Alter Icons: The Russian Icon and Modernity (Studies of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 027103677X ISBN 13: 9780271036779

Publisher: Penn State University Press, 2010

Synopsis

Passage into the modern world left the Russian icon profoundly altered. It fell into new hands, migrated to new homes, and acquired new forms and meanings. Icons were made in the factories of foreign industrialists and destroyed by iconoclasts of the proletariat. Even the icon&;s traditional functions&;whether in the feast days of the church or the pageantry of state power&;were susceptible to the transformative forces of modernization. In Alter Icons: The Russian Icon and Modernity, eleven scholars of Russian history, art, literature, cinema, philosophy, and theology track key shifts in the production, circulation, and consumption of the Russian icon from Peter the Great&;s Enlightenment to the post-Soviet revival of Orthodoxy. Alter Icons shows how the twin pressures of secular scholarship and secular art transformed the Russian icon from a sacred image in the church to a masterpiece in the museum, from a parochial craftwork to a template for the avant-garde, and from a medieval interface with the divine to a modernist prism for seeing the world anew.

In addition to the editors, the contributors are Robert Bird, Elena Boeck, Shirley A. Glade, John-Paul Himka, John Anthony McGuckin, Robert L. Nichols, Sarah Pratt, Wendy R. Salmond, and Vera Shevzov.

About this title

About the Authors

Jefferson J. A. Gatrall is Assistant Professor of Russian at Montclair State University.

Douglas Greenfield is Assistant Professor in the Intellectual Heritage Program at Temple University.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 027103677X
• ISBN 13: 9780271036779
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304
• Editor: Gatrall Jefferson J. A., Greenfield Douglas