For Stelletsky, however, imitation could potentially play an important role in the understanding of Old Russian art. He wrote in his memoirs: "It befits the Russian people to have their own art. Over the years, I understood that only by learning the artistic legacy of our ancestors and even, at the beginning, slavishly imitating it, it is possible…to resurrect our own Russian, native beauty."23 When it came to religious painting, Stelletsky's opinion was similar. In an article he contributed to the Rigabased journal *Native Antiquity* (*Rodnaia starina*) in 1928 — a year after he completed his work at Saint-Serge — he wrote of the importance of following the canon when painting icons: "One of the Old Russian system's main responsibilities was, as we know, the precise observation of the canon, which embraced all sides of spiritual and everyday life. The canon of icon painting demanded its painters' stringent observation of the *established style*."24 These restrictions appeared to place "shackles" (*okovy*) on artistic creativity, but were essential in continuing the tradition.25 Although he did not discuss his own icon painting, it is clear from the article that preserving the tradition, as handed down through hundreds of years of history, was key for Stelletsky.26

This dedication most likely stemmed, at least in part, from Stelletsky's firm Orthodox faith. His convictions were so strong that he had rejected Diaghilev's invitation to design for his ballet of the life of Christ — *Liturgie* — in 1915 on religious and moral grounds.27 Deeply religious and, as prominent émigré critic Mikhail Osorgin put it,

23 Quoted in Oleg Leikind and Dmitrii Severiukhin, *Khudozhniki russkoi emigratsii, 1917–1941: biograficheskii slovar′* (St Petersburg: Izd-vo Chernysheva, 1994), p. 431. "Русскому народу подобает иметь свое искусство. С годами я понял, что, только изучая художественное наследие наших предков и даже сначала рабски ему подражая, можно […] воскресить свою русскую родную красоту."

24 Dmitrii Stelletskii, 'Dragotsennaia tsep′', *Rodnaia starina*, 5. 6 (1928), 21–22 (p. 22). "Одною из главных обязанностей древне-русскаго строя было, как известно, точное соблюдение канона, обнимавшаго все стороны духовной и обыденной жизни. Канон иконописи требовал от изографов строжайшаго соблюдения установленнаго типа."

25 *Ibid.*

26 Stelletsky was up to date with the latest scholarship on icon painting and responded enthusiastically to Aleksandr Animisov's study of the recently cleaned Vladimir Mother of God in a letter to Princess Natalia Iashvil, who helped translate the book into English (Letters from Stelletsky to Princess Natalia Iashvil, 2 and 20 March 1928 (KI 41), Kondakov Institute.) Animisov revealed that the oldest layer of paint dated back to the eleventh to twelfth centuries, making the Vladimir Mother of God much older than previously speculated by Nikodim Kondakov. The book reproduced images of the icon along with a diagram of the layers of repair and restoration (A. J. Animisov, *Our Lady of Vladimir*, trans. by N. G. Yaschwill and T. N. Rodzianko (Prague: Seminarium Kondakovianum, 1928)). For more information on Animisov's text and the effort to get it published, see Shirley A. Glade, 'Anisimov and the Rediscovery of Old Russian Icons', in *Alter Icons: The Russian Icon and Modernity*, ed. by Jefferson J. A. Gatrall and Douglas Greenfield (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), pp. 89–111.

27 See Vera Bunina's diary entry on 16 August 1930 in Ivan Bunin and Vera Muromtseva-Bunina, *Ustami Buninykh. Dnevniki Ivana Alekseevicha i Very Nikolaevny i drugie arkhivnye materialy*, ed. by Militsa Grin, Vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Posev, 1982), p. 230. See also John E. Bowlt, 'Léon Bakst, Natalia Goncharova and Pablo Picasso', *Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes, 1909–1929*, ed. by Jane Pritchard and Geoffrey Marsh (London: V&A Publications, 2010), pp. 103–17 (p. 108). It was Stelletsky who suggested that Diaghilev ask Goncharova to carry out the designs, and Stelletsky later wrote to Goncharova, asking for her help in getting in touch with Diaghilev. Letters from Stelletsky to Goncharova, 30 June 1917, 13 July 1917 (f. 180, ed. khr. 1714–15), Tretyakov Gallery. This dialogue

"Russian Orthodox to the bone".28 Stelletsky called his work at Saint-Serge "a service to God".29 Indeed he took on this two-year commission only at the cost of room and board at time when money and work were hard to come by, suggesting this work was more important than material concerns.30

Yet in practice, while visual continuity with Old Russian churches in Russia was a central concern, Stelletsky more loosely interprets older modes of representation in many of his church designs. This freer, more experimental approach to medieval revivalism was in keeping with the neo-Russian style, especially the neo-Russian tendencies incorporated within the modern Russian architectural style popular at the turn of the century: *style moderne*. 31 In what William Brumfield has described as "a remarkable confluence of purpose and understanding", contemporaries of Stelletsky such as Sergei Maliutin and Roerich — who were both at Talashkino — worked with *style moderne* architects to decorate interiors of churches and private buildings.32 This collaborative effort helped recreate "the logical bond between material and structure in the Old Russian or folk traditions of pre-Petrine Russian architecture" but generally emphasised theatricality and drama over imitation.33 Stelletsky is not associated with this group of neo-Russian practitioners (which also included, among others, Konstantin Korovin, Mikhail Vrubel, and the Vasnetsov brothers), yet given his virtually unacknowledged church commissions in Russia and work at Saint-Serge in emigration, he undoubtedly engaged with the more modern strand of the neo-Russian style. He collaborated with Aleksei Shchusev, who was one of the most prominent proponents of *style moderne* in Russian church architecture, on several occasions. According to Brumfield, no one but Shchusev "understood better the harmony between medieval forms and the new aesthetic", for he was a follower of the tradition begun at Abramtsevo that — in words that could be applied to Stelletsky's work as well — "grasp[ed] and sens[ed] the sincerity of ancient times and creatively imitate[ed] it not in the copying out and correcting — that is, distorting — of old forms

suggests that even if the two artists had seemingly oppositional approaches, this did not rule out friendly relations and mutual respect between them.

28 Mikhail Osorgin, 'Pamiati D. S. Stelletskago', *Tserkovnyi vestnik Zapadno-Evropeiskoi eparkhii*, 6 (1947), 9–12 (p. 10). "до мозга костей русским православным человеком".

29 Aleksandr Semenov-Tian'shanskii, 'Pamiati D. S. Stelletskogo', in *Obshchestvo "Ikona" v Parizhe*, ed. by G. I. Vzdornov, Z. E. Zalesskaia, and O. V. Lelekova (Moscow: Progress traditsiia, 2002), pp. 152–58 (p. 156). "служба Богу".

30 Donald A. Lowrie, *Saint Sergius in Paris: The Orthodox Theological Institute* (London: S. P. C. K., 1954), p. 13.

31 For more on *style moderne* or the 'new style' in architecture see William Craft Brumfield, *The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture* (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991); William Craft Brumfield, *A History of Russian Architecture* (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), pp. 426–37.

32 Brumfield, *The Origins of Modernism*, p. 80. Stelletsky met Roerich at Talashkino and found much in common with him, writing to Kustodiev, 'I really agree with [Roerich] — I speak to him a lot about different questions.' Letter from Stelletsky to Kustodiev, undated, quoted in Zhuravleva, *Talashkino. Sbornik*, p. 357.

33 Brumfield, *The Origins of Modernism*, p. 80.

but in the creation of new forms that express… the idea of a place of communion between the people and God".34

Shchusev's first church project — the Saint Sergius of Radonezh church in Tula province commemorating the Battle of Kulikovo — was in fact carried out with the assistance of Stelletsky and another artist, Vladimir Komarovsky, who both painted the icons.35 Count Iury Olsufev, a patron and close friend of Stelletsky, requested both artists' services for the church, and the work was executed sometime between 1911 and 1914.36 It is clear that Old Russian icons served as important source material for this commission: in a letter to Tretyakov Gallery director Ilia Ostroukhov from 1913, Stelletsky requested the return of his Saint Nicholas icon to create the iconostasis for Saint Sergius of Radonezh at Kulikovo fields.37 However, the only design by Stelletsky known to have survived (after the Revolution, the church was ransacked and badly damaged during the Bolshevik iconoclasm) is a sketch of Christ on the cross that is hardly canonical.38 The image relates closely to his secular work in the stylised treatment of form and diverts from tradition in the unusual blue colouring of Christ's skin. It would appear, at least in the case of this design, Stelletsky shared Shchusev's willingness to deviate from convention in design but preserve the spirit of medieval Russia.

Over a decade later, Stelletsky received the most significant commission of his career when he was tasked with decorating the entire interior of Saint-Serge — arguably the most important centre of the Orthodox faith outside of Russia — based on his own designs. Although he had developed a reputation for copying Old Russian artistic precursors very closely, Stelletsky nonetheless stepped outside of the canon for the church's vibrant wall scheme. Rather than superimposing a medieval rubric

34 *Ibid.,* p. 104.

35 *Ibid.*

36 Kari Kotkavaara, *Progeny of the Icon: Émigré Revivalism and the Vicissitudes of the Eastern Orthodox Sacred Image* (Åbo: Åbo Akademi, 1999), p. 183.

37 Letter from Dmitry Stelletsky to Ilia Ostroukhov, 2 August 1913 (f. 10, ed. khr. 6037), Tretyakov Gallery.

38 For an illustration, see E. V. Tarasenko, *Dary i priobreteniia: novye postupleniia v sobranii grafiki XVIIInachala XX veka. Risunok, pechatnaia grafika. Katalog vystavki* (exh. cat., Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 2013). Stelletsky also decorated a second church before emigrating in 1914. As Galina Zelenskaia has established, it was commissioned by Count Aleksandr Medem in 1911 for his estate Aleksandriia near Khvalynski on the Volga and dedicated to Saints Constantine and Helene. The iconostasis was lost after the Revolution, so it is difficult to know what form Stelletsky's icons took before emigration, but the fact that he executed some church painting before Saint-Serge is significant. Cited in Kotkavaara, *Progeny*, pp. 182–83. During the First World War, Stelletsky executed several travelling iconostases for Russian soldiers stationed in Champagne, and one of these survived and was held in the private collection of Nikolai Semenov-Tian'shansky — brother to Aleksandr. Stelletsky reworked it in 1939–40 when it was installed at the Church of Saints Peter and Paul in Châtenay-Malabry. For more information, see T. V. Iur′eva, 'Ikonostasy D. S. Stelletskogo', in *X nauchnye chteniia pamiati Iriny Petrovny Bolottsevoi: Sbornik statei*, ed. by O. B. Kuznetsova and E. Iu. Makarova (Yaroslavl: Avers Press, 2006), pp. 144–60, http://www.icon-art.info/book\_contents.php?book\_id=60. For a reproduction, see Semenov-Tian-Shanskii, 'Stelletskii', pp. 34–35.

onto Saint-Serge, Stelletsky's designs were far closer to the neo-Russian style's free interpretation of Old Russian forms and folk motifs, particularly within *style moderne*. Yet he still maintained enough of a visual connection to earlier Russian churches — primarily through the hanging cloth motifs running along the lower areas of the walls of the church — for the building to be convincing as an Orthodox church.

Stelletsky's experimentation may have partly been out of necessity, given the church building was not Orthodox, but nineteenth-century gothic. Unlike an Orthodox cross-in-square church plan, as seen, for example, at the Church of the Nativity of the Virgin at the Ferapontov Monastery, Saint-Serge follows a standard cruciform plan, thus presenting Stelletsky with a challenge: how does an artist develop an Orthodox programme in this structure? Instead of limiting his use of the church's space, incorporating the foreign structural elements such as the rose windows and the barrelvaulted nave into the scheme ended up inspiring some of the more inventive designs at Saint-Serge. This creative flexibility emphasises that Stelletsky, though attentive to Orthodox Church requirements, used the most public commission of his career to assert his own style and boldly experiment on a large scale.

Through Stelletsky's murals, Saint-Serge became not a 'copy' of an Old Russian church, as some of his contemporaries viewed it, but a new exemplar of the neo-Russian style in emigration.39 Like other artists and architects working in this style, Stelletsky drew from and reinterpreted an array of Old Russian sources such as embroidery, manuscripts, and icons, and took more recent developments in artist colonies such as Abramtsevo into account. The widespread revival of Old Russian culture that reached its peak in early twentieth-century Russian art and architecture had been cut short by the Revolution, thus Stelletsky's designs at Saint-Serge helped perpetuate this interest in emigration.40

Stelletsky's approach to the neo-Russian style is clearly expressed through the most unusual element of his wall painting: the predominance of colourful, stylised foliage throughout the interior (fig. 9.1). The use of these forms can be related to several different sources that the artist would have known. In terms of possible architectural precursors, the Tsarina's Golden Chamber (sixteenth century) and the Terem Palace at the Kremlin, which Stelletsky would at least have known through photographs and possibly pattern books, feature colourful ornamental designs that encompass

39 See, for example Lollii L′vov, 'Russkoe iskusstvo za granitsei', *Illiustrirovannaia Rossiia*, 17 (23 April 1927), 12–13 (p. 12); Iulia Reitlinger, quoted in Kotkavaara, *Progeny*, p. 259.

