This book addresses the lively artistic dialogue that took place between Russia and the West-in particular with the United States, Britain, and France-from the 1860s to the Khrushchev Thaw. Offering stimulating new readings of cross-cultural exchange, it illuminates Russia's compelling, and sometimes combative, relation with western art in this period of profound cultural transformation. Russian Art and the West breaks new ground in the range of its material and its chronological span. Attending both to vanguard tendencies and to the official artistic institutions and practices of the tsarist and Soviet eras, it casts light on seminal developments little studied in western scholarship, while also providing new contexts for, and fresh insights into, the avant-garde of the early twentieth century. The book's eleven essays by leading experts on Russian art and design explore painting, architecture, and the decorative arts, considering not only the objects but also the patrons, audiences, exhibitions, and critical readings that together shaped national culture in an international context. Written in an accessible style and encompassing a variety of approaches, they collectively rethink conventional polarities and influences, and unpack the myths of separateness and isolation so often associated with artistic endeavor in late imperial or Soviet Russia. This illustrated volume will appeal to students, scholars, and general readers seeking to understand the fuller context of Russian artistic culture during a remarkable century of social and political change.

This volume of thirteen essays presents rigorous new research by western and Russian scholars on Russian art of the nienteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Over More than three decades after the publication of Elizabeth Valkenier's pioneering monograph, Russian Realist Art, this impressive collection showcases the latest methodology and subjects of inquiry, expanding the parameters of what has become an area of enormous intellectual and popular appeal. Major artists including Ilia Repin, Valentin Serov, and Wassily Kandinsky are considered afresh, as are the Peredvizhnik and Mir iskusstva movements and the Abramtsevo community. The book also breaks new ground to embrace subjects such as Russian graphic satire and children's book illustration, as well as stimulating aspects of patronage and display. Collectively, the essays include a range of approaches, from close textual readings to institutional critique. They also develop major themes inspired by Valkenier's work, among them: the emergence and evolution of cultural institutions, the development of aesthetic discourse and artistic terminology, debates between the Academy of Arts and its challengers, art criticism and the Russian press, and the resonance of various forms of nationalism within the art world. These and other questions engage multiple disciplines-those of art history, Slavic Russian studies, and cultural history, among others-and promise to fuel a vibrant and ascendant field.