Journal ARS 47 (2014) 2

Myroslava M. MUDRAK

Cubism, the Icon and the Ukrainian Legacy of Alexis Gritchenko

(Summary)

Myroslava M. Mudrak, Professor Emerita of the History of Art at The Ohio State University focuses on the reception, analysis, and interpretation of Parisian Cubism in Ukraine through the lens of the writings and paintings of Ukrainian modernist painter Oleksa Hryshchenko (1883-1977). Best known by the French transliteration of his name, Alexis Gritchenko spent the critical period of his artistic formation in Paris, at the apogee of Cubism’s meteoric rise. Upon his return to Moscow, he witnessed firsthand the works of the modernist masters in the collection of the Moscow merchant, Sergei Shchukin, confirming for himself that Cubism was more than a profound and unprecedented stylistic innovation, but that the movement constitutes a pivotal moment in modernity for restoring the basic properties of image making as practiced by the ancient Byzantines and as seen in Byzantine-Rus’ icons. In his seminal study, On the Relationship between Russian Painting with Byzantium and the West 13-20th Centuries [O sviaziakh russkoi zhivopisi s Vizantiei i Zapadom XIII-XX vv (Moscow, 1913)], Gritchenko renders a survey on the development of icon painting and its legacy from the time of Kyiv-Rus’. Focusing on the formal properties of the geometric treatment of form, the flattening of the picture space, and the segmentation of objects, Gritchenko argues for distinct parallels between the ancient form of icons and Cubism. His analysis of Picasso’s Cubism as a repositioning of planar elements sheds light on the pictorial energies of Cubist painting that parallel the sensation of dynamism inherent in the icon image. When, in 1914, Nikolai Berdyaev criticized Picasso’s art and later disparaged Cubism in a public lecture entitled “The Crisis of Art” (1917), Berdyaev’s alarmist note led Gritchenko to defend the principles of pure painting, which, he believed, Cubism restored for modernity. Countering the philosopher’s position in a published essay entitled “’Crisis of Art’. Contemporary painting: On the Occasion of the Lecture of N. Berdyaev” [“Krizis’ iskusstva” Sovremennaia zhivopis: po povodu lektsii N. Berdiayeva (Moscow 1917)], Gritchenko highlights the methods of Paul Cézanne’s art (which Berdyaev admittedly appreciated) as the paradigm of transition between conventional illusionism in the history of painting and the syncretic values elicited by the absolute painting qualities of Cubism. Gritchenko’s own paintings, and those of his Kyiv colleagues, Alexandra Exter and, most especially Oleksandr Bohomazov, show evidence of an assimilated volumetric Cubism, a Cézanniste compression of space, and an affirmation of the picture surface through facture—an expression of the kind of “simultaneity” that the icon image offers the spectator. For his part, Gritchenko’s study of the compositional values and “rules” of color in ancient iconography in tandem with the modernist developments of Cubism led to new discoveries for his own art, and the concept of “color dynamos” (tsvetodynamos) —the renewal of color as an artistic element, according to both the compositional strictness and the physicality of the flat medium of ancient iconography. Gritchenko’s 1917 publication, The Russian Icon as the Art of Painting [Russkai︠a︡ ikona kak iskusstvo zhivopisi] promotes painting’s transubstantiation of the object into an absolute, which, like an icon, requires that the viewer confront the work directly, sort out its components, and derive meaning from the experience of beholding it. Gritchenko’s writings constitute an important, but neglected, contribution to the body of critical writing on Cubism.