40 Marc Raeff has discussed the continued interest in medieval Russian culture abroad through, for example, the study of Slavic linguistics at the Cercle linguistique de Prague. The Bolsheviks had generally frowned upon medieval revival as it was closely connected with religious culture. Marc Raeff*, Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919–1940* (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 99–100.

large sections of the wall and ceilings.41 Both the Tsarina's Golden Chamber and Saint-Serge have decorative patterns running along the inside of the vaults, and the colour scheme of red and yellow is reminiscent of Stelletsky's in the gallery (fig. 9.2). The walls and ceilings of the Terem Palace, which were, due to fire, repainted in the revivalist style of the second quarter of the nineteenth century, are similarly covered in extensive ornamental designs.42 Many Orthodox churches also used such motifs in their interiors, notable examples including the Cathedral of Saint Vasily the Blessed (Saint Basil's) (1555–60) in Moscow and Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv.43 A section of the wall design in the narthex can be connected with ornaments found in midseventeenth-century Yaroslavl churches, which Stelletsky visited in 1904, especially those at Saint Nicholas on the Stumps (1689–90).44

While the use of ornament at Saint-Serge was certainly inspired by the interiors of sixteenth- to seventeenth-century religious and secular buildings, the neo-Russian style would appear to have been of equal influence. Vasnetsov's set design for the *Snow Maiden* palace interior (c. 1885, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow) may have played a role, especially the stylised, colourful floral motifs covering the walls.45 Artists practising the neo-Russian style within *style moderne* architecture, too, similarly filled the entire wallspace with designs. Roerich, for example, along with the architect Shchusev, carried out wall paintings and mosaics for the Trinity Cathedral at the Pochaev Monastery in the Ukraine (1905–12), which enveloped the walls in religious scenes and flower motifs.46 In his work for the apartment of N. P. Pertsov (1905–07) in Moscow, Maliutin adapted the teremok style popularised at Talashkino to a small interior with "dramatic" but "impractical" and "affected" results.47 Indeed, the interior is swarming with various decorative schemes of odd creatures and wild flowers competing for space, whereas Stelletsky chooses fewer elements, instead allowing rich colours to take centre stage in a much simpler, ordered interior. This application of bold colours is similar to the red and green chapel in Pavel Riabushinsky's manor-house in Moscow (1900), designed by the most prominent architect of *style moderne*, Fedor Shekhtel. Yet even Shekhtel's colours seem more subdued by comparison with Stelletsky's, in which vibrant green, red, yellow, and black are sharply contrasted.

47 *Ibid.,* pp. 77, 83.

41 The Tsarina's Golden Chamber has been repainted several times in its history, but the decorative scheme remains intact and has been largely well preserved. Kathleen Berton, *Moscow: an Architectural History* (London: Studio Visa, 1977) p. 78.

42 The original seventeenth-century interior of the Terem Palace has not survived but was repainted in the nineteenth-century revivalist style, which sought to use decorative motifs of the seventeenth century, reinterpreting these designs. See William Craft Brumfield, *Gold in Azure: One Thousand Years of Russian Architecture* (Boston: D. R. Godine, 1983), p. 223.

43 Although Saint Sophia was rebuilt in the seventeenth century after it was destroyed by the Mongols in 1239–40, the eleventh-century frescoes and tenth- to twelfth-century mosaics are, for the most part, well preserved. Brumfield, *Gold in Azure*, p. 23.

44 Lev Zander, 'V obiteli prepodobnago Sergiia', *Pravoslavnaia mysl'*, 2 (1930), 188–99 (p. 191).

45 Dianina, *When Art Makes News*, p. 191.

46 Brumfield, *The Origins of Modernism*, p. 105.

9.1a and 9.1b Dmitry Stelletsky, north and south transept vaults, 1925–27. Paris: Saint-Serge Parish Church. Photograph © Nicola Kozicharow, CC BY 4.0.

9.2 Dmitry Stelletsky, gallery arch, 1925–27. Saint-Serge, Paris. Photograph © Nicola Kozicharow, CC BY 4.0.

The patterns and shapes of the ornaments themselves at Saint-Serge are more comparable with motifs found in medieval manuscripts and embroideries. Stelletsky was familiar with such influences through his own research and possibly also the Exhibition of Old Russian Art, which took place in Moscow in 1913. Designs from this exhibition do seem to correspond with many of Stelletsky's: the ornament on the wall to the right of the inside doors at Saint-Serge is reminiscent of the border at the bottom of a page from a manuscript of the Four Evangelists (1593–95), and a sixteenthcentury Apostolic Conversations manuscript has an undulating plant design close to that found in the north and south transept vaults.48 Embroideries, too, may have had an impact on Stelletsky, such as a pattern from a phelonion from the seventeenth century — also from the exhibition — with small, spade-shaped flowers. As with architectural designs, Stelletsky generally drew upon sixteenth-century forms from various media to create his ornamental motifs.

Not all of Stelletsky's sources for ornaments were, however, necessarily even Russian. In recently discovered sketchbooks of Stelletsky's, several drawings of ornaments at the French medieval cathedrals of Chartres and Rouen, dated March 1927, indicate he was influenced by western sources for Saint-Serge as well.49 This revelation reiterates the fact that Saint-Serge was far from the model of a Russian Orthodox church, but instead it represented Stelletsky's creative experimentation with his lexicon of Old Russian forms and knowledge of religious precedents, even un-Orthodox ones. It also suggests that empirical research was important to Stelletsky: in the absence of Old Russian churches in emigration, the observation of French ones would have to do.

Some sources were potentially more contemporary. The foliage on the wooden candle stand at Saint-Serge resembles the partitions in the Church of the Saviour Not Made by Hands at Abramtsevo (1881–82), which were most likely executed by Vasnetsov, who carved some of the floral motifs in the interior.50 Stelletsky may have visited Abramtsevo, or at least known of the church through photographs. His brief time at Talashkino, too, may have had an effect. It is possible to link the stylised, plant-like ornaments on the vestibule ceiling in the narthex with some of the designs created at Talashkino, such as, for example, cushions by Tenisheva. Stelletsky, though sympathetic to the aims of Talashkino, had, for the most part, little interest in the aspects of folk design that captivated his contemporaries such as the *lubok* and *kustar* crafts, and medieval book illumination remained his chief source of inspiration. This difference in national source material gave his designs a more refined appearance than those of Maliutin's, for example.

48 *Vystavka drevnerusskogo iskusstva ustroennaia v 1913 godu v oznamenovanie chestvovaniia 300-letiia tsarstvovaniia Doma Romanovykh* (Moscow: Imperatorskii Moskovskii Arkheologicheskii Institut Imeni Imperatora Nikolaia II, 1913), nos. 45 and 23.

49 There were four sketchbooks in total, which were in Stelletsky's possession when he died in 1947. Christie's London, *Important Russian Art* (catalogue, 24 November 2014), lot 7.

50 Eleonora Paston, *Abramtsevo: iskusstvo i zhizn′* (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 2003), p. 359.

9.3 Dmitry Stelletsky, gallery balustrade, 1925–27. Saint-Serge Parish Church, Paris. Photograph © Nicola Kozicharow, CC BY 4.0.

The stylisation of some of Stelletsky's designs, particularly on the balustrade of the gallery (fig. 9.3), even go beyond reference to Old Russian or national precedents and appear closer to the formal interests of modernist artists. The black leaves, which are simply stylised with a single blue line, are sharply juxtaposed against the bold golden yellow and playfully dance along the balustrade. This sense of play through shape, emphasis of colour contrasts through light and dark hues, and overall flatness of the ornaments through lack of modelling have a strong correlation to Matisse's interiors from 1908 onwards. In addition, the rhythmic curve of motifs on along the gallery and in the archways, as well as the juxtaposition of strong colours, resemble Matisse's ornamental arabesques in paintings such as *The Dessert: Harmony in Red* (State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, 1908), which Stelletsky may have known from the collection of Sergei Shchukin in Moscow. Stelletsky's use of colour in the interior — and even, to an extent, in the bold greens, reds, and blues, in the iconostasis — also represents "a reduction of essentials", as Jack Flam put it with regard to Matisse's own use of colour.51 This formal connection with Matisse underlines the fact that Stelletsky may not have been labelled a modernist by the avant-garde, but his association with the 'Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition' was perhaps more justified than previously thought. The expressive power of colour, although here used to spiritual effect, was of clear importance to Stelletsky. While he may have drawn inspiration from the use of bold colours such as red in Novgorod icons — as did, in fact, Matisse on his visit to Moscow in 1911 — the explosion of bright colour at Saint-Serge was not wedded to bygone sources, but rather showed the free play of imagination.52

Moreover, Stelletsky's marked, extensive use of these colourful motifs is virtually unprecedented in Orthodox Church architecture. Instead of mere decorative patterns, these ornaments play a dominant role in the overall design, filling the entire space of the narthex, gallery, and the large arches over the north and south transepts (fig. 9.4).53 There is a spiritual significance to these forms, which Lev Zander, a professor at the Institute, described as "holy flowers and herbs".54 Indeed the nonfigurative murals may have been a deliberate way to draw the worshippers' attention to the sacred images on the iconostasis. As much as Stelletsky was interested in Old Russian predecessors in church design, the customary figurative mural schemes typically found in such churches did not have a central place in Stelletsky's design. Even with comparison to Roerich's neo-Russian style wall paintings for the Trinity Cathedral, religious scenes and figures play a dominant role, and floral motifs are restricted to

51 Jack Flam, *Matisse on Art* (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), p. 36.

52 Iu. A. Rusakov, 'Matisse in Russia in the Autumn of 1911', trans. by John E. Bowlt, *The Burlington Magazine*, 117 (May 1975), 284–91, and Alison Hilton, 'Matisse in Moscow', *Art Journal*, 29 (Winter 1969–70), 166–74, https://doi.org/10.2307/775225

53 It should be noted that Stelletsky installed the gallery himself, according to Kotkavaara, *Progeny*, p. 254.

54 "райскими цветами и травами". Zander, 'V obiteli prepodobnago Sergiia', p. 131.

archways and lower walls. Stelletsky's more inventive use of space thus reflected a fresh, more modern approach to the way in which areas of the church were painted both in traditional Orthodox churches and the neo-Russian style.

9.4 Dmitry Stelletsky, narthex, 1925–27. Saint-Serge, Paris. Photograph © Nicola Kozicharow, CC BY 4.0.

Stelletsky does not avoid figuration altogether: warrior saints and fathers of the church reside on the pillars supporting the vaults at the crossing in accordance with the tradition in Orthodox churches (and indeed, in Roerich's church).55 A few scenes such as Noah's ark adorn the walls of the narthex, and painted saints on board, though few, line the walls of the nave. Stelletsky therefore does not completely deviate from tradition in these spaces, especially in decorating the bottom half of the walls with hanging cloth motifs, which echo those at bastions of Orthodox medieval architecture such as the Church of the Nativity at Ferapontov Monastery. Rather, it is through Stelletsky's incorporation of the non-Orthodox gothic architecture that he stepped further outside the canon.

55 I would like to thank Richard Marks for first assisting me with identifying the iconography of Saint-Serge.

9.5 Dmitry Stelletsky, *Seraphim*, nave ceiling, 1925–27. Saint-Serge, Paris. Photograph © Nicola Kozicharow, CC BY 4.0.

The way he integrated the long barrel-vaulted nave — an element not found in traditional Orthodox churches — perhaps jars the most with traditional Orthodox architecture and reflects the theatricality of the neo-Russian style. In each of the three vaults, he painted four seraphim.56 Literally meaning "burning ones", they are angels who circle the throne of God and are ordinarily found in icon painting (fig. 9.5). The centrality given to seraphim is exceptional: they do appear in wall painting, as in the Church of the Nativity on the walls of the nave and keystones of the arches, and on wooden church ceilings in Northern Russia, but tend to complement more important scenes and figures rather than take up a large amount of space.57 In Roerich's Trinity Cathedral, one large seraph appears on the walls as well. The seraph itself is a figure closely connected with Russian symbolism, and the subject of well-known painting by Vrubel (1904, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg). It is possible that Stelletsky was drawn to this theme through Vrubel, reflecting the dual influence of medieval and contemporary sources.

The seraphim's placement does loosely fit within the Orthodox canon. The ceiling of the nave constitutes one of the highest zones of Saint-Serge, where angels may be painted, and seraphim are the holiest beings in the Christian angelic hierarchy. In the iconography of the Virgin of the Sign, when the Virgin raises her hands to the heavens, seraphim or cherubim often circle above.58 In this icon, as Alfredo Tradigo points out, "her fingers open in prayer like two wings, echoed here by those of the cherubim", thus the holy gesture is repeated in the form of the angels.59 This iconography may have influenced Stelletsky's mural scheme, as the seraphim lead across the ceiling of the nave to the apse, where the Virgin of the Sign raises her arms towards them. This would certainly account for the unusual and extensive usage of the angels in such a holy area of the church.60 The repetition of the seraphim in the vaults also forms a pattern, which leads into the central crossing, where the four evangelists are painted in their animal forms. The evangelists are often part of the dome in the Orthodox canon — or on the ceiling in, for example, Rublev's wall paintings at Vladimir Cathedral — and Stelletsky placed them in front of the iconostasis, where a dome would be. Such decisions resourcefully bend the rules, reflecting both a highly original use of space and a logical and knowledgeable use of the canon.

As per the classic approach of practitioners of the neo-Russian style in church architecture, Stelletsky's murals at Saint-Serge were shaped through a mixture of

56 For other discussions of seraphim in church painting, see Chapter 2, p. 49 and Chapter 3, p. 76.

57 For a northern wooden church with such designs, see, for example, the early eighteenth-century Chapel of Archangel Michael in Kizhi, Karelia.

58 See, for example, the mid-sixteenth-century Virgin of the Sign icon in the State Historical Museum in Moscow. Alfredo Tradigo, *Icons and Saints of the Eastern Orthodox Church*, trans. by Stephen Sartarelli (Los Angeles, CA: J. P. Getty Museum, 2006), p. 173.

59 *Ibid.*

60 Several pages in one of Stelletsky's sketchbooks sold at Christie's are devoted to drawing seraphim, especially their wings, suggesting they might have proved difficult to execute. Christie's London (auction catalogue, 24 November 2014), lot 7.

national and non-Russian medieval and contemporary sources. While some of his contemporaries referred to the church as a perfect "copy" of an Old Russian church, Stelletsky's general approach could not be further from imitation.61 He went beyond the canon of the Orthodox Church both in his amalgamation and reinterpretation of various influences and the way in which he creatively filled the space of the church. Indeed the building's unsuitability as a traditional Orthodox church necessitated compromise, but Stelletsky still failed to paint the space wholly in a way that was classically Orthodox, notably avoiding figurative scenes that normally occupy church walls and ceilings. The colour and interplay of his ornamental motifs, as well as their overall dominance, even found a counterpart in the work of modernist artists such as Matisse, suggesting that Stelletsky's work was not altogether rooted in the past, but, at least in this case, engaged with aesthetic approaches beyond Russia's borders. This fusion of modern and medieval, aesthetic and spiritual, and tradition and innovation in the wall paintings at Saint-Serge made Stelletsky an important contributor to the neo-Russian style in church architecture.

