Iconic developments

I've had this weekend off which I've greatly appreciated. The weekend has included my brother-in-law's 40th birthday party but it began with presentations about and a visit to the Byzantium exhibition at the Royal Academy.

Both were organised by the Faith & Image group. Peter Webb and Graham Dixon gave interesting presentations on the background to the exhibition on Thusday evening with Webb focusing on the history and Dixon on the liturgy. Mark Lewis had arranged the exhibition visit that followed on the Friday morning.

What I found most interesting about the presentations and the exhibition itself was the sense of development. Iconic practice is often presented as an essentially unchanging tradition but this exhibition shows the way in which such practice developed from the integration of Roman imagery into Christian art and through the stimulous of iconoclasm to its theological underpinning.

The carved ivory work in the exhibition, for example, does not have the same degree of stylization as is found in the icons displayed and a greater degree of realistic representation. Later icons also in some instances reflect the influence of developments towards realism within the Western artistic tradition and show therefore that iconic practice can and does contain scope for variation and development, as can also be found in differing ways in some twentieth and twenty-first century iconic practice.

With this in mind it was also interesting to come across The Avant Garde Icon in the RA bookshop. This unusual treatment of the Russian avant-garde aims to offer original insights into the broad and complex unfolding of Russian art up to the 1950s. Beginning with an account of the movement's origins in about 1870, and concluding with the death of Stalin, Andrew Spira seeks to demonstrate how icons underpin the development of nineteenth and twentieth-century Russian art.

During this time new ideas grounded in a radical revolutionary secularism were providing a strong challenge to the values of a society steeped in religious, faith-based traditions. Great artists such as Malevich and Larionov offered an ambivalent response to their religious heritage. Whilst they rebelled against its stifling conservation and credulity, they were also profoundly influenced by its nationalist, populist, aesthetic appeal and, ultimately, its spirituality. Malevich in particular aimed to raise the status of contemporary art to that of icons.

Spira seeks to trace the course of this paradoxical dialogue between artists at the cutting edge of modernity and the rich, sacred and artistic traditions of the past, which then continued as communist designers adapted the popular conventions of icon painting to their own purposes after the Russian Revolution. The Avant-Garde Icon aims to throw a new light on the deeper meaning and significance of icons. It adds to art-historical debates around early twentieth-century art, whilst also catering to those who have a general interest in icons and in the stunning images produced in Russia throughout this tumultuous period.

This is a book that seems to deal with arguments also made by Daniel Siedell in God in the Gallery and iconographer Aidan Hart in articles published on his website. True iconic practice may only be possible within the theology and liturgy of Orthodoxy as Graham Dixon pointed out in responding to questions following his presentation but the influence of iconography on the development of Modern Art seems to be becoming equally well established and, if the arguments of Dan Siedell were to be accepted, could continue to be a significant influence on the development of Contemporary Art.

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Arvo Pärt - Bogoróditse Djévo.