Article
Iconic Encounters: Vasily
Kandinsky ’ s and Pavel Florensky ’ s
‘