61 See Iulia Reitlinger, quoted in Kotkavaara, *Progeny*, 259.

# 10. The Role of the 'Red Commissar' Nikolai Punin in the Rediscovery of Icons

### *Natalia Murray*

Nikolai Punin (1888–1953) still remains an enigma both in Russia and the west, perceived by many as a 'red commissar', being the right hand of Anatoly Lunacharsky.1 Punin's role in defining post-revolutionary art and his support for avant-garde artists (especially the Futurists) are much better known than his contribution to the rediscovery, study, and indeed preservation of Russian icons.2 This chapter examines

1 'Red Commissar' refers to Punin's honorary position of People's Commissar of the State Hermitage and the Russian Museum, which he was granted by the People's Commissar of Education, Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875–1933). In this role Punin had to liaise between the museums' councils and the new Bolshevik government. Although he was never a member of the Bolshevik party, he was seen by many museum curators as the party's spy.

2 The principal literature on Punin as at the date of writing comprises the following: *The Diaries of Nikolay Punin*, ed. by Sidney Monas and Jennifer Greene Krupala, trans. by Jennifer Greene Krupala (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press; Amersham: Combined Academic, 2000); Nikolai Punin, *Mir svetel liubov′iu: Dnevniki, pis′ma*, ed. by Leonid A. Zykov (Moscow: Artist, Rezhisser, Teatr, 2000); John E. Bowlt, 'From Practice to Theory: Vladimir Tatlin and Nikolai Punin' in *Literature, Culture, and Society in the Modern Age: In Honor of Joseph Frank*, ed. by Edward J. Brown (Stanford: Department of Slavonic Studies, 1992), pp. 50–67; Natalia Murray, *The Unsung Hero of the Russian Avant-Garde: The Life and Times of Nikolay Punin* (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Natalia Murray, 'No Future for the Futurists? Art of the Commune and the Quest for a New Art in Post-Revolutionary Russia', *The International Yearbook of Futurism Studies*. *Reactions to Futurism in Argentina, Armenia, Brazil, Egypt, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Japan, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, The Netherlands, USA*, ed. by Günter Berghaus, 4 (2014), 202–29; Larissa Zhadova, 'Un articolo sconosciuto di Punin', *Rassegna sovietica*, 37, 3 (May-June 1986); *Sovetskie khudozhniki. Izbrannie trudy o russkom i sovetskom izobrazitel′nom iskusstve*, ed. by Irina Punina (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1976); Nikolai Punin, 'Cycle of Lectures [Extracts], 1919', in John E. Bowlt, *Russian Art of the Avant-Garde. Theory and Criticism 1902–1934*, revised edition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2017), pp. 170–76; 'Iskusstvo i Revolutsiia' (unpublished manuscript, N. Punin Archive, St Petersburg; fragment published in *Iskusstvo Leningrada*, 1989).

the origins and impact of Punin's interest in Russian icons, as well as his place among other Russian scholars who wrote about icons at the beginning of the twentieth century.

In 1907, nineteen-year-old Punin entered the State University in St Petersburg. He studied law for one year, but soon gave up his pursuit of a political career and entered the historical-philological faculty. In St Petersburg State University, a history of art faculty had been officially founded as early as 1863, when, following a High Decree of Tsar Alexander II, the new faculty of Theory and History of Art was formed. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century, history of art in Russia was still closely linked with archaeology and philology. The strictly chronological, so-called 'iconographical' method, created in Russia by Nikodim Kondakov for studying Byzantine art, was used for all research into the history of art.3 Thus, Old Russian icons and church relics were analysed strictly from a religious or archaeological perspective.

Punin's professor at the University, Dmitry Ainalov, was a specialist in Byzantine art. Like many of his contemporaries, Ainalov believed that art after the Renaissance was not worth studying. He marked Punin's final paper, 'Traces of antiquity in the landscapes of Giotto' (*Cherty antichnosti v peizazhakh Dzhotto*), as "pretty satisfactory", and commented that Punin should wait for the publication of Ainalov's book on church wall paintings from Novgorod, in which he also wrote about Giotto and the Byzantine mosaic artists. For Ainalov, his own book seemed to define the height of perfection to which his loyal student had to strive. Paradoxically, it was from this same book that a new approach to the history of art began. Ainalov and his students would now add their own personal observations to the otherwise rather dry academic papers, thus making them more accessible to a wider audience. Through this more subjective approach, the history of art was stepping out of the realm of science into the uncultivated field of popular, although still elitist, culture.

In 1913, Punin started work in the department of Old Russian Art at the Russian Museum in St Petersburg, which incorporated a Museum of Christian Relics (formerly part of the Imperial Academy of Arts) as its base. The recent purchase of the famous collection of Greek and Russian icons from Nikolai Likhachev had provided the Russian Museum with the largest collection of icons in Russia. That same year, Punin started writing articles and book reviews for the prestigious art journal *Apollon*. His first article was dedicated to the art of the Spiritual Mother of Russia, the Byzantine Empire. It was called 'On the problem of Byzantine art' and was full of metaphors

3 Nikodim (or Nikodeme) Pavlovich Kondakov (1844–1925) was an art historian with special expertise in the history of Russian Christian icons. For more on Kondakov, see Chapter 8 of this volume. In 1876 he published the History of Byzantine Miniature Painting (N. P. Kondakov, *Istoriia vizantiiskogo iskusstva i ikonografii po miniaturam grecheskikh rukopisei* (Zapiski Imp. Novorossiiskogo Universitet, 21) (Odessa, 1876; second edition, Plovdiv, 2012), https://archive.org/details/kondakov), in which he used the old-fashioned chronological method for which he later became known. From 1888 he taught at St Petersburg University. From 1893 he was a member of the Russian Academy of Fine Arts, and from 1898 a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 1895, together with Fedor Uspensky, he founded the Russian Archaeological Institute of Constantinople.

10.1 Nikolai Punin, c. 1919. Photograph © Punin Family Archive, St Petersburg, all rights reserved.

10.2 Nikolai Punin with Russian Museum guard, 1914. Photograph © Punin Family Archive, St Petersburg, all rights reserved.

and romantic reminiscences. He believed that Byzantine art was "the most artistic of all arts", and that Constantinople was "the bath of oriental and Hellenistic traditions, in which Byzantine art was bathing, and a cradle, where the descendants of the previously mighty cultures were rocked to sleep".4 These beautiful reminiscences were too picturesque for the dry academicians and too complicated and allegorical for the general public. But Punin was prepared, at least at the time, to be understood by a selective audience. He wrote in his article that the problem is that "we think about our everyday life too much to take time to understand the splendour of a cut sapphire."5 He admired the people of ancient Byzantium, who could accept and feed this amazing culture for many centuries, and described Constantinople as a magical city where "the butcher would not sell a piece of meat without expressing his view on the greatness of the Virgin, which he had contemplated overnight, and where people would argue about the Holy Trinity, the birth and the holy nature of Jesus on the squares and in the shops".6

Between 1903 and 1904, the Trinity icon (fig. 1.3) by the legendary Russian artist, Andrei Rublev, had been cleaned for the first time. In 1913, the tercentenary year of the founding of the Romanov dynasty, an exhibition of newly restored icons called the Exhibition of Old Russian Art (*Vystavka drevnerusskogo iskusstva*) was held in Moscow.7 After looking to the west for two hundred years, Russians were turning to their own traditions and heritage. This was the Russian Renaissance — "an awareness of Russian consciousness, revitalisation in philosophy, the sciences, literature, music, painting, theatre. What these years lived by and what they gave to the spiritual world would never die".8 As Jane Sharp has explained:

The shift in orientation from West to East in the decade that followed the revolution and Russo-Japanese war betrays this generation's different assumptions regarding the authority of Tsarist institutions. [Natalia] Goncharova and her colleagues were uniformly sensitive to their status as emissaries of Western culture, on the one hand, and as receptors for Western influence, on the other. They saw themselves not as serving the purpose of empire but as colonists subversively seeking to reverse the process of colonisation. To a large extent, their turn to the East was compensatory. Like the Slavophiles before them,

4 N. Punin, 'K probleme Vizantiiskogo iskusstva', *Apollon*, 3 (1913), 19, http://www.v-ivanov.it/ issledovaniya\_i\_materialy/apollon

5 *Ibid.*, p. 21. "мы слишком много смотрим на повседневную жизнь, чтобы понять великолепие граненого сапфира".

6 *Ibid.*, p. 23. "мясник не продавал мяса без того, чтобы не высказать какого-нибудь довода, который он придумал за ночь, о той или иной степени величания св.  Poet and Prophet* (Los Angeles, CA: Figueroa Press, 2006, revised edition), p. 47.

the Muscovites sought to redefine an excessively Europeanized present and privileging Russia's prior assimilation of Byzantine and Eurasian cultural traditions.9

The twentieth century opened a new chapter in the study of the history of art, and Punin became one of the first researchers to write in its pages. It was only to be expected that this should inspire Punin's interest in and admiration of Old Russian icons. Along with Pavel Muratov and Nikolai Shchekotov, Punin became one of the first critics to reveal the unique aesthetic characteristics of Russian icons.10 In his articles he aimed to engage the reader with their spiritual qualities.11

At the end of the nineteenth century there had also been a revival in collecting Russian icons, which in its turn encouraged a new wave of interest in this subject among artists and art critics. The discovery of a process which enabled restorers to remove darkened varnish and layers of soot from old icons revealed the most beautiful treasures. But the cleaning of these icons was not welcomed by everyone and soon became a highly controversial issue. The debate on icon cleaning brought Punin into conflict with the Latvian artist and art critic Voldemars Matvejs, who had argued against the intrusive restoration of icons. Matvejs believed that the restoration of old icons destroyed their texture (*faktura*); the old varnish and layers of soot that most were striving to get rid of, according to Matvejs, contributed to the mysterious appeal of old icons. He wrote:

Cleaned icons have a ragged appearance; they look as if they were made to look like western European paintings — as a result icons disappear. The dark St Georges come

9 Jane A. Sharp, *Russian Modernism between East and West: Natal′ia Goncharova and the Moscow Avant-Garde* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 24.

10 Pavel Muratov (1881–1950) was a Russian essayist, novelist, art historian, critic, and playwright. From 1906 until 1914 he worked at the Rumiantsev Museum in Moscow. He became friends with the writers Boris Zaitsev, Vladislav Khodasevich, and Nina Berberova (who called him "one of the most remarkable men I ever met"), as well as the artist Nikolai Ulianov. From 1906 he published in the journals *Vesy*, *Zolotoe runo*, and *Apollon*. He collaborated with Igor Grabar on the latter's *History of Russian Art* (1909–14), and in 1913–14 he helped publish the journal *Wisdom* (*Sofiia*), dedicated to early Russian art. After 1918, he helped Grabar restore cathedrals and was associated with the only bookshop in Moscow which remained unregulated by the state, The Writer's Library. Nikolai Mikhailovich Shchekotov (1884–1945) was an art historian, art critic, and artist. In 1910–11 Shchekotov studied ancient Russian art with the famous collector of Russian icons, Ilia Ostroukhov. In 1918 he began his career as a critic, publicist, and museum official. Shchekotov was a member of the collegium of the People's Commissariat of Education from 1918 to 1922, director of the Russian Historical Museum from 1921 to 1925, and director of the Tretyakov Gallery in 1925–26. He was a member of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia from 1923 to 1932.

11 See for example Nikolai Punin, 'Vystavka drevnerusskogo iskusstva (ustroennaia Moskovskim arkheologicheskim institutom)', *Apollon*, 5 (1913), 39–42, http://www.v-ivanov.it/issledovaniya\_i\_ materialy/apollon; Nikolai Punin, 'Novye priobreteniia Muzeia Imperatora Aleksandra III', *Apollon*, 6 (1913), 52–53, http://www.v-ivanov.it/issledovaniya\_i\_materialy/apollon; Nikolai Punin, 'Zametki ob ikonakh iz sobraniia N. P. Likhacheva', in *Russkaia ikona*, *sbornik 1* (Petrograd: t-vo R. Golike i A. Vil′borg, 1914), pp. 21–47; Nikolai Punin, 'Ellinism i vostok v ikonopisi. Po povodu sobraniia ikon I. S. Ostroukhova i S. P. Riabushinskogo', in *Russkaia ikona, sbornik 3* (Petrograd: t-vo R. Golike i A. Vil′borg, 1914), pp. 181–97; Nikolai Punin, 'Andrei Rublev', *Apollon*, 2 (1915), 1–23, http://www.vivanov.it/issledovaniya\_i\_materialy/apollon; Nikolai Punin, 'Vystavka tserkovnoi stariny v muzee Shtiglitsa', *Apollon*, 4–5 (1915), 93–94, http://www.v-ivanov.it/issledovaniya\_i\_materialy/apollon.

to mind — with such a special dark surface, such play of brown and golden tones and sheen, dressed in gold and silver, — which one will never find either in paintings by Rembrandt, nor Leonardo, nor Ribera.12

Matvejs's declaration of the superiority of Russian icons over European art had its roots in the nineteenth century. The voice of the Slavophiles, who already in the 1830s had opposed westernisers in defence of a messianic nationalism, found a strong wave of support among the artistic intelligentsia at the beginning of the twentieth century.

