readings to institutional critique. They also develop major themes inspired by Valkenier’s work, among them: the emergence and evolution of cultural institutions, the development of aesthetic discourse and artistic terminology, debates between the Academy of Arts and its challengers, art criticism and the Russian press, and the resonance of various forms of nationalism within the art world. These and other questions engage multiple disciplines?those of art history, Slavic Russian studies, and cultural history, among others?and promise to fuel a vibrant and ascendant field.

Rosalind P. Blakesley is reader in Russian and European art at the University of Cambridge, a fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and founder and co-director of the Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre. She is author of Russian Genre Painting in the Nineteenth Century and The Arts and Crafts Movement, and is co-editor of Russian Art and the West: A Century of Dialogue in Painting, Architecture, and the Decorative Arts (Northern Illinois University Press, 2007). She has curated exhibitions in London, Moscow, and Washington, DC.

Margaret Samu teaches art history at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women in New York City and lectures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her publications include articles on Russian and American art from the 18th through early 20th centuries in Woman’s Art Journal, Experiment, and Nineteenth-Century Studies, as well as the book, Women and Things: Gendered Material Strategies. She is president of the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA).