John Ruskin: Brantwood and the Ruskin Cross

Today's place of pilgrimage was to Brantwood, home of John Ruskin, and to the Ruskin Cross at St Andrew's Coniston.

Brantwood offers a fascinating insight into the world of John Ruskin and the last 28 years of his life spent at Coniston. Filled with many fine paintings, beautiful furniture and Ruskin’s personal treasures, the house retains the character of its famous resident. Displays and activities in the house, gardens and estate reflect the wealth of cultural associations with Ruskin’s legacy – from the Pre Raphaelites and the Arts and Crafts Movement to the founding of the National Trust and the Welfare State.
"Ruskin was one of the most important art critics and social thinkers of the nineteenth century. He championed the art of J. M. W. Turner and exercised a profound influence on the Pre-Raphaelites. When he came to write his famous architectural history of Venice entitled The Stones of Venice, he began to contrast mediaeval craftsmanship with modern industrial manufacturing."

"Ruskin believed that, to achieve the highest artistic ideals, the artist must understand the God given laws of nature by paying attention to minute details as well as spectacular effects."

"His ideas inspired William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement but also had profound political implications. When the first Labour Party MPs were elected in 1906, the book that they said had most influenced them was Ruskin’s Unto This Last. Much of the second half of his life was spent defending his ideas that industrialisation and free markets were doing terrible damage to the ability of people to live fulfilling and meaningful lives. Gandhi and Tolstoy are amongst those who found his writing deeply compelling."

Tolstoy said that, ‘Ruskin was one of the most remarkable men, not only of England and our time, but of all countries and all times. He was one of those rare men who think with their hearts, and so he thought and said not only what he himself had seen and felt,but what everyone will think and say in the future.’

"After his death Ruskin’s ideas found expression in the welfare state, the National Health Service, and widening access to education. His analysis of gothic buildings made a direct contribution to the development of modernist architecture."

"Standing by his grave," as W. G. Collingwood wrote, "one cannot but think what we owe him. He was not a mere successful man, but a great pioneer of thought. He led the way to many new fields, which he left for others to cultivate. It is from him chiefly that we, or our teachers, have learnt the
feelings with which we look nowadays at pictures or architecture or scenery, entering more intelligently into their beauty and significance, and providing more consciously for their safe keeping. Nobody for many generations understood so clearly and taught so fearlessly the laws of social justice and brotherly kindness; no one preached councils of perfection so eloquently and so effectively. There are few of us whose lives are not the better, one way or another, for his work."

My appreciation of Ruskin's significance came as a result of the writing of the art critic Peter Fuller. Fuller wrote that:

"When, in the early 1980s, I wrote the essays, later gathered together in Images of God, I felt that I was being tremendously daring and even perverse in reviving the idea that aesthetic experience was greatly diminished if it became divorced from the idea of the spiritual. What I responded to in Ruskin, above all else, was the distinction he made between ‘aesthesis’ and ‘theoria’, the former being a merely sensuous response to beauty, the latter what he described as a response to beauty with ‘our whole moral being’. My book, Theoria, was an attempt to rehabilitate ‘theoria’ over and above mere ‘aesthesis’; I also tried to communicate my feeling that the spiritual dimensions of art had been preserved, in a very special way, within the British traditions."

"I became interested in the links between ‘natural theology’ and the triumphs of British landscape painting. I am still convinced that there is a close correlation between British ‘higher landscape’ and those beliefs about nature as divine handiwork which were held with a peculiar vividness and immediacy in Britain."

Such views seem to have little place in the contemporary art world and, as Jonathan Jones has written, "this fierce defender of figurative painting and enemy of the avant garde has now been almost erased from the history of British art. His legacy has been reduced to the career of his protegee Sister Wendy Beckett and the annual Peter Fuller Lecture ... Even Modern Painters, the magazine he founded in 1987, officially abandoned his editorial policy ... to become broadly sympathetic to conceptual art ... Fuller has disappeared from the story of British art because that story has been mythicised and thinned out."

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Creed - With Arms Wide Open.

Fraser, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Collins & Houtheusen: The fool sees things the wise person never can

Giles Fraser had a great comment piece in yesterday's Guardian about Tolstoy and War and Peace:

"Tolstoy believed there was quite a lot to be said for foolishness, here goes: all Christians are fools. Politicians can’t allow themselves to look or behave like fools. Therefore, politicians cannot be Christian ...

Tolstoy reminds us that to be a Christian is to be a fool and a social outcast, that anyone who wishes to follow Christ has to be prepared to die as an enemy of the state, nailed to the cross. It’s a little bit more than a few verses of Shine, Jesus, Shine on a Sunday morning ...

the fool sees things the wise person never can."

Jim Forest reminds us that, "In Leo Tolstoy’s memoir of his childhood, he fondly recalls Grisha, a holy fool who sometimes wandered about his parent’s estate and even came into the mansion itself without knocking on the door. “He gave little icons to those he took a fancy to,” Tolstoy remembered."

In an article for the Financial Times, Harry Eyres writes:

"The holy fool, or fool for Christ, is a key figure not just in Orthodox religion but in Russian culture. Holy fools are disruptive; they go around half-naked, act as Robin Hoods, taking from the rich and giving to the poor; and, as Sergey Ivanov writes in Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond (2006), they “provoke outrage by [their] deliberate unruliness” ...

The figure of the holy fool appears repeatedly in the novels of Dostoevsky. There are “true” holy fools, such as Elder Zosima, the inspired preacher in The Brothers Karamazov, and Bishop Tikhon in The Devils; there are also false holy fools, such as Semyon in the same novel. But the most fascinating holy fool of all may be Prince Myshkin, the hero of The Idiot, who is never explicitly named as such. Myshkin represents Dostoevsky’s attempt to portray “a positively beautiful man”; naive to the point of gullibility, emotionally empathetic and open, Myshkin ends up ruining the lives of the two women he loves. Perhaps Dostoevsky’s point is that in a thoroughly corrupt society even attempts to do good are bound to come to grief."

The Fool became a major theme and life focus for the mystical painter, Cecil Collins. For Collins, the Fool represents “innate, inviolate, primordial innocence which sees clearly” with our purpose in life being to recover that direct perception; the vision of the Fool. The Fool “is interested … in love and its manifestation in that harmony and wholeness which we call beauty” but because he is in “a state of creative vulnerability and openness” the Fool “is easily destroyed by the world.”

See also my ArtWay article entitled The Spirituality of the Artist-Clown. The significance of the clown in the life and work of Albert Houthuesen.

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The Rolling Stones - Fool To Cry.

There is a need for models of sacrifice in society

Madeleine Bunting highlights the ideas of theologian Sarah Coakley in today's Guardian. Coakley argues that sacrifice needs to be restored as a central biological, ethical and theological principle. Far from sacrifice being an outmoded ritual, it is central to human experience:

'She cites recent evolutionary theory that puts sacrificial co-operation on a par with mutation and selection as a fundamental "principle" of evolution. "Individual evolutionary loss can be group evolutionary gain," she says.

Rather than imagining our genes as selfish, struggling in a race for the survival of the fittest, we can see evolution as requiring ceaseless sacrifices, small and large, to ensure the survival of the group ...

What makes Coakley's ideas so challenging is that, as she suggested in her 2012 Gifford lectures, "there is a need for models of sacrifice in a society" – that the existence of people dedicated to an "altruism beyond calculation" plays a critical role in challenging, inspiring and provoking the social order around them ...

We are living in an age of sacrifice on a near apocalyptic scale: a great extinction is under way with hundreds of species being eliminated as their habitats are destroyed. Looking at another dimension of this age of sacrifice, we have developed a global economy in which people's wellbeing and communities are routinely sacrificed for the sake of economic growth and efficiency – strange gods built on fantasies that allege rationality.

This is the ugly sacrifice that consumer capitalism attempts to conceal with its glamorous illusions and ideology of desire and entitlement, of self-fulfilment and self-expression. Capitalism offers speed, convenience and choice, but behind all of these lies sacrifice, from the poor working conditions of an exhausted workforce to the water-stressed cotton fields.

The urgency of us grasping the importance of sacrifice in human experience must surely be a vital part of any sustainable future.

Any proposal to slow down or reverse our destructive impact on the natural environment leads to talk of sacrifice on the part of consumers in western developed economies. Only when we understand how sacrifice can be a force for good have we any hope of restraining our destructive capabilities.'

Among other excellent Easter-themed coverage is John Dugdale's listing of 10 key Easter scenes to be found in writers ranging from Shakespeare to Yeats and Goethe to Tolstoy.

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Linda Perhacs - The Soul Of All Natural Things.