While Punin disagreed with Matvejs about the importance of cleaning old icons, he agreed with him on the question of the superiority of Old Russian art. In a letter to his future wife, Anna Arens, written in 1913, Punin proclaimed that icon painting was such a mature form of art that in front of it, "the whole of European art (perhaps only with the exception of the Renaissance) — looks like toys".13 The Exhibition of Old Russian Art had the most profound effect on him. He wrote to Arens:

If only people in St Petersburg knew what kind of treasures are buried in Moscow and what an icon is. In just one Virgin Mary from the Novikov church, which I saw today, such spiritual energy is concentrated, that if one takes the souls of all the heroines from the novels by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Pushkin, as well as the souls of the sisters Arens and the souls of the deepest women — even this synthesis would not exceed in its strength and depth this one icon.14

Punin dedicated his articles written in 1914 to Russian icons, which for him represented much more than just great works of art. He perceived them as a revelation, and as the highest ideal for the newly emerging Russian avant-garde. In his article of 1923, 'Review of new trends in the art of St Petersburg', Punin concluded that "the influence of Russian icons on [Vladimir] Tatlin is undoubtedly greater than the influence of Cézanne or Picasso upon him".15 As John Milner confirms in his book on Tatlin:

For Tatlin, as for [Kazimir] Malevich and [Natalia] Goncharova, the icon provided a living and Russian alternative to Western traditions. Their search for a Russian identity could find spatial systems in the icon that were not imported. Furthermore, many icons were pictorially superb, their painters' control complete and their emphasis upon materials crucial.16

12 Voldemars Matvejs [Vladimir Markov], *Printsipy tvorchestva v plasticheskikh iskusstvakh: faktura*, first published in 1914, reprinted in *Voldemars Matvejs. Statii, katalog proizvedenii, pis′ma, khronika deiatel′nosti "Soiuza Molodezhi"*, ed. by Irina Buzhinska (Riga: Neptuns, 2002), p. 54.

13 Punin, *Mir svetel liubov′iu*, Letter of 22 April 1913, p. 46. "[…] и уже, конечно, не забыть столь совершенного искусства, перед лицом которого вся Европа (за исключением, может быть, Ренессанса) — эстетические и часто дурные игрушки".

14 *Ibid.*"Если бы только кто-нибудь из петербуржцев знал, что за сокровища погребены в Москве и что такое вообще — икона. В одной Божьей Матери Новиковской церкви, которую я сегодня видел, сосредоточены такие души, что если бы взять души всех героинь Достоевского, Тургенева, Пушкина, души сестер Аренс, души тысяч самых глубоких женщин — то и этот синтез не превзойдет силою и глубиною эту одну икону."

15 N. Punin, 'Obzor novykh techenii v iskusstve Peterburga', *Russkoe Iskusstvo*, 1 (1923), 17–28.

16 John Milner, *Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde* (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 24.

Punin considered Tatlin to be "the only creative force capable of moving art out of the trenches of the old front line". He believed that "Tatlin gave, through his representational matter, a new form to the world. New form— high relief — is opposite to the past, it went outside all the limits of painting, it is a cloud of arrows — into the future, without looking back".17 When, in 1916, Tatlin arrived in St Petersburg from Moscow, Punin described the excitement of Tatlin's visit by saying that they awaited him "as one awaits an event which could warrant expectations and move everything forward, as one awaits a leader".18

In 1914 Punin, by now an experienced clerk in the department of Old Russian Art, was promoted to become secretary of the Society for the Research of Old Russian Painting, and a member of the editing committee of the periodical *Russian Icon* (*Russkaia ikona*). Published six times a year, printed on lusciously thick paper, with thirty to thirty-five beautiful reproductions in each issue and a special font, this anthology of Russian icons was criticised by many contemporary critics for its focus on style and appearance rather than the quality of its contents. Thus, in his article dedicated to this periodical, Muratov wrote:

The editors would have been better off if they had only included beautifully reproduced illustrations, without filling the big pages with strange colourless text. Who needs articles, which look as if they were taken from unreadable archaeological books, even if they are printed on fine thick paper with red vignettes?19

Muratov remarked that at least foreigners would be happy to look at this periodical, since, without being able to understand the text, they could appreciate the illustrations. However, the only article that Muratov considered worth reading in the first issue of *Russian Icon* was one by Punin on the icons in Likhachev's collection. He admired the emotional angle from which Punin had written it, but criticised it for being too shallow, and for its inability to give a true understanding of the significance of this renowned collection.20

In his article, Punin was only supposed to date and provide a brief description of the most remarkable icons from the Likhachev collection (which, by then, was in the permanent collection of the Russian Museum), but he could not avoid describing the Russian Orthodox spiritual aspect of the icons and their emotional impact on the viewer. Concentrating on Italian influences upon Russian icons, Punin once again

17 Quoted in Antonina Izergina, 'Kvartira N 5. Glava iz vospominanii', *Panorama iskusstv*, 12 (1989), p. 194.

18 *Ibid.*, p. 193.

19 Pavel Muratov, 'Peterburgskaia russkaia ikona', *Sofiia*, 4 (1914), quoted in P. Muratov, *Drevnerusskaia zhivopis'. Istoriia otkrytiia i issledovaniia* (Moscow: Airis-Press, Laguna-Art, 2005), p. 348. "Редакция сделала бы лучше, если бы в самом деле ограничилась одними прекрасно выполненными произведениями, не заполняя больших страниц бесцветным случайным текстом. Кому нужны статьи, точно выхваченные из нечитаемых археологических трудов, напечатанные хотя бы и с красненькими виньетками, хотя бы и на негнущейся бумаге?"

20 *Ibid.*, p. 349.

stressed the importance of the Byzantine tradition in their development. He further described the historical and stylistic significance of these icons:

An icon — one cannot forget — is not only an example of a certain style, not only an example of the power of the wealth of colour, but a certain content (substance), a certain part of eternity, the fulfilment of another life and another spiritual realm, different from the tradition which fed our artistic experiences so far.21

Punin stressed that one must see the spiritual side of icons before their historical or aesthetic significance. He finished his opus by saying that "the full description of this collection is still awaiting its author, we have no doubt about it — someone more attentive and less passionate".22

Not able to resist the powerful appeal of Russian icons, Punin wrote another article for this periodical, dedicated to the private collections of icons that belonged to the wealthy merchants Ilia Ostroukhov and Pavel Riabushinsky. Once again, in this article Punin pointed out the progression of Russian art from that of Byzantium: "A complicated artistic phenomenon in its own right — Byzantine art — could not avoid lending its complexity to Russian icon painting".23

Punin's most significant article on icons was written in 1915. It was dedicated to one of the most mysterious (and indeed canonised) Russian artists, Andrei Rublev.24 The article first appeared in *Apollon*, and a year later it was published as a separate booklet and became one of the first descriptions of the artistic style of this unique artist, as well as of the tradition from which it was born. Punin admired Rublev both as a unique artist and as a humble monk — "a tender and strong flower, which has grown from the rich and fertile soil of the Orthodox East".25 He wrote that the significance of Rublev for Russian art is expressed in "the purity and security of the ancient traditions which fed his art, which he made stronger and which he carried on into the next centuries".26 In the beginning of his article Punin stressed that Russia, bordered by both east and west, had become "an extraordinary full cup of spiritual forces", for which the European and eastern traditions were equally important.27 Both Byzantium and Europe influenced the development of Russian icons and frescoes, and, by the beginning of the fifteenth century, Russian art had gained "a new dress, upon which Byzantine and European Renaissance have already embroidered their patterns — its tender, classically beautiful ornamental attire".28

21 N. Punin*,* 'Zametki ob ikonakh v sobranii N. P. Likhacheva', p. 23.

22 *Ibid.*, p. 47.

23 N. Punin, 'Ellinism i vostok v ikonopisi', p. 181.

24 N. Punin, 'Andrei Rublev', in N. N. Punin, *Russkoe i sovetskoe iskusstvo. Mastera russkogo iskusstva XIVnachala XX veka. Sovetskie khudozhniki. Izbrannye trudy o russkom i sovetskom izobrazitel′nom iskusstve*, ed. by Irina Punina (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1976), p. 39.

25 *Ibid.*

26 N. Punin, *Andrei Rublev* (Petrograd: Apollon, 1916), p. 23.

27 N. Punin, 'Andrei Rublev', in N. N. Punin, *Russkoe i sovetskoe iskusstvo,* p. 36.

28 *Ibid.*, p. 41. "подходит в одеянии обновленном, на котором византийско-европейское Возрождение вышило свои узоры, свой нежный, классически прекрасный орнаментальный убор".

Punin based his arguments about the style of Rublev's work on his most significant icon — the Trinity. Inspired by the heavenly beauty of this icon he wrote that it was:

an icon of such God-inspired beauty, that we, like flowers towards the sun, raise our soul to it and in the triviality of our deathly desires cannot reject the thirst for knowing, finding, calling the name, which distinguished a genius in this world, who was elevated to such lonely, such tenderly-beautiful and pure heights.29

In his article Punin provided the most poetic description of Rublev's Trinity:

No matter how long or how scrupulously one examines the icon of the Holy Trinity, its tender grace and inspired mystical energy do not stop exciting one's imagination. One can analyse its style in detail and even describe its content, but even after such analysis, there is something unspoken left, which gives this icon inexhaustible charm. As if life itself keeps feeding these lines, these faces, and every new day is reflected in this icon with its new light, new grief of daily affairs, and new melancholy of its death.30

Punin praised this unique icon as "a triumph of motionless contemplation, as if three souls, with equal plenitude of spirit and vision, came together to experience their humility and wisdom of life, full of suffering and sorrow".31 Punin called Rublev "a genius, the light of the early period of our painting, a sun which dominated the horizon for at least hundred years […] a marvellous and delicate prophet of divine essences".32 The article marked the end of Punin's research into Russian icons, although his attempts to find the true roots of the Russian artistic tradition never ended. He concluded with the statement that: "Art is not born in one day, art needs life and it needs the past, art can never live without traditions. Where are our traditions?"33

Already in 1915 Punin's writing was preoccupied with the problems of contemporary art. After the October Revolution, Punin, now a furious fighter for futurism, proclaimed: "We want new life and new culture […]. We are the polar opposite of the whole old world. We came in order not to renew it, but to destroy it, in order to create our new world."34 But did he truly believe in the necessity of destroying traditional art? At the same time that he signed this bold proclamation, Punin was still trying to support icon painters in a remote village in central Russia, Mstera, where the whole population had historically been involved in painting icons.

After the Revolution, the sale and export of icons from villages in central Russia was banned, and many skilled artists lost their jobs. It was suggested that perhaps

29 *Ibid.*"[…] икона такой боговдохновенной красоты, что мы, как цветы к солнцу, возносим к ней свою душу и в суете своих смертных желаний не можем отказаться от жажды узнать, найти, назвать имя, которое отмечало в мире гения, поднявшегося на столь одинокие, столь нежнопрекрасные и чистые вершины".

30 *Ibid.*, p. 48.

31 N. Punin, *Andrei Rublev* (Petrograd: Apollon, 1916), pp. 19–20.

32 *Ibid.*, p. 23.

33 N. Punin, 'Andrei Rublev', in N*.* N. Punin*, Russkoe i sovetskoe iskusstvo,* p. 48. "Искусство не родится в один день, искусству нужна жизнь и нужно прошлое, никакое искусство не живет без традиций. Где наши традиции?"

34 N. Punin, 'Vstrecha ob iskusstve', *Iskusstvo kommuny*, 5 (5 January 1919), 2.

these artists could use their skills and techniques to paint wooden toys, but since other villages in different parts of Russia were already specialising in toy making, starting this industry in Mstera meant "stealing their bread". Punin fought for their right to continue production of icons as works of art rather than subjects of a religious cult, arguing that there was no decree prohibiting the sale of icons.

In 1918, Lunacharsky appointed Punin as Head of the Visual Arts Department of the Petrograd People's Commissariat of Enlightenment (*Narkompros*) and as the Commissar of the Hermitage and Russian Museums. Lunarcharsky wrote in his article 'A Spoonful of Antidote': "Not for nothing does the fighting Futurist Punin sweat for all he is worth in order to save the traditions of icon painting in Mstera and is concerned about the prohibition of local authorities to export icons from Mstera […]".35 At a meeting in the Lassal house, which took place in January 1919, and was dedicated to the relationship between old and new art, Lunacharsky pointed out that "not all old art is bourgeois and even if it is — not all of it is bad".36 In his speech he stressed the participation of the working class in creating the eternal monuments in Egypt and Ancient Greece. But he also stated his belief that futurism is not the only alternative to the art of the past. Punin argued that "our aim is to revolutionise old art, which does not mean to make it futurist — it can be anything it wants to be, but it should be alive".37 Already in 1919 the icon painting workshops in Mstera had been transformed into artistic workshops for workers, and the village factory, which was famous for producing *rizas* (or *oklads*) for icons, became a jewellery factory, which in Soviet times produced more than one million medals for the Second World War.38

Although he was unable to help to preserve icon painting in Mstera, Punin carried his faith in the importance of icons throughout his life. In his book *Tatlin. Against Cubism*, written in 1921, Punin proclaimed that Russian art, using its long tradition of a great feeling for materials, which comes from icon painting, was capable of making a great leap forward — beyond cubism itself.39 At the same time, in his article 'In Moscow', Punin wrote: "The novelty of Tatlin's relief in comparison with the frescoes of Raphael lies only in the fact that the surface and texture and other elements are distilled by Tatlin to their essence; otherwise it is a continuous tradition. That is why we have nothing more to learn from Raphael" (fig. 10.3).40 Despite his admiration for Russian icons, Punin felt that "only in front of Tatlin's reliefs one feels how insignificant the world is".41

35 Anatoly Lunarcharsky, 'A Spoonful of Antidote' (*Lozhka protivoiadiia*), quoted in Wiktor Woroszylski, *The Life of Mayakovsky*, trans. by Boleslaw Taborski (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1972), p. 250.

