The Kyiv Museum of Russian Art recently unveiled an exhibit entitled “The World of the Orthodox Icon.” It features works from private collections of this art form, which combines sacral dimensions with earthly beauty. Without this beauty perhaps we, sinners, would have a weaker sense of spirituality. No matter what theologians write or try to prove, an icon has two identities: a religious and an artistic one. It is both an element of church rituals and an elaborate painting that excites the soul not only with its substance and purpose but also its aesthetics. It is no accident that all kinds of secular art have sacred roots.
The exhibit’s organizers, the Kyiv Museum of Russian Art and the Ducat Antique Store, have produced a fine, richly-designed catalog, The World of the Orthodox Icon, complete with superb illustrations. In their speeches at the museum, art specialists noted that restoring, dating, identifying the artist, and determining the value of icons is a very complex matter, requiring great knowledge and intuition. Since icons are works of Orthodox art, they may be displayed and admired exclusively as part of exhibits like the one in question, not in churches. (In Western countries Roman Catholic churches are filled with paintings and sculptures created by the great masters. But they have created the proper conditions, including good lighting, for visitors to view these works of art). Unfortunately, the catalog provides scant information on the style of icon-painting in a given epoch, characteristics of icon painters’ techniques, and offers little in the way of historical or artistic background. The catalog is nothing more than a retelling of Biblical stories.
The exhibit includes over 70 Russian, Bulgarian, Greek, and Ukrainian icons spanning the 16th-19th centuries. Together the icons form a brilliant mosaic of periods, styles, national and regional peculiarities, compositions and plots based on the Scriptures. Most of the icons are Russian, representing various schools of icon painting. Especially interesting were icons by Old Believers’ masters, who always strictly adhered to the ancient icon- painting traditions of the Ruthenian icon, which preceded the 1656 reforms of Patriarch Nykon. Another icon, entitled “The Crucifixion with Saints,” is a modern work representing an artistic fusion of rigid traditionalism and 19th- century esthetics of which the icon painter was a contemporary.
Looking at the Russian icons, visitors cannot help comparing them to Western paintings, which depict the same subjects and date from the same period, let’s say, the 16th century. Why the big difference? Why — at a time when the Renaissance was flourishing in Western Europe, combining the divine and the earthly — was the East content endlessly to repeat (according to fixed canonical types of icons) the same subjects, forms, and inks? Why did it take so little interest in the anatomy of divinely created man or the boundless diversity of surrounding nature, another of God’s creations? How can one possibly compare El Greco’s “Ascension” with the 16th-century “Fiery Ascension of the Prophet Elias,” which was part of the exhibit? It is not even a question of talent: these are two different worlds whose inhabitants see with different eyes. Only dilettantes ask these kinds of questions, while art critics and historians have all the pat, scholarly answers. After all, even the cave art of primitive man impresses with its artistic taste and expressiveness.
You cannot help comparing the artistic level of the few Greek icons on display with ancient (pagan) Greek art (the same way you compare the Greeks’ Orthodox architecture with their ancient architecture). These are things that are impossible to compare. I am always saddened by the thought of the abyss that Christianity created between Greece’s ancient and Orthodox art. Christianity completely renounced its tremendous heritage and followed its own course.
I feel a bit awkward admitting that my favorite works in “The World of the Orthodox Icon” exhibit are the 18th-century Ukrainian icons, which, according to the compilers of the catalog, “demonstrate the loss of artistic language” (they must mean the absence of cliches and adherence to standards imposed by the 7th Ecumenical Council in the 8th century). What is most important to me is the fact that these icons are gifted group portraits of our fellow countrymen from the 18th century, painted against the backdrop of beautiful sacred subjects. I rejoiced to see these people (Orthodox and, I suspect, Greek Catholics), in the icon “Under the Pallium of the Mother of God” — various figures, clearly delineated faces and bodies, their eyes directed at the viewer, looking through the centuries. I also liked the portrait of St. Nicholas (18th century, from the Chernihiv area). In this icon he is an old man with a kind, shining face, and dressed in rich sacral vestments (the epitrakhelion alone is worth seeing). One of St. Nicholas’s missions — a rescue at sea — is very artistically accentuated in the style of early romanticism. These are two dramatic subjects linked to a naval accident.
I should also mention “The Assumption and Crowning of the Mother of God” (18th century, Bukovyna). This is a two-tier icon; the upper, heavenly, tier depicts the crowning of Mary, while the lower tier shows the apostles (no doubt fellow villagers of the icon painter) who are mourning the Mother of God.
Now that Ukraine has private collections and the experience of displaying them to the public, in time such exhibits should become a permanent feature of public life. It is in the interests of both art lovers and collectors. Why else invest so much money in paintings, icons, and sculptures? Let us hope that three or four generations down the road the heirs of today’s neophyte collectors will follow in the footsteps of outstanding personalities of the past, who donated their priceless collections to museums, their native towns, and their country. The collections they donated now bear their names.
One of the speakers on opening night said, “Stamp collectors collect stamps. Coin collectors collect coins. Meanwhile, icon collectors fathom the nation’s soul.”