Anna Karenina

Joe Wright's film of Anna Karenina applies the look and feel of Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge to Imperial Russia in the 1870s. All scenes where Russia's high society appear in public are given a theatrical setting which highlights the sense that their lives are played out in public according to a rigorously enforced society script. It is this that Anna breaks through her affair with Vronsky and the sense that one cannot depart from one's allotted part is conveyed well throughout, particularly in the scene when Anna attempts to retake her place in the audience at the Opera.

The staginess of these scenes could easily have hampered the film's narrative but the scene transitions are genuinely creative and maintain the flow of the story. The focus is on Anna's alternative role - the assertive woman choosing love over status - and the tragic consequences of such choices in that day and time. Yet Wright does not neglect the other alternative that Tolstoy presents in the novel and the realism of Levin harvesting alongside his peasants and Kitty washing the fevered body of Levin's brother eloquently reveals the power of love by means of its contrast with the artificiality inherent in the theatre of high society.

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Dario Marianelli - Dance With Me.

Modern Religious Art

I've been corresponding recently with Christopher Clack who started the Modern Religious Art website just over a year ago. The site has had over 22,000 visitors over that time so has rightly attracted a good deal of notice.

Christopher writes that the motivation for the site was driven by his own work and interest in 'religious art' and because he believes "religious consciousness is nothing other then the indication of the new creative attitude of man towards the world" (to quote Tolstoy). He writes:

"I think that any new religious consciousness will be expressed through the arts, the problem being we may not yet know what it will be like or look like, it may not even at the moment be recognized as religion or religious, so I wanted to show examples of work that might (or might not) be part of this development. if that makes sense."

By religion he means matters of ultimate concern: "Religion means being ultimately concerned, asking the question of "to be or not to be" with respect to the meaning of one’s existence, and having symbols in which this question is answered. This is the largest and most basic concept of religion. And the whole development, not only of modern art but also of existentialism in all its realms -- and that means of the culture of the twentieth century -- is only possible if we understand that this is fundamentally what religion means: being ultimately concerned about one’s own being, about one’s self and one’s world, about its meaning and its estrangement and its finitude." Paul Tillich, Existentialist Aspects of Modern Art 

"Religion, like Art," he suggests, "is not about propounding doctrines, it’s not about what’s lawful or unlawful but about playfulness and creativity. Making art reconciles conflicting forces within us. The 'Religious' is found in the least expected places."
 
As such Modern Religious Art displays and encourages and the work of contemporary artists who are in some way motivated by or engaged with the religious. The site is not prescriptive of any particular belief system, it may contain contributions from artists who follow a particular faith but also artists of no faith or creed, and there will be those who consider themselves atheists, religious humanists, humanists, or agnostic. As the site is fairly new, Christopher has been searching out artists himself but he hopes more artists will start to find the site and he will start to find artists for the site that way.
 
Currently there are 11 artists featured on the site, including Christopher himself, and their work includes digital art, film, installation, painting, photography and sculpture. I particularly appreciated Tony O'Connell's photographs of everyday people as saints and Kate Pickering's performance and text based works which make "use of the language of religion to both examine and undo art world norms and assumptions."    

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Arcade Fire - Ready To Start. 

Airbrushed from Art History? (8)

Symbolism was an international movement and as a result the many Christian influences found within it also have strong international dimension.

In Belgium, Gustave van de Woestyne, Valerius de Saedeleer, George Minne and Alfons Dessenis formed the first 'generation' of the Latem School, which was followed shortly by a second group of artists - Albert Servaes, Frits van den Berghe, Constant Permeke, Léon de Smet and Gustave de Smet. Robert Hoozee writes in Belgian Art 1880 - 1914 that the "central idea of the little artists' colony was to search for a meaningful, spiritual art."

Like Maurice Denis, who was an influence on his work, van de Woestyne has been viewed as associating "the biblical message with the reality of an idealized rural world cut off from industrial society" (Cathérine Verleysen in Maurice Denis: Earthly Paradise). His work mixed "profound religious devotion with a realistic, sometimes mystical sensibility." George Minne was referred to on more than one occasion by critics as having a 'Gothic soul'. He drew inspiration for themes and forms from the Middle Ages and his entire oeuvre is imbued with religious feeling. Hoozee writes in Impressionism to Symbolism that Minne's work "captured perfectly the introverted spiritually expressive concerns of Symbolism, enclosed as they were within the elegant forms of Art Nouveau."