36 Anatolii Lunarcharskii, 'Vstrecha v dome Lassalia', *Iskusstvo kommuny*, 5 (5 January 1919), p. 3.

37 N. Punin, 'Revolutsionnaia Mudrost′', *Iskusstvo kommuny*, 6 (12 January 1919), p. 2.

38 *Riza* (Russian: риза, 'robe') or *oklad* (оклад, 'covered') is an icon cover, sometimes referred to as 'revetment' in English.

39 N. Punin, *Tatlin. Protiv kubizma* (St Petersburg: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo, 1921), p. 28.

40 N. Punin, 'V Moskve (Pis′mo)', *Iskusstvo kommuny*, 10 (9 February 1919), p. 2.

41 Punin, *Mir svetel liubov′iu*, diary note of 23 October 1916, p. 103.

10.3 Vladimir Tatlin, *Painterly Relief. Collation of Materials*, 1914, iron, plaster, glass, asphalt. Whereabouts unknown. Photograph © Punin Family Archive, St Petersburg, all rights reserved.

In September 1932, Punin was invited to give lectures at the Academy of Arts in his native Leningrad. Since by then any mention of Russian icons, or the avant-garde, was already prohibited, in his lectures Punin had to concentrate on Renaissance art, as well as Academic art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Unwilling to accept these and other constraints of the increasingly brutal Soviet regime, Punin was arrested three times — in 1921, 1935, and 1949. Punin's daughter Irina wrote that when he was arrested in 1935, her father kissed the icon before he was taken away. His common law civil wife and lover, the poet Anna Akhmatova, dedicated one section of one of her most famous poems, *Requiem*, to Punin's arrest:

> They led you away at dawn I followed you like a mourner, In the dark front room the children were crying, On your lips was the icon's chill. The deathly sweat on your brow…Unforgettable! — I will be like the wives of the Streltsy, Howling under the Kremlin towers.42

Punin's major sin in the eyes of Soviet prosecutors was his unwillingness to accept and praise Soviet art, which was, after 1932, dominated by socialist realism. During the Second World War Punin was evacuated with the staff of the Academy of Arts, first to Samarkand, and then to Zagorsk monastery (formerly Sergiev Posad, where Rublev's Trinity was created) (fig. 10.4).43 Historically this had been one of the main centres of the Russian Orthodox Church. But in the spring of 1928 the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) began to build up a case against this spiritual centre, accusing it of counter-revolutionary activities.44 On 12 May 1928 a letter was published in the *Workers' Newspaper* (*Rabochaia Gazeta*). In it a certain A. Lyass wrote: "All kinds of 'people of the past' — but mainly Grand Dukes, ladies-in-waiting, priests, and monks — have built themselves a hive at the so-called Trinity St Sergey [monastery]. If formerly the Grand Dukes protected the priests, now the priests are protecting the Grand Dukes […]".45 He concluded his letter by saying that "this hive of Black Hundreds must be destroyed".46

A week later, OGPU carried out an extensive raid on the monastery and arrested a large group of priests and lay members. It marked the beginning of an unofficial war against the Church. Among those arrested was the priest, writer, and a former

42 A. Akhmatova, *Requiem* (1935), quoted in Emma Gerstein, *Moscow Memoirs* (London: TheHarvill Press, 2004), p. 320.

43 Sergiev Posad was renamed 'Zagorsk' by the Soviet regime in 1930, after the death of the revolutionary Vladimir Zagorsky.

44 OGPU (or GPU) — Unified State Political Administration (Ob″edinennoe gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie). OGPU was the secret political police from 1922 to 1934, then superseded by the NKVD, and which had been founded to fight political and economic counter-revolutionary activity.

45 Quoted in Vitaly Shentalinsky, *The KGB's Literary Archive*, trans. by J. Conquest (London: The Harvill Press, 1995), p. 102.

46 *Ibid.*

professor of the Spiritual Academy at the Trinity Sergius Monastery, Pavel Florensky, who is often described today as the Russian Leonardo da Vinci. Florensky, who was a mathematician, physicist, inventor, engineer, writer, and priest, was interrogated brutally by the Soviet secret police, kept in a cell in the Lubyanka, and then sent to the Solovki labour camp. Up to now there have been many legends about the end of his life, and even his children and grandchildren did not know for sure when and where he died. Only in the 1990s did the researcher Vitaly Shentalinsky find a narrow strip of paper in the KGB archives. On one side was typed "Florensky, Pavel Alexandrovich"; on the other, "To be shot, Florensky Pavel Alexandrovich", and a tick marked with a thick red pencil.47

Florensky, who was recently sanctified, was shot on 8 December 1937 in Solovki, which, ironically, was once a monastery in its own right. In one of his letters from Solovki he wrote:

The universe is so organised that only at the price of suffering and persecution can the world be given anything. The more selfless the gift, the harsher the persecution, and the more severe the suffering. That is the law of life, its fundamental axiom […]. Greatness must pay for its gift in blood […].48

By then, Punin had perhaps already started paying for his particular form of "greatness", although he was at least still a free man. He longed for Samarkand, where he "did not feel the past so much".49 But already in March 1944 he wrote in his diary that "there was something miraculous in the destiny that brought him to Zagorsk".50

Admiring icons and frescoes in this ancient centre of Russian Orthodoxy, Punin worried about the destiny of Soviet art. At the end of February 1944 Punin wrote in his diary: "I do not expect anything from life, but I do want to see good art".51 In Soviet culture, dominated by socialist realism, Punin struggled to find this "good art":

Our today's 'realism' (if I can use this term at all) — is like the rags of a completely worn out dress. It stinks of decomposition and mould.

It should stop groaning, and start suffering instead;

It should stop holding on, and start walking;

It should stop being enthusiastic, and start being content.

Perhaps, most importantly it should be quiet, like Chekrygin's drawings or even quieter, calmer and more confident. Completely silent!52

47 *Ibid.*, p. 122.

48 *Ibid.*, p. 123.

49 Punin, *Mir svetel liubov′iu*, diary note of 24 February 1944, p. 373. Punin was evacuated to Samarkand during the Siege of Leningrad with the Academy of Arts.

50 *Ibid.*, diary note of 7 March 1944, p. 377.

51 *Ibid.*, diary note of 26 February 1944, p. 375.

52 *Ibid.*

10.4 Nikolai Punin. c. 1940. Photograph © Punin Family Archive, St Petersburg, all rights reserved.

Was it the silence of the Trinity by Andrei Rublev, which Punin had praised in 1915, for which he was now longing? In April 1944 he wrote in his diary that it is important to understand the true aim of art: "In our contemporary art, so-called realism has become the goal; method has been elevated to the level of a principle and has substituted for the goal itself. Nothing, except the death of art, could come from it. Make good art using any means you like, but just make good art."53

After Punin was arrested for the last time in 1949, condemned for refusing to cease lecturing on twentieth-century art and its links with Russian icons, he was sent to the Gulag for ten years. He spent the last years of his life in a camp beyond the Arctic Circle, in the Abez settlement. But, even there, in the cold damp barracks which accommodated two hundred people, together with his fellow-prisoner, the philosopher Lev Karsavin, Punin would give lectures to their less-educated inmates about the meaning and significance of the icon of the Virgin Mary of Vladimir, and about the twentieth-century icon, Kazimir Malevich's *Black Square* (fig. 5.3).

Punin died in August 1953, a few months after Stalin's death. He was only sixty-four years old, but he had managed to fit several lives into this relatively short time — a colourful life in Imperial Russia, two revolutions, three arrests, two World Wars, the siege of Leningrad, and the Gulag. Back in 1940 Punin had written:

It is such a happiness to be still alive; I did not expect this; I never thought that I would live for so long. Levushka [the pet-name for Lev] Bruni said to me a long time ago: 'What an amazing Guardian Angel you have.' Art does not want to part with me. It still needs me to preach it in front of the mad people who have lost it.54

For Punin the one and only thing, for the sake of which he lived and died, was art: "I am — the eternity and the destiny, something basic, everlasting and enduring, like art itself. I just do not want any system, no system at all, if possible. To be equal with life, to be part of it — a slice of it, made in art."55

In 1957, after the Twentieth Party Congress, and following the special request of his relatives, Punin was rehabilitated, but publication of his books and articles was still not permitted for a long time. Even when some of Punin's articles were finally published in 1976 in Moscow, they were heavily criticised by "those with authority" — "people in the system", as Punin used to call them — and nothing was available for a further ten years.56

For fifty years this most respected voice of Russian Futurism, the man of principle, principles which he never compromised, had been deliberately forgotten. But history likes justice and remembers its true heroes. In 1940 Punin wrote: "Art — is a very

53 Punin, *Mir svetel liubov′iu*, diary note of 8 April 1944, p. 380.

54 Punin's letters to M. Golubeva, approx. 1940, in Punin, *Mir svetel liubov′iu*, p. 445.

55 *Ibid*., p. 436.

56 N. N. Punin, *Russkoe i sovetskoe iskusstvo. Mastera russkogo iskusstva XIV-nachala XX veka. Sovetskie khudozhniki. Izbrannye trudy o russkom i sovetskom izobrazitel′nom iskusstve*, ed. by Irina Punina (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1976).

personal thing — the most personal out of everything that is given to man in life. That is why the love of art is full of passion; it feels like the love of a woman: both have a great desire for eternity. To transform the present into the future — this is the true purpose of art."57

Punin carried his passionate love of icons and his strong belief in their impact on twentieth-century art throughout his life. Up until now Punin's impact on the development of the Russian avant-garde has been underestimated and his name was obliterated from most books on art history in Russia. His remarkable life serves as a reminder of the cruelty and injustice of the Communist system, which still, to this day, threatens to compromise the democratic freedoms which Russia claims to adopt. Russian icons and their preservation occupied an important part of Punin's rich life, giving him inspiration and lifting his spirits in the most difficult and challenging periods of his life.

57 Punin's letters to M. Golubeva, approx. 1940, in Punin, *Mir svetel liubov′iu*, p. 438.

# 11. Ucha Japaridze, Lado Gudiashvili, and the Spiritual in Painting in Soviet Georgia

*Jennifer Brewin*

This chapter examines the career of the Soviet Georgian painter Ucha Japaridze (1906– 88) (fig. 11.1) who, despite being little known in the west, was among Soviet Georgia's most successful artists in the Stalin and post-Stalin eras. The first reassessment of Japaridze's painting since his death, it offers a fresh analysis that investigates, in particular, themes of religion, spirituality, and mysticism that recurred in his painting throughout his career. It makes a case for examining his encounters with modernist currents in Russian, Georgian, and European painting and literature, including, in particular, the Symbolist movement, as sources of those themes. In doing so, it makes an initial step towards resurrecting the neglected history of Georgian artists' negotiation of modernist impulses, national cultural mythologies, and Soviet cultural dictates. At the same time, it helps to demonstrate the reach and endurance of modernism's legacy and of the spiritual as a source of imagery and ideas in Soviet painting, extending beyond Russia's borders and beyond the usual chronology of modernism and spiritual enquiry in Russian and Soviet art.

The Soviet regime sought to achieve a secular, atheist society and it thus became increasingly difficult for artists to engage with religious or spiritual themes. Once socialist realism was declared the official formula for the arts in the Soviet Union in 1934, Soviet painting was required to operate within a defined set of state-approved parameters. Painters were to portray Soviet life as if the state's socialist (and secular) utopia of tomorrow had already been realised today; thus there could be little room for religious content, or, at least, for positive portrayals of religious practice in Soviet life. Nevertheless, just as secular rule did not translate to a fully atheist society, these limitations did not mean the absence of all religious content or of the spiritual in Soviet art. In certain periods, when it was deemed to be politically beneficial (for example, during the Second World War and following the failures of Nikita Khrushchev's anti-religious campaign of 1958–64), the Soviet regime strategically tolerated public religious observance. But even during its most aggressive crackdowns on religion, when public religious activity was vastly diminished throughout the Soviet Union, religious belief did not disappear, especially within rural communities and among older generations.1 Where secularisation limited religious expression and practice, it brought 'not a loss of religion, but religious change' — change in the ways religiosity manifested itself, but not its disappearance.2 Cultural traditions rooted in abandoned practices remained a part of daily life even as they became disassociated from their religious roots.3 As a result, painting could evoke memories of and associations with religion or suggest the sacred while excluding explicit reference to religion, especially when depicting rural life. Many artists, moreover, continued to draw on the lessons of religious art and of artists who had concerned themselves with spiritual enquiry in previous decades, and used imagery with religious or spiritual associations in constructing their vision of life in the Soviet Union. Japaridze, as this chapter will argue, is one such artist.

My investigation takes as its starting point the collection of Japaridze's work preserved in the artist's former studio in Tbilisi, maintained as a house museum under the aegis of the Georgian National Museum. It examines the treasures of this important, but little-known collection, including previously unstudied early sketchbooks and mature works, and analyses them in conjunction with biographical and contextual evidence drawn from the memoirs of contemporaries and the accounts of several Soviet biographers. Its first task is to redress gaps in Soviet accounts of Japaridze's career that are concerned primarily with charting and celebrating his contributions to the canon of Soviet socialist realism.4 Placing particular emphasis on the nostalgic

1 On religiosity and secularisation in the Soviet Union, see Catherine Wanner, ed, *State Secularism and Lived Religion in Soviet Russia and Ukraine* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) and Heather J. Coleman, 'Atheism versus Secularization? Religion in Soviet Russia, 1917–1961' (Review), *Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History*, 1, 3 (Summer 2000) (New Series), 547–58. On the persistence of religious belief and observance in Russian peasant communities in the 1930s, see 'Religion' in Sheila Fitzpatrick, *Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization* (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 204–13.

2 Catherine Wanner, 'Introduction', in *State Secularism and Lived Religion in Soviet Russia and Ukraine,* pp. 1–26 (p. 9).

3 As Sheila Fitzpatrick comments regarding Russian peasant life following agricultural collectivisation in 1929–31: 'The longterm effect of the Soviet assault on religion was to strip away much of the Orthodox veneer that had covered the pre-Christian religion of the Russian peasantry, leaving most of the basic folk rituals and beliefs intact.' Fitzpatrick, *Stalin's Peasants*, p. 207.

4 For Soviet monographs on Japaridze see: Andrei Lebedev, *Ucha Malakievich Dzhaparidze* (Moscow: Izobrazitel′noe iskusstvo, 1982); Lidia Zlatkevich, *Ucha Dzhaparidze — khudozhnik i pedagog*, ed. by

portraits of traditional life in rural Georgia for which Japaridze became known in the 1950s and 60s, Soviet authors presented Japaridze as a committed, life-long adherent of socialist realism, the patriotic creator of a lyrical, romantic vision of life in Soviet Georgia. This characterisation is fair with respect to sections of Japaridze's artistic production, but these accounts disregard works and information that do not fit as easily into the narrative of his development as a socialist realist painter. In particular, they pay little attention to his early contacts with Tiflis's early twentieth-century avant-garde or to evidence of these encounters in his painting.5 As a result, Japaridze's engagement with artistic and literary influences associated with the culture of the *finde-siècle*, and, in particular, the Symbolist movement, have been underplayed, as have religious and spiritual themes present in his painting. I set out here to resurrect the history of that encounter and, in doing so, to resituate Japaridze's mature painting within the contacts and contexts of his formative years.

It is not the aim of this chapter to argue that Japaridze was not a socialist realist painter, or that he was a Symbolist or otherwise modernist and dissident painter whose work somehow passed without notice under the radar of the Soviet censor. However, as a result of his engagement with pre-Revolutionary and modernist trends, he produced a body of painting which increasingly trod a path between conformity and dissidence. His art remained within the bounds of the acceptable, while also gently criticising the regime, by presenting a subtly pessimistic view of the transformation of rural life in Georgia under Soviet rule. In that sense, its closest analogy is to be found in the Village Prose movement, a literary movement that appeared during the 1950s and 1960s and existed within the official culture of the era, yet expressed regret for a traditional way of life that its authors felt had been lost.6 In some instances the nostalgic mood of Japaridze's representations of rural Georgia simply reflected the sentimental turn which socialist realism took as a whole in the post-War years. Yet in others Japaridze presented more sinister visions of Soviet life, many of which drew imagery directly from his early encounters with the Symbolist movement. The impact of these earlier encounters on Japaridze's mature painting is evidenced by the frequent recurrence of imagery from early works, almost verbatim, in paintings of the 1950s onwards.

Lado Gudiashvili (Tbilisi: Ganatleba, 1980); Igor Urushadze, *Ucha Dzhaparidze* (Tbilisi: Zaria Vostoka, 1958); and Nodar Dzhanberidze, *Ucha Dzhaparidze* (Tbilisi: Khelovneba, 1980).

5 The city of Tiflis was renamed Tbilisi in 1936.

6 On the Russian Village Prose movement, see: Kathleen F. Parthé, *Russian Village Prose: The Radiant Past* (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); G. A. Tsvetov, *Russkaia derevenskaia proza: evoliutsiia, zhanry, geroi: uchebnoe posobie* (St Petersburg: St Petersburg State University Press, 1992); A. Bol'shakova, *Russkaia derevenskaia proza XX veka: kod prochteniia* (Shumen: Aksios, 2002).

11.1 Ucha Japaridze, *Self-Portrait*, 1941. Ink on paper, 21 x 15 cm. Ucha Japaridze House Museum, Tbilisi. Photograph © Georgian National Museum, all rights reserved.

11.2 Lado Gudiashvili. 1910s. Photograph. Konstantin Zanisi. The National Parliamentary Library of Georgia. Photograph in the public domain. Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gudiashvili\_Lado\_recto.jpg

11.3 Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, View of Tiflis in the early 1900s. Photograph in the public domain. Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:View\_of\_ Havlabar\_(Tbilisi),\_in\_the\_early\_1900s,\_Sergei\_Mikhailovich\_Prokudin-Gorskii.jpg

The chapter is divided into two sections. The first revives the history of Japaridze's interaction with representatives of the Symbolist movement in Georgia, above all, the literary society known as the Blue Horns (*Tsisperi qantselebi*) and the painter Lado Gudiashvili (1896–1980) (fig. 11.2). It explores evidence of this encounter in Japaridze's artistic output between 1925 and 1935, much of which is examined here for the first time. I then turn to Japaridze's continued engagement with Symbolist sources and imagery and the prevalence of themes of religion, spirituality, and the occult in his mature painting. I examine the intimate representations of life in rural Georgia with which Japaridze's name became synonymous in the post-War period, focusing in particular on his representation firstly of animals and livestock, and secondly, of women. In Symbolist iconography, both are associated with the visualisation of the spiritual, the magical: that which is beyond everyday reality. As we will see, in Japaridze's painting, they frequently evoke heightened emotional and psychological states explored in Symbolist art and literature, including fear, anguish, distress, apprehension or grief, or they carry associations of the divine. Through the introduction of these motifs and the employment of certain pictorial devices that counter canonical forms of socialist realism, ostensibly harmonious pastoral scenes become deeply ambiguous, sometimes even dark and unsettling.

### Becoming an Artist in Early Soviet Georgia

Japaridze's childhood and teenage years coincided with the dramatic and unprecedented transformation of cultural and intellectual life in Georgia's capital that took place in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Georgia, and Tiflis (fig. 11.3) in particular, being situated at the crossroads between Europe and Asia, had been home to an extraordinarily diverse multi-ethnic population throughout its long history. For centuries its demographic had incorporated large communities of Persians, Armenians, and Russians, as well as Georgians and other national groups, many of whom were drawn to the city for trade. Moreover, invasions and occupations by powerful neighbours, including the Persian, Ottoman, and Russian Empires, had inevitably led aspects of occupying powers' cultural traditions and religious practices (as well as their peoples) to be absorbed and integrated into modern Georgian culture.7 In the 1910s and 1920s, however, Tiflis became still more cosmopolitan when the city suddenly became a sanctuary for Russian and European artists, writers, and intellectuals seeking refuge from the ravages of revolution and war to the north and

7 For a history of Georgia prior to Sovietisation, including the cultural impact of successive occupations, see 'Part One: The Rise and Fall of the Georgian Monarchies' and 'Part Two: Georgia in the Russian Empire', in Ronald Grigor Suny, *The Making of the Georgian Nation* (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994) (second edition, first edition published 1988), pp. 3–181. Suny, for example, discusses the cultural dominance of the occupying Ottoman Turks in Eastern Georgia and of Iranian power in Western Georgia from the mid-sixteenth century until the end of the seventeenth century, and to that of Imperial Russia thereafter (pp. 48, 52).

west.8 In addition to its already cacophonous jumble of ethnic and cultural identities, a bustling new avant-garde community of writers and artists of various inclinations colonised the city, founding journals, holding events, and opening taverns where they could meet to discuss the latest movements in European, Russian, and Georgian art, literature, and philosophy. Well-known Russian artists, writers, and intellectuals including Aleksei Kruchenykh, Vasily Kamensky, Igor Terentev, Iuri Degen, Sergei Gorodetsky, and Vera and Sergei Sudeikin all became visitors or temporary residents of this 'fantastic city' whose sudden cultural flourishing peaked during Georgia's brief independence from Imperial Russian and subsequently Soviet rule between 1918 and 1921.9

Through the arrival of these figures, as well as the activities of Georgia's own emerging cadres of modernist artists and writers, a whole new vocabulary of intellectual thought and political, philosophical, literary, and artistic ideas appeared in Georgia. The arrival of European and Russian literary and artistic movements, including Symbolism and Futurism, as well as the currents of Romanticism still prevailing across Europe and Russia (with its fascination, in particular, with all things 'oriental'), were reshaping the ways both Georgians and foreigners conceived of and represented Georgia and Georgian culture. These transformations formed the unique intellectual environment in which Japaridze found himself as a young aspiring painter.

Japaridze moved to Tiflis to study painting only in 1922, a year after the Bolsheviks had taken control of Georgia and established the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic in February 1921. Thus he arrived in the city only after anticipation of Bolshevik hostility had dispersed part of its vibrant intellectual community. As such, he has been assumed to have little or nothing connecting him with the cultural flourishing of pre-1921 Tiflis. He belongs to the first generation of Georgian painters educated under Soviet power, those graduating amidst the upheaval of Stalin's First Five-Year Plan and Cultural Revolution when organisations such as the Association of Artists of the Revolution (AKhR, 1928–32) in Moscow, and the Georgian Association of Revolutionary Artists (SARMA, 1929–32), were demanding the proletarianisation of the arts and declaring their opposition to the 'bourgeois', 'decadent' avant-garde movements of the preceding decades.10

8 On cultural life in Tiflis in this period, see Tat′iana Nikol'skaia, *'Fantasticheskii gorod': russkaia kul′turnaia zhizn′ Tbilisi (1917–1921)* (Moscow: Fifth Country, 2000); Luigi Magarotto, Marzio Marzaduri, *et al.*, *L'Avanguardia a Tiflis: studi, ricerche, cronache, testimonianze, documenti* (Venice: University of Venice, 1982); and Harsha Ram's extended review of Nikol'skaia's volume: 'Modernism on the Periphery: Literary Life in Post-revolutionary Tbilisi', *Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History*, 5, 2 (Spring 2004), 367–82, https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2004.0030

9 The Georgian modernist writer and publicist Grigol Robakidze wrote that Tiflis in this period had become a "fantastical city" and Paolo Iashvili referred in his poetry to "fantastic Tiflis". The phrase was adopted in the title of a recent study of avant-garde activity in early twentieth-century Tiflis: Nikol'skaia, *'Fantasticheskii gorod'.*

10 The Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AKhRR, 1922–28) gradually increased its dominance over artistic activity in Russia over the period of its existence. In 1928 it remodelled itself as the Union-wide Association of Artists of the Revolution (AKhR, 1928–32), and began to oversee

Indeed, Japaridze's immediate and consistent success in Soviet Georgia has reinforced notions of his distance from Georgia's pre-Soviet avant-garde. Even as he was finishing his studies at Tiflis's Academy of Arts (established 1922), his works shown at SARMA's exhibitions in 1930 and 1931 were attracting praise in the local press.11 By 1936, following three years' work experience in Moscow and boasting a network of useful contacts in the Soviet capital, he returned to Tiflis to be given a teaching post at the Academy alongside his former teachers — a position that he retained throughout his career. By that time Japaridze had adopted a realist style of painting compatible with the gradually crystallising demands of socialist realism, and he was contributing canvases to Stalin's personality cult, answering demands from Transcaucasian Party Secretary Lavrenty Beria for works illustrating Beria's new, highly falsified history of Stalin's role in the Bolshevik conquest of Transcaucasia.12 In the post-War period he earned further fame fulfilling several high-profile commissions, including eightmetre-long frescoes for Tbilisi's branch of the Institute of Marx-Engels-Lenin. These commissions, along with numerous state prizes, positions of authority, and the large personal exhibitions with which he was honoured (in Moscow in 1963, in Tbilisi in 1948, 1961, 1968, and 1970, and in his home village of Gari in 1962) affirmed his enduring position as a leading figure of Soviet Georgia's artistic establishment, and reinforced assumptions about his distance from Georgia's pre-Soviet avant-garde.

Nevertheless, a mass of visual and biographical evidence also attests to Japaridze's extensive engagement with that avant-garde community, a significant contingent of

the establishment of local branches of AKhR across the Soviet Union. The Tiflis branch (later, All-Georgian Republican Centre) of AKhR (REVMAS, *Revoliutsiis mkhatvarta asotsiatsia*) was initiated in 1928 by Georgian artists Mosei and Irakli Toidze, who had become members of AKhRR in Moscow in 1927. However, archival records suggest that the branch only formalised its activities and gained approval for its membership from AKhR's central bureau for the administration of its branches in 1930. It existed until 1931, before being subsumed into the more dominant Georgian Association of Revolutionary Artists (SARMA, *Sakartvelos asotsiatsia revoliutsionur mkhatvarta*) following orders from Glaviskusstva (RGALI, f. 2941, op. 1, ed. khr. 197 and 198). There were also further branches of AKhR inside the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic (GSSR). Notably, AKhRR's documentation also refers to branches outside of Russia prior to its re-branding as AKhR, including in Tashkent as early as 1925, and in Batumi, the port and capital of the Achar ASSR, which was part of the Georgian SSR, in 1926. The Batumi organisation later became the Achar SSR branch of AKhR, reportedly organised under the supervision of AKhRR founder-member, Boris Ioganson, in 1927 (RGALI, f. 2941, op. 1, ed. khr. 179, st. 1; f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 193, l. 15).

11 The Academy was in a state of flux in this period, undergoing several reorganisations and changes of name in the space of a few years. Established in 1922 as the Georgian Academy of Arts, in 1929–31 it became the Higher Art and Technical Institute, based on Moscow's art institute of the same name (*Vysshii Khudozhestvenno-Tekhnicheskii Institut* (*Vkhutein*), 1926–29, formerly *Vkhutemas*, the Higher Art and Technical Studios (*Vysshie khudozhestvenno-tekhnicheskie masterskie* (*Vkhutemas*), 1920–26)). In 1931 it was closed and replaced with a Faculty of Fine Arts within Tbilisi Pedagogical Institute, but was reinstated as the independent Tbilisi State Academy of Fine Arts in February 1933. For praise of Japaridze's painting in the contemporary press, see V. Sokol, 'SARMA', *Na rubezhe vostoka*, 9–10 (1930), p. 119.

