Chronologically and conceptually, the icon occupies first place in the survey of Russian art history. However, approaches to what has traditionally constituted in historical reckonings as Russia's great contribution to the western canon of art—the radical avant-garde of the early twentieth century—has been decidedly secular. Maria Taroutina's richly-illustrated and rigorously-researched volume, The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival, offers a new approach for art and cultural historians to interrogate the construct of these “origin” points. From the book's cover, featuring water-colored blues of Mikhail Vrubel΄’s Lamentation II (1887), we are invited to reconsider the avant-garde in the retrograde and the traditional in the radical, as Taroutina argues for a renegotiation of our understanding of Russian modernism through the pictorial values of her living history of Russo-Byzantine revivalism.

In an approach that argues for continuity in pictorial influence, Taroutina's vivid and thorough history of medieval revivalism in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Russia does not focus on the radical breaks of war and revolution. Her first two chapters, which situate many of the experimental impulses of modernism in the late nineteenth century, weave together the interfacing of art criticism, restoration efforts, and artists’ works. She considers not only the work of major period theorists (Nikolai Tarabukin, Pavel Florensky, Nikolai Punin), but also the emergence of the field of Byzantine archeology and scholarship alongside changes in museology and display practices. What emerges is an illuminating picture of the dynamic cultural spaces in fin-de-siècle Russia, from the open studios and storage spaces of the Moscow Historical Museum to the press sensation that followed the restoration of Andrei Rublev's Trinity icon. Neither the museum, academy, nor icon itself serve as an ossifying force; rather, they each act as a “dynamic catalyst for contemporary artistic production” (68).

This history takes into account both the training of a viewing public and of the artists themselves, the latter of whom are treated in most detail in chapters three, four, and five. As Taroutina shows in these chapters devoted to Mikhail Vrubel΄, Vasilii Kandinskii, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin, pictorial lessons in Byzantine and medieval Russian art are formative for the philosophy, material, and style of these radically different artists. Vrubel΄ and Kandinskii are each offered as sites of recuperation from their often provincial or marginalized position in modernist (Greenbergian) art histories. Vrubel΄ forms a foundation through which Taroutina demonstrates the salience of a late nineteenth century “revivalist impulse” that shaped the “formal and conceptual possibilities of the twentieth” (135). Her analysis of Kandinsky through the lens of Byzantine revival offers an alternative modernism with affinity in the spiritual theistic turn of his literary contemporaries. If there is a site of recuperation in her fifth chapter devoted to Malevich and Tatlin, it is in her exploration of 0.10: The Last Futurist Exhibition. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the exhibition forms the “limit case study of the Russo-Byzantine revival” with the icon “literally and figuratively deployed in the service of a conceptual refiguration of the modernist idiom” (180–81). Though the Black Square might offer that zero point (for Taroutina as well as Malevich), Taroutina's attention to Tatlin's overlooked Corner Counter-Reliefs enriches the picture. She expands the single photograph offered too often to capture this complex moment in the history of Russian modernism. Moreover, her broader arguments regarding the artists’ individual histories illustrate the formative role that medieval art training had on Malevich, and especially, on Tatlin. Moving beyond the confines of the room of the Last Futurist Exhibition, the proto-Cubist is read through the frames of neo-Byzantine revival. Taroutina convincingly argues that we must understand the pictorial methods of the Byzantine tradition and their relevance for the nascent, and eventually, mature twentieth-century avant-garde.

Taroutina's keen formal insights are achieved through the deft handling of composition and form that make for effective readings of the direct citation or subtle codings of Russo-Byzantine forms—made all the more present through high-quality reproductions. Taroutina's prose is elegant and clear, making this scholarly volume accessible to all specialists in Russian art and culture. While one of the book's major interventions is in redefining the features of Russian modernism, Taroutina's conclusion makes an expansive turn, both temporally and spatially. In Pussy Riot's performance in the doubly-revived Cathedral of Christ the Savior, her work poignantly offers a “prehistory for the current debates on the triangulating forces of contemporary Russian art, politics, and religion” (222). It also seeks, however, to provide a model by which other national traditions could be interrogated—through the forms of revivalism, religion, regionalism, and nationalism. Whether this model can extend to such a global reach remains to be seen, but this erudite and effective volume has laid an excellent foundation.