Until the Communists came along, Russia used to import most of its ideas about art.
Wandering Byzantine craftsmen first brought "eikons" (images) into Russia, and set the stage for Russia's golden age (the 15th Century) of religious painting. Peter the Great hired Europeans to teach portraiture and allegorical landscape to Russian serfs (who were sometimes flogged for failure to produce a flattering likeness in good taste), turned 18th and 19th Century Russian art into a brackish backwater of the West.
Even when turn-of-the-century artists tried to get the dramatic realism of Tolstoy and...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