12 Lavrentii Beria, *K voprosu ob istorii bol′shevistskikh organizatsii v Zakavkaz′e* ('On the question of the History of Bolshevik Organisations in Transcaucasia'. Report of the meeting of the Tiflis Party Organisation, 21–22 July 1935) (Moscow: Partizdat, 1935).

which continued to be active in Tiflis for at least a decade after the arrival of Bolshevik power, including the Blue Horns. This also included Gudiashvili, who taught Japaridze at the Academy and became his friend and mentor from that period onwards. Soviet scholarship tended to overlook the importance of these encounters — Japaridze's early contact with Gudiashvili was presented as little more than an unfortunate period during which his work briefly strayed into "arbitrary proportions" and "hypertrophy of form".13 Though some Soviet texts mention in passing Japaridze's personal connections with members of the Blue Horns association, no serious enquiry into his professional engagement with their writing has been offered. Moreover, in post-Soviet Georgia, painters of the Stalin era have attracted little interest among scholars.14

Since the late 1980s, flourishing western scholarship on socialist realism in literature, music, and the arts has demonstrated the complexity of the Stalinist cultural project, despite its aesthetic retrospection and tragic implications for intellectual and personal freedoms, and made a clear case for its further study. Pioneering studies by Boris Groys, Katerina Clark, Evgeny Dobrenko, Irina Gutkin, and others have transformed our understanding of socialist realism, elucidating its mechanisms and explaining its cultural origins in both the preceding avant-garde movements and the intellectual currents of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.15 Since the majority of this scholarship focuses on the artists and institutions and the political machinery operating in Moscow, at the Soviet centre, however, an examination of artistic activity on the Soviet periphery is much needed, not least in Georgia's case in light of the limited scholarship concerning the republic to date, and Georgia's special significance as the place of Stalin's birth.16

13 See Lebedev, *Ucha Malakievich Dzhaparidze*, p. 9 and Zlatkevich, *Ucha Dzhaparidze*, p. 22.

14 To my knowledge, post-Soviet scholarship concerning Japaridze is limited to a single short article in Georgian on Japaridze's book illustration: Mariam Gachechiladze, 'Ucha Japaridze — tsignis mkhatvari', *Mtsignobari '06* (2006), 169–84.

15 See: Katerina Clark, *The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual* (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000. First published 1981); Evgeny Dobrenko, *Political Economy of Socialist Realism*, trans. by Jesse M. Savage (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007); Boris Groys, *The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond*, trans. by Charles Rougle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Irina Gutkin, *The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic, 1890–1934* (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999); *Socialist Realism without Shores*, ed. by Evgeny Dobrenko and Lahusen Thomas (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1997). For a new analysis of socialist realism as a strand of modernism, see Petre Petrov, *Automatic for the Masses: The Death of the Author and the Birth of Socialist Realism* (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015).

16 There exists a small but growing body of scholarship concerned with art in the former socialist countries of Eastern and Central Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. For a useful introduction to this field see: *East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe*, ed. by the Slovenian artists' group IRWIN (London: Afterall, 2006). In the early 1990s two brief articles and an exhibition catalogue published in English offered high-level surveys of artistic activity across each of the Soviet Union's national republics and regions. See Musya Glants, '"From the Southern Mountains to the Northern Seas": Painting in the Republics in the Early Soviet Period', and Milka Bliznakov, 'International Modernism or Socialist Realism: Soviet Architecture in the Eastern Republics' in *New Perspectives on Russian and Soviet Artistic Culture: 4th World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies: Selected Papers*, ed. by John Norman (New York; Basingstoke: St Martin's Press; Macmillan Press, 1994),

Irina Gutkin has demonstrated the important role that Russian Symbolist philosophers and writers including Vladimir Solovev (1853–1900) and Viacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949) played in the genesis of socialist realism and socialist realist language.17 The Symbolists were engaged with theories concerning the occult, meaning a tangible higher realm existing beyond the visible, material reality, and with the idea that the observable world is made up of signs which can be decoded by the artist to reveal a higher reality. Responding to Solovev's theurgic aesthetics assigning artists and poets with the task of transfiguring the world through "the possession of the religious idea", Ivanov developed his theory of the mythological properties of artistic language.18 He proposed Symbolist poetic language, in which the ordinary language of empirical, material things, as distinguishable from the poetic-metaphorical language of a higher, spiritual plane, would be the penultimate linguistic stage in an evolution towards a mythological language in which material and spiritual realities are synthesised. As Gutkin shows, socialist realist language represents a realisation of Ivanov's prediction in that it constructs Soviet reality through a set of carefully controlled myths that conflate two realms — a beautiful mythologised present and future. Its vocabulary was made up of "a limited menu of positive and negative epithets, depending on whether it signified something belonging to the Soviet futurelike world or the old, capitalist world", and every word was "bonded together into a rigid system of politically correct correspondences […] coded to officially sanctioned mythologems", ensuring absolute control over the way they were read.19 The cultural myths this language employed then served "as grids of perception through which […]

pp. 95–111 and pp. 112–30, and Matthew Cullerne Bown, *Soviet Socialist Realist Painting 1930s–1960s: Paintings from Russia, the Ukraine, Belorussia, Uzbekistan, Kirgizia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Moldova selected in the USSR* (exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1992). For recent scholarship concerning art in Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus see: Aliya Abykaeva Nurteevna de Tiesenhausen, 'Socialist Realist Orientalism?: Depictions of Soviet Central Asia 1930s–1950s' (unpublished PhD thesis, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 2010); Cloé Drieu, *Fictions nationales: cinéma, empire et nation en Ouzbékistan (1919–1937)* (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2013); Vardan Azatyan, 'On the Ruins of the Soviet Past: Some Thoughts on Religion, Nationalism and Artistic Avant-Gardes in Armenia', *Springerin*, 4 (2008), https://springerin.at/en/2008/4/uber-dieruinen-der-sowjetischen-vergangenheit/; Vardan Azatyan, 'Disintegrating Progress: Bolshevism, National Modernism, and the Emergence of Contemporary Art Practices in Armenia', *ARTMargins*, 1, 1 (February 2012), 62–87, https://doi.org/10.1162/ARTM\_a\_00004

17 Gutkin, *The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic*. See in particular Chapter 2, Part 4, 'Myth and Socialist Realism: Symbolic Language, the Soviet Novel, and the Formation of Collective Consciousness', pp. 64–80. See also Gutkin, 'The Magic of Words: Symbolism, Futurism, Socialist Realism', in *The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture*, ed. by Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 225–46. Although Gutkin was the first to offer a comprehensive study of the cultural origins of socialist realism, including Stalinist culture's appropriation of the ideas of the Russian Symbolists, Groys, Clark, and others also acknowledge the importance of these ideas as well as the centrality of occult themes in the genesis of socialist realism.

18 Vladimir Solovev, "Tri rechi v pamiat' Dostoevskogo," in his *Sobranie sochinenii v dvukh tomakh* (Moscow, 1988), quoted in Gutkin, 'The Magic of Words: Symbolism, Futurism, Socialist Realism', in *The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture*, ed. by Rosenthal, p. 226.

19 Gutkin, *The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic*, pp. 68–69.

so-called reality" was presented.20 Through the continual repetition of this vocabulary of stock myths, presented through political rhetoric, literature, and visual culture, the people's cognition of those myths was automated so that they entered the Soviet citizen's subconscious and came to form the lens through which reality was perceived (or, following Dobrenko's argument, the material from which socialist reality was produced).21

In some of his artistic production from the Stalin era, and more explicitly during the post-Stalin era, Japaridze increasingly eluded this rigid system of signs by interspersing imagery and symbols drawn from Symbolist art and literature, and from Georgia's particular national cultural mythology, in his portraits of Soviet Georgia. As has been noted before, despite the rigidity of socialist realism's vocabulary of stock myths and images, since symbols could "have several meanings, even at the same time, and […] can often be used ambiguously", artists and writers could harness "the multivalence of literature's [and visual culture's] iconic signs" to convey meanings outside of the official viewpoint.22 The relatively liberal climate of the post-Stalin years in particular allowed for a looser definition of socialist realism which drew on an increasingly broad range of sources that could be combined to create even greater ambiguities in their interpretation. In Japaridze's case, because national cultural myths were as entrenched as Soviet myths in Georgians' conception of reality (helped by Soviet nationalities policies that encouraged the preservation and popularisation of Georgian cultural heritage), symbols could often be read ambiguously as responding either to Georgian national or Soviet myth systems (or both), thus giving rise to multiple meanings.23 Moreover, since socialist realist language itself drew heavily on Christian and occult themes and imagery (for example, the supernatural abilities with which, as Groys, Clark, and others have observed, Stalin or other heroes and villains were imbued in countless socialist realist novels), there was scope for experimenting with mystical and occult themes pervading in Romantic and Symbolist visions of Georgia.24 As I

20 *Ibid.*, p. 72.

21 Groys, *The Total Art of Stalinism*, pp. 44–45; 'Chapter 1: Socialism as Will and Representation' in Dobrenko, *Political Economy of Socialist Realism*, pp. 1–74.

22 Clark, *The Soviet Novel*, p. 12.

23 Nino Nanava has shown how Georgian intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries consistently drew on myths and symbols of Georgia's primordial past, both religious and secular, in articulating a conceptualisation of the modern Georgian nation that in turn filtered as fact into Georgian national self-conception. See Nino Nanava, 'Conceptualising the Georgian Nation: The Modern Intellectual Discourse of Georgian Identity' (unpublished PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London, 2005). For an introduction to the Soviet nationalities policy and the Soviet government's systematic promotion of the distinct national cultures of each of the officially designated Soviet nationalities see: Terry Martin, *The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939* (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001).

24 Scholars have long noted socialist realism's appropriation of Christian religious imagery, not least in the Lenin and Stalin personality cults. On the fantastical and superhuman abilities of heroes (including Stalin) and villains in socialist realist literature, see Groys, *The Total Art of Stalinism*, pp. 59–72 and 'Chapter 6: The Sense of Reality in the Heroic Age' in Clark, *The Soviet Novel*, pp. 136–59. On the

argue here, while enjoying the pragmatic support of the State, extended to him in part due to the Georgian public's emotional investment in Japaridze's painting as the visualisation of their own national feeling, Japaridze, like many artists in the post-Stalin era, inhabited a space between artistic conformity and dissent.

### Fantastic City: Japaridze and Tiflis in the 1910s and 1920s

The Blue Horns association, which included poets Paolo Iashvili and Titsian Tabidze, was a prominent feature of Tiflis's cultural community in the late 1910s and 1920s. Formed under the mentorship of the Georgian writer and publicist, Grigol Robakidze, in the Georgian city of Kutaisi in 1916 (relocating to Tiflis in 1919), it was Georgia's first home-grown modernist literary organisation. Many of the group's members were returning to Georgia following studies in St Petersburg, France, and Germany, and brought with them knowledge of contemporary European literary and intellectual movements. Although their interests were eclectic (several of them, like Gudiashvili, also participated in Futurist activities) they were united, above all, by their allegiance to contemporary Symbolist and Decadent movements sweeping Europe and Russia.25 By engaging with these movements they were the first to break with the strict linguistic forms that had governed Georgian literature before them. They adopted European Symbolism's concern with the expression of intense emotional and psychological experiences and its prevailing themes of love, death, anguish, and unrequited desire. Moreover, they shared the European Symbolists' belief in a higher spiritual realm that the poet or artist could communicate to the reader or viewer through a system of symbols. Their writing adopted common Symbolist visual motifs and sources — otherworldly creatures, virginal maidens, tormented demons — as well as Symbolism's debt to Greek mythological and biblical sources.

However, the Blue Horns were not concerned simply with importing the innovations of their European colleagues to Georgia. Instead they sought to establish a modern literary canon that was rooted in Georgia's own national cultural mythology. Their poetry and prose exploring Symbolist preoccupations of love, anguish, and death was set in the malarial marshes of Georgia's lowlands or against the vast peaks of the Caucasus mountains, and populated with imagery mined from Georgia's unique cultural history. References abound to Georgia's powerful medieval dynasties and famous chivalric traditions, to the poetry of Shota Rustaveli (Georgia's twelfthcentury national bard), and the country's multifarious religious beliefs and practices. Moreover, the Blue Horns' adoption of imagery from Greek mythology held specific connections to Georgia's cultural ancestry, due to the extensive cultural influence

influence of occult ideas in Soviet culture, including Maxim Gorky's interest in quasi-occult, quasiscientific theories of thought transference and its potential for controlling the minds of the Soviet masses, see Rosenthal, *The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture*.

25 The Blue Horns also translated Futurist works from Russian and Italian, and Iashvili Italianised his first name, Pavle, to Paolo in homage to the Italian Futurists. See Donald Rayfield, *The Literature of Georgia: A History* (Surrey: Curzon Press, 2000. First published Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 231 and 257*.*

Ancient Greece asserted over the proto-Georgian kingdom of Colchis (which occupied the western territories of modern Georgia). In turn, Transcaucasia claimed a prominent place in the ancient Greek imagination as the exotic, untamed land of Prometheus and Jason and the Argonauts. As such, the Blue Horns' engagement with mythological sources had particular significance in their construction of their own and Georgian national identities. For example, the group's meeting place, the Kimerioni café, took its name from Greek mythology's *chimera*, a monstrous fire-breathing hybrid creature usually represented as part lion and part goat, with a snake for a tail. Since the *chimera*  was fabled to inhabit Asia Minor, a territory that to the Greek imagination, like Colchis, represented the wild, exotic lands of an unknown east, the choice of name reflects the self-orientalising, self-exoticising vision of Georgia that the Blue Horns cultivated in their writing.26 This exoticisation of Georgian identity is of particular interest in considering Japaridze's relationship with the Blue Horns writers, and his representation of Georgia in the Stalin and post-Stalin eras.

Japaridze's connections with the Blue Horns predated his relocation to Tiflis in 1922. His brothers, twins Grigol and Lado, had been active members of the society since the year of its formation in 1916. As such, Japaridze, who was only nine years old when it formed, was surely familiar with its ideas and members from a young age. Indeed Japaridze's father, who was also a published writer, reportedly held frequent literary evenings at the family home and kept an extensive library, making it probable that Japaridze was well versed in the latest literary and artistic movements in Europe and Russia by the time he entered his teens.27 While there is no specific written record of Japaridze's professional interactions with the group in the 1920s, the absence of such records is not conclusive evidence that they did not take place. Instead, the denouncement (and in several cases, murder) of many of the Blue Horns writers in the Great Terror of 1937–38 offers plentiful explanation as to why any such connections might have been suppressed. It is clear that Japaridze was close with the group at least by the mid-1930s, as he later recalled how Titsian Tabidze and Iashvili would often visit him in Moscow in the 1930s to "wander the streets" and "talk about art" together.28 These friendships in the 1930s, and connections via his brothers and Gudiashvili, suggest a professional interaction in the 1920s and early 1930s that is also reflected in Japaridze's painting.