James Ensor is the greatest of the Belgian Symbolist painting truly visionary scenes and seeing himself often "in the midst of a hostile crowd, as a rejected Christ figure." This is an identification made by modern artists from Ensor and Gauguin onwards which can reflect both the isolation of artists in their suffering rejection or the sense of the god-like power to create possessed by artists. Ensor's biblically themed works such as The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889, in addition to their celebration of the artist as creator and unappreciated redeemer, also "create a grand, synthetic critique of contemporary politics, religion and society" which denounces "colonial policies, religious dogma, materialism, oppression, and deceit." (Michelle Facos, Symbolist Art in Context)

Jan Toorop was the oldest and most prominent of the Dutch symbolists and had many links with the Belgian movement. Robert Goldwater writes in Symbolism that the "mysticism of Toorop and [Johan] Thorn-Prikker" was a significant aspect of the "brief flowering of Dutch Symbolism." Toorop's early paintings are in the style of Ensor, he then works in a neo-impressionist style before his symbolist orientation begins to take hold. He draws on an eclectic range of iconography, including Javanese puppet figures, the flowing tresses of the Pre-Raphaelites, and Celtic interlace. All these elements come together in The Three Brides where Michael Gibson writes in Symbolism that:

"The central fiancée evokes an inward, superior and beautiful desire ... an ideal suffering ... The fiancée on the left symbolises spiritual suffering. She is the mystic fiancée, her eyes wide with fear ..." The bride on the right has "a materialistic and profane expression ..." and stands for the sensual world."

Gibson writes that "Thorn Prikker took Toorop's formalism a step further; the garland worn by The Bride echoes Christ's crown of thorns." He explained that "his basic intention [is] to fix ... the essence of things contained in general abstract concepts such as life, purity, mysticism, but also in the emotions of love, hate, depression." Goldwater writes that "his subjects are Christian, but like Maurice Denis, the best of whose early work has the same serene and lyric mood."

In Italy Symbolism was combined with Divisionism, the application of "pure colours directly onto the canvas in small dots, lines and threads" (Aurora Scotti Tosini in Radical Light). Giovanni Segantini's transcendent mountain scenes were often imbued with religious references while his "typically Symbolist dialectic of holy mother and fallen women" used "female characters who often represented the binary opposition of Mary and Eve" (Vivien Greene in Radical Light). "Guiseppe Pellizza da Volpeda was able to sustain his passion for socially conscious subjects while also using Symbolist imagery that was imbued with Christian motifs and was based on Italiam medieval and Renaissance prototypes." The Procession "re-enacts the powerful rituals of Catholicism" while The Mirror of Life "suggests biblical passages in which sheep symbolise the followers of Christ" in order to conceive the sheep of the scene as a metaphor for humanity.

For Gaetano Previati, "the most traditionally religious of the Divisionists," the Madonna and Child was a preferred theme realised most famously in Motherhood. "Previati sought to suggest the religious mysticism of his subject through the evocation of light, which radiates non-naturalistically from the figure of the Madonna in a diffused aureole" (Lara Pucci in Radical Light). "Previati's reinterpretation of Christian iconography and his efforts to reassign a spiritual meaning to art had a significant influence on the next generation [the Futurists]."

Yevgenia Petrova in From Russia portrays Mikhail Nesterov as one of "Russia's subtlest Symbolist artists":

"Nesterov devotes many of his paintings to people of the Church, remote from worldly vanity, immersed in the mysterious and rich world of spiritual quest. As a rule, the personages in Nestoerov's canvases are not portrait-like, having no concrete prototypes. They are symbols of the existence of a way of life, which rejects vanity and worldliness."

Petrova then describes the works of Mikhail Vrubel as "exhibiting a completely different kind of religiosity, rebellious in character, in keeping with the spirit of the Symbolist age":


"The thinking being tormented by good and evil, pride and sorrow, condemnation and revolt, strength of will and resignation to fate: this is the main theme of the mature Vrubel ... In his later years, Vrubel embodied his obsession with repentance in another masterpiece on a religious theme, Six-Winged Seraph."

This latter work "is perceived as an inner vision of the artist, to whom an angel has appeared to remind him of his high mission as one of the chosen, calling him to "inflame the hearts of people throughout the world", to arouse their spirits "from the trivia of the everyday, through sublime imagery"" (Valentina Knyazeva in From Russia).


Similarly, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin's Virgin of Tender Mercy to Evil Hearts is "permeated with an energy of great spiritual force" which "acquires a special significance as the artist's heartfelt response to the tragic events taking place at the time [the First World War]" Galina Krechina in From Russia).

National identity was a significant element within Symbolism, particularly in Eastern Europe. For example, Piotr Kopszak and Andrzej Szczerski writing in Symbolist Art in Poland suggest that:

"At the turn of the twentieth century the debate arose among artists concerning the search for a distinctive Polish national style. Hopes for an assertion of national identity found their expression in paintings and sculptures related to Polish history and national myths, and the Romantic idea of Polish messianism. These works implied that the sufferings of Poles had a deeper, spiritual meaning and served to redeem Europe. Poland appeared as the 'Christ of Nations', modelled on the symbolism of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ: in Romantic literature for example, contemporary Poland was compared to the crucified Jesus Christ, especially by [Adam] Mickiewicz. In the fine arts, the religious iconography of crucifixion appeared in works dedicated to national uprisings, and the sacrifice of national heroes, or in visionary works, such as [Stanislaw] Wyspiański's Polonia."

Jósef Mehoffer was a "major representative of the Polish art scene around 1900" who "throughout his life turned to the Roman Catholic religion as a source of inspiration, and his profound knowledge of Christian iconography was unique among his contemporaries." "His works were particularly well known for their attractive aesthetic qualities, based on colour harmonies and ornamental arabesques." He executed numerous church decorations but these were "a source of intense debate, with traditionalists considering the boldly modern works of Mehoffer to be inappropriate." Kazimierz Sichulski was another whose diverse output "often conveyed deeper Symbolist and religious meanings" (Julia Dudkiewicz in Symbolist Art in Poland).

In Hungary two artist communities had great significance, as Gyöngyi Éri and Zsuzsa Jobbágyi write in A Golden Age. Károly Ferenczy became the leading figure of the Nagybánya Artists' Colony and painted "a series of Biblical paintings exemplifying his love of nature." The lyrical approach to nature of the Nagybánya Artists and their semi-religious attitude to art "were both features of international Symbolism and a comon aspect of the Central-European Stimmungsmalerei." It was Ferenczy "who first painted the type of harmonious compositions where colours dominate the design, and the atmosphere is full of tender lyricism" (Ilona Sármány-Parsons in A Golden Age).

The Gödöllő Colony was inspired by the philosophy of Leo Tolstoy by simplifying their own lives and popularising his teachings for the common good, seeking happiness in unity:

"The painting Ego sum via, veritas et vita (1903) by Aladár Körösföi Kriesch is one of the most perfect expressions of the purity of this Christian faith. It displays a mentality that sought and found the fullness of life in family togetherness. Körösföi painted it after the premature death of his first child. The composition (on the right side of which members of the Gödöllő settlement are recognizable) illustrates Christian compliance with the Divine will."

"Sándor Nagy's paintings and drawings also reflect the Gödöllő striving for the purification of the spirit ... Ave Myriam (c. 1903) ... is part of a series depicting the development of the artist's own life in its progress towards beauty and perfection. At the beginning of the cycle, the artist discovers the evangelical tenets then, finding a wife, experiences the joyous beauty of life and reaches fulfilment with the birth of a child."

Finally, Tivandar Csontváry Kosztka was a "strange, obsessed genius" who following a vision aged twenty-seven indicating that he would be greater than Raphael "painted huge, visionary works in such a subjective style that they were inaccessible to the general public." The Praying Saviour "with its depiction of Moses in the background and the rather spectral presence of the apostles at the bottom of the picture, belongs to a ... visionary period, as do Cedars of Lebanon (1907) and Riders on the Seashore (1909), in which the freize-like procession of figures enhances a sense of enchantment." With similar nationalistic tendencies to those of the Young Poland movement, Csontváry "believed that a national art would serve to legitimize the history of the Hungarians as a separate and independent people in the heart of Europe."

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Arvo Part - Magnificat.

From Russia

From Russia is an exhibition about international relations. Titled From Russia, presumably because all the paintings on show come from Russian museums, it is famously the exhibition that was almost ‘not from Russia’ because of the worsening state of Anglo-Russian relations in the political fallout from the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. The exhibition itself tells a story of the effect that Modern Art developed primarily in Paris had on the art of Russia, culminating, through the work of Kandinsky and Malevich, in Russian artists temporarily leading the newest avant-garde movements. As a result the exhibition could have been titled ‘From Paris,’ as that is the main direction of the influence traced.

Although the exhibition has been publicised as a blockbuster show crammed with Modern masterpieces, it is actually an exhibition of greater variation and contrasts that the pre-publicity would have us believe. True, major works by Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Bonnard, Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Kandinsky and Malevich are all being shown in this country for the first time and that is reason enough in itself to make a visit to this exhibition a priority. But alongside this retelling of the standard history of Modern Western Art movements, is another interesting and less well-known story; the development of Modern Art within Russia itself.

Curators are continually seeking new ways of retelling the story of Modern Art because of its box-office cache; in this instance by the exploration of its influence on national and regional art. This is pragmatic postmodernism; as the telling of a national art-story enables the showing of The Dance which in turn guarantees queues at the ticket office. While getting the crowds in is an essential element in planning a major exhibition, this does not mean that telling the national art-story is simply a hook on which to hang modern masterpieces. In this case, as in last year’s Piety and Pragmatism exhibition at the Estorick, a fascinating story emerges in which spirituality plays a significant role.

The brooding figure of Leo Tolstoy barefoot painted by Ilya Repin stands at the entrance to this exhibition. Repin was heavily influenced by Tolstoy’s treatise What is Art? in which Tolstoy argued that the task of art was advocacy of moral virtue and Repin’s image of the writer as prophet signals a contrast between the serious moral and spiritual content of Russian Art at the turn of the nineteenth century and the joie-de-vivre of French Impressionism with its light celebrations of the bourgeoisie at play. The story here is of the way in which Modern Russian Art comes to dress itself in the clothes of Modernism without losing its spiritual soul and thereby, in the expressive abstraction of Kandinsky and the minimalist abstraction of Malevich, for a short period leads the Modernist stampede towards new artistic movements.

The staging posts on this journey are both beautiful and mysterious. Mikhail Nestorov’s The Murdered Tsarevich Dmitry is a poignant lament for the lost spiritual soul of Russia. Mikhail Vrubel’s Six-Winged Seraph is a masterpiece of expressionist painting creating a Symbolist image designed to arouse Russian spirits from the trivia of the everyday to contemplation of the sublime. Nikolai Roerich’s landscapes, saturated with colour harmonies and represented here by Kissing the Earth, are meditations on the universality of the Russian soul. Natalia Goncharova’s naïve and monumental Peasants derive from a nine-part composition based on the Gospels celebrating the spirituality of the Russian people. Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, in his Virgin of Tender Mercy to Evil Hearts, responds to the horrors of the First World War with a Virgin who looks on us the viewer with a tenderness borne of her own experience of suffering through the birth and death of Christ, as depicted in blue dream-like cubist images behind her. A similar combination of sorrow and strength through spirituality also pervades Marc Chagall’s The Red Jew. These are paintings as prophecy, increasingly using the techniques of Modernism, to address the Russian soul and a strong contrast to other works which draw more closely on the French-influenced exploration of form and colour that initially appeared free of such existential angst.

In the exhibition’s final room, this sense of artists calling out to a spirituality held in check finally finds release in the differing abstractions of Kandinsky and Malevich. Kandinsky abstracts from the folk art and fairy tales that featured in the art of Goncharova and Chagall to create paintings such as Composition VII on which colour explodes along lines of spiritual force. Malevich, by contrast, pares his imagery and colour down to black on white, shape on background. He spoke of his Black Cross as an icon of the new time and hung it across the corners of a room in the space traditionally reserved for an icon in a home. His black shapes represent the weight and substance of humanity in the weightlessness and void of the universe.

In the exhibition’s catalogue Yevgenia Petrova writes, of Malevich, “the quest for one of the 20th century’s most innovative creators for new themes and a new artistic language had its source in the realm of his religious notions.” This sense that Modernism was fed, in part, by “religious notions” is one that is only recently beginning to be explored and acknowledged in exhibitions such as Piety and Pragmatism and now From Russia. In this exhibition, the phenomenon is dealt with as being a purely Russian characteristic despite the influence of the Nabi's and, in particular Maurice Denis, on the French art that was purchased by the two principal Russian collectors, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. The role of Denis and other Nabi's in developing a modern French sacred art is therefore overlooked and the opportunity to explore links between l'Art Sacré and Russian spirituality missed.

If one of the legacies of From Russia were to be a more widespread re-examination of the influence of spirituality on Modernism, then the impact of this exhibition could potentially equate to that which the legendary collections of French art assembled by Shchukin and Morozov, which form the heart of From Russia, had on the Russian art of their own day.

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Rachmaninoff Vespers - Rejoice, O Virgin.