Mikhail Vrubel

Maria Taroutina is Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies at Brown University. She is the author of The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival (2018), which was awarded the 2019 University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies.

In this eloquent text, Maria Taroutina makes a wholly persuasive case for counting Mikhail Vrubel among the great artists of the nineteenth century. His idiosyncratic, compelling works in multiple media bear the unmistakable imprint of originality, foreshadowing the visionary modernism of Kandinsky and Malevich. Offering new readings of individual works while sketching the largest of contexts, this richly rewarding book fills a significant lacuna in the English-language history of art. - Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, Yale UniversityIn a tour de force of expansive scholarship and close reading, Maria Taroutina has written the book that an artist as protean, cosmopolitan and creatively unbound as Vrubel deserves. Sharing her subject’s insatiable intellectual curiosity, she unearths stimuli ranging from Byzantine mosaics and Persian carpets to contemporary opera and the tessellated forms of Cézanne. Vrubel’s restive response to these myriad cultural encounters establishes him as much a powerhouse of transnational modernism as he was a cornerstone of the Russian avant-garde. - Rosalind P. Blakesley, Professor of Russian and European Art, University of Cambridge, and Master of Pembroke College, CambridgeMaria Taroutina has written a unique, and uniquely holistic, study of Mikhail Vrubel, a fin-de-siècle artist central to the history of Russian modern art. Stunningly illustrated and carefully researched, the book introduces Anglophone readers to Vrubel’s staggeringly eclectic body of work: icon and monumental painting; forays into proto-Cubist form; ceramics; and even architectural projects. One of the most eccentric and experimental representatives of late imperial Russian art, Vrubel was also, as Taroutina’s definitive account shows, an important influence on the subsequent generation of artists and thinkers of the Soviet avant-garde. - Aglaya K. Glebova, Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art, University of California, BerkeleyIn a beautifully fashioned mosaic of images and observations, Maria Taroutina reassesses Vrubel as an artist continually exploring the boundaries of visual expression, drawn equally to the spiritual legacy of national traditions and the radical breaks of transnational experimentation. This is a fully rounded portrait of one of modernism’s most complex figures, full of fresh new insights across a wealth of media. With a nuanced understanding of how each successive generation found its own interpretations of the artist, the author introduces new audiences to a Vrubel for our time. - Wendy Salmond, Martha Weidlein Masters Professor in Art, Chapman University