Like Japaridze's brothers, Gudiashvili was a close collaborator of the Blue Horns from the group's inception.29 His painting during the 1910s and 1920s is known for

26 The group's name was also a reflection of its marriage of European Symbolism's aesthetic innovations and imagery rooted in Georgia's unique culture and geography. As Titsian Tabidze explained, 'blue' stood for azure skies, romantic dreaming, and the establishment of a powerful kingdom. 'Horns' referred to the traditional Georgian drinking vessel, citing both a national and ethnic dimension and, as Tabidze declared, carrying associations of drunkenness as a means of stimulating intuition and facilitating comprehension of the mysteries of the universe. Rayfield, *The Literature of Georgia*, p. 231.

27 Urushadze, *Ucha Dzhaparidze*, p. 6.

28 Zlatkevich, *Ucha Dzhaparidze*, p. 29.

29 Having first met Galaktion Tabidze in 1915, a year before the society was formed, while both were contributors to Ioseb Imedashvili's journal *Theatre and Life* (*Teatri da tskhovreba*), Gudiashvili quickly developed close and lasting friendships with many of the group's members. He became their constant

its eclectic blend of influences and references, with debts to sources as disparate as Georgian ecclesiastical wall-painting, Persian miniature painting, the beguiling portraits of the Jewish-Italian painter and sculptor Amadeo Modigliani (whom he met during a period of residence in Paris from 1920 until 1925), and the anatomical distortions of Art Deco design. However, his most sustained engagement was with the Blue Horns. Like the group's poetry and prose, Gudiashvili's painting of the period is replete with Symbolism's magic and mysticism, yet uniquely Georgian in its imagery. Numerous paintings present sinister visions of Tiflis's destitute underclasses in which the city's carousing *kintos* (petty tradesmen), often lustful and demonic in appearance, mingle with the criminals and fallen women of Ortachala, the city's impoverished bohemian district. An insipid palette and distorted, un-naturalistic treatment of space and form imbues them with an eerie, unreal quality. Other works conjure strange exotic landscapes inhabited by bewitching, otherworldly nudes, nymphs, and virgins surrounded by lush foliage and magical creatures, all lit up in the ethereal glow of twilight. Marrying Symbolism's exotica with Georgian settings, works such as *Green Woman* (*Spring*) (1920), *Virgin in the Mountains* (1923), and *In the Waves of Tskhenistsqali* (1925) offer visual analogies to the poetry of Titsian Tabidze, who claimed to put "Hafisz roses in Prudhomme's vase, Baudelaire's poisonous flowers in Besiki's garden".30

Georgia's rich history of spiritual traditions is a central wellspring of the Blue Horns' and Gudiashvili's imagery. Although the history of Christianity in Georgia stretches back as far as the fourth century, the country has also played host to a panoply of other traditions, each of which has seeped into a cultural mythology of modern Georgia. Islam and Islamic cultural traditions became a part of Georgian life during Persian and Ottoman occupations in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries and continue to colour Georgian culture today. Similarly, the pre-Christian pagan beliefs and practices of the proto-Georgian kingdom of Iberia occupy an important place in modern Georgia's identity, not least due to the fusion of pagan and Christian beliefs and practices that is still observed in Georgia's remote, north-eastern regions such as Khevsureti and Pshavi.31

companion in the late 1910s and 1920s, attending the various literary salons emerging in Tiflis. Later, Gudiashvili recalled how he spent "almost every day" in their company. Their shared friendship and aesthetic vision is reflected in Gudiashvili's artistic formulation of and illustrations for the group's journal *Dreaming Gazelles* (*Meotsnebe niamorebi*, 1919–22 and 1922–24) as well as his fantastical murals decorating the Kimerioni café. *Lado Gudiashvili*: *kniga vospominani; stat′i; iz perepiski; sovremenniki o khudozhnike*, ed. by L. Sh. Gagua (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1987), p. 101. On Gudiashvili's painting during the 1910s and 1920s see John E. Bowlt, 'Lado Gudiashvili', in *L'Avanguardia a Tiflis: studi, ricerche, cronache, testimonianze, documenti*, ed. by Luigi Magarotto, Marzio Marzaduri, and Giovanna Pagani Cesa (Venice: Università degli Studi di Venezia, 1982).

30 The Georgian poet, politician, and diplomat, Besarion Zakarias dze Gabashvili, commonly known as Besiki (1750–91). Titsian Tabidze, quoted in Rayfield, *The Literature of Georgia*, p. 239.

31 There is some debate as to whether pagan beliefs and practices have been retained from these early pre-fourth century origins, or whether these regions in fact adopted Christianity soon after its arrival in lowland Iberia but have since unwittingly diverged from certain Christian practices and beliefs during the thirteenth through to the seventeenth centuries as waves of Mongol, Turkish, and Persian invasions cut them off from Christian centres in the Georgian lowlands. See Kevin Tuite, 'Highland

Twentieth-century perceptions of Georgia's spiritual traditions have been shaped to a significant degree by nineteenth-century intellectuals' representation of them. As Susan Layton has shown, Russian Romantic writers including Lermontov, Pushkin, and Bestuzhev-Marlinsky presented an image of Georgia that emphasised Muslim and pagan 'oriental' elements of her spiritual and cultural identity.32 They constructed Georgia as both Asiatic and feminine, wild, and irrational — vis-à-vis a civilised, rational, male Russia — to produce a narrative legitimising Russia's annexation and 'protection' of Georgia. They advanced a "dualistic construct of woman": Georgia, personified through their female characters, was "an intensely good figure (the innocent virgin, the devoted mother)" yet "liable to metamorphose into a fiend (the murderess, the sorceress, the temptress)".33 Drawing on Islamic and pagan motifs in realising the latter incarnation in particular, these writers created a vision of Georgia that was beautiful and desirable, yet also dangerous and unpredictable — a land to be loved, but also controlled. These Russian writers and their Georgian followers, such as Ilia Chavchavadze, Grigol Orbeliani, and Nikoloz Baratashvili provided a vocabulary for constructing Georgian identity with reference to her spiritual and cultural traditions that the Blue Horns, Gudiashvili, and ultimately Japaridze would adapt to their own visions of Georgia and Georgian-ness.34

### Ucha Japaridze and Symbolism in Georgia

Japaridze's early works and sketchbooks of the 1920s and early 1930s abound with the otherworldly imagery of the Symbolist movement, including motifs particular to Gudiashvili's and the Blue Horns' markedly Georgian brand of Symbolism. However, such imagery was often more mystical than spiritual. For example, Japaridze's sketchbooks feature fantastical beasts familiar from Georgian mythology: majestic pheasants, howling wolves, and rearing stallions. These appear alongside 'oriental' princes and menacing demons with grotesquely distorted, laughing faces indebted to the carnivalesque, erotic imagery of Gudiashvili's painting, inspired in turn by that of Sergei Sudeikin, the Russian Symbolist painter known for his fantastical decorations adorning St Petersburg's Stray Dog cabaret, and Gudiashvili's collaborator on the murals decorating the Kimerioni café. In addition, watercolour illustrations of contemplative, virginal maidens in long draping dresses recall the forlorn maidens

Georgian paganism — archaism or innovation?' Review of Zurab K′ik′nadze, *Kartuli mitologia, I: jvari da saq′mo* (Kutaisi: Gelati Academy of Sciences, 1996), *Annual of the Society for the Study of the Caucasus*, 6–7 (1994–96), 79–91.

32 Susan Layton, *Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); see Chapter 11, 'Georgia as an Oriental Woman', pp. 192–212.

33 Layton, *Russian Literature and Empire*, p. 193.

34 Georgian Romantic writers' conceptualisations of Georgia's relationship with her Imperial coloniser were, however, constructed in particular and distinct ways. See Harsha Ram and Zaza Shatirishvili, 'Romantic Topography and the Dilemma of Empire: The Caucasus in the Dialogue of Georgian and Russian Poetry', *The Russian Review*, 63, 1 (January 2004), 1–25.

of Galaktion Tabidze's early poetry and the Pre-Raphaelites in England.35 Favoured Symbolist themes of death, mourning, and despair are similarly abundant: on one page a skull embraces the artist's disembodied head as if delivering a kiss of death. Other illustrations present mourning figures kneeling at gravesides, their bodies bent in grief or arched to the sky in despair, while one shows stooping crows that metamorphose into mourners.

Numerous pictures from this period reflect Japaridze's engagement with Gudiashvili's painting and Symbolist themes more broadly. An early pastel image, *Sleeping Shepherd* (1935) (fig. 11.4), for example, demonstrates the breadth of Symbolist sources to which he was responding. Ostensibly a realist picture, the image, in which a shepherd reclines against a twisting, knotted tree overhanging the bank of a river, unites a familiar set of motifs. In presenting the figure asleep in the landscape it aligns itself with the Symbolists' interest in the cognitive possibilities of dreaming, which they associated with accessing higher spiritual planes. It recalls representations of dreaming in the works of the Russian Symbolist painters of the Blue Rose group, such as Petr Utkin's *The Dream* (1905), as well as the reclining *kintos* of Gudiashvili's *Dreamers of Ortachala* (1920).36 The curve and twist of Japaridze's shepherd's elongated body, moreover, his narrow waist, broad shoulders, slender limbs and arched neck clearly emulate the willowy figures of Gudiashvili's *kintos*. Their distorted forms introduce otherworldly strangeness that contributes to the sense of their dream-world setting, and impart a divine quality through stylisation of form comparable to that found in Byzantine and Orthodox mural painting. The work's azure palette, moreover, aligns it with the Symbolists' association of the colour blue with spiritual realms.

35 Japaridze would have been familiar with the work of the Pre-Raphaelites through his contact with the Blue Horns and Gudiashvili since the Russian Symbolists, of whom the Blue Horns were followers and colleagues, acknowledged the Pre-Raphaelites as an important influence. Japaridze might also have been familiar with the coverage of the movement in the Russian periodical press, beginning in 1863 with Russian critic Dmitry Grigorevich's extended report in *The Russian Herald*, 'Paintings by English Artists at London Exhibitions in 1862' (Dmitrii Grigorevich, 'Kartiny angliiskikh zhivopistsev na vystavkakh 1862 goda v Londone', *Russkii vestnik*, 43 (1863), 31–92)*.* Coverage of the Pre-Raphaelites peaked at the turn of the century. For example, Sergei Diaghilev's journal, *The World of Art* (*Mir iskusstva*), published extensive reviews of the Pre-Raphaelites' activities. John Ruskin's 'Pre-Raphaelitism' was translated into Russian by Olga Soloveva, the wife of Russian Symbolist philosopher Vladimir Solovev, and published in *The World of Art* in 1900. See Rosalind P. Blakesley, 'Slavs, Brits and the question of national identity in art: Russian responses to British painting in the mid-nineteenth century', in *English Accents: Interactions with British Art c. 1776–1855*, ed. by Christiana Payne and William Vaughan (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2004), pp. 203–23, and Anna Poznanskaia, 'The Pre-Raphaelites in Russia', *The Tretyakov Gallery Magazine*, 39, 2 (2013), http:// www.tretyakovgallerymagazine.com/articles/%E2%84%962-2013-39/pre-raphaelites-russia

36 An oil version of *Dreamers of Ortachala*, dated 1920, was sold at Sotheby's in 2009 (Russian Art Evening Sale, Sotheby's, London, 8 June 2009, lot 21). It seems more likely that this was painted in the 1940s after a sketch of 1920; if so, it would have been the latter that likely came to the attention of Japaridze.

11.4 Ucha Japaridze, *Sleeping Shepherd*, 1935. Pastel on paper, 17 x 30cm. Ucha Japaridze House Museum, Tbilisi. Photograph © Georgian National Museum, all rights reserved.

A pair of buffalo that wallow in the river near Japaridze's shepherd also connects the image with Symbolist precedents. Buffalo feature frequently in Symbolist art and literature in light of their meaning in various religious traditions, in which they often embody masculine potency and fertility. Indeed, Japaridze's buffalo recall the wallowing beasts (buffalo and horses) which appear in Gudiashvili's *Green Nymphs* (1925), *In the Waves of Tskhenistsquali* (1925), and *Buffalo Tandem* (1931), which in turn make reference to other Russian and European Symbolist sources. In Gudiashvili's *Green Nymphs*, an otherworldly female nude perches on the back of a buffalo wading in swirling waters, while another nymph swims at its side. The image calls to mind the myth of the Rape of Europa, in which Zeus disguises himself as a tame bull in order to gain Europa's trust, abduct and rape her — a subject also treated by Valentin Serov in 1910.  As well as bringing to mind Hamlet's Ophelia — a favourite subject of the Russian Symbolists and the English Pre-Raphaelites alike — Gudiashvili's image clearly refers to Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin's seminal Symbolist painting, *Bathing of a Red Horse* (1912), in which adolescent male nudes and red and white horses are presented bathing in a clear blue pool.37

Beyond their shared subject matter, Japaridze's painting also bears compositional similarities with each of these works. The animals presented in each are viewed from a high vantage point causing them to appear suspended in the flattened space of the surrounding water, rather than on its surface. The plane of the water's surface is disconnected from the naturalistic space rendered in the remainder of each picture so that the animals seem to inhabit an alternate realm. Elliptical compositions produced by the curve of the water's edge in both Petrov-Vodkin's and Japaridze's images and in Gudiashvili's *Buffalo Tandem*, moreover, make this division between the separate planes still more pronounced. In Japaridze's picture, as a result, the animals are read as belonging to the domain of the shepherd's dream, rather than to his waking reality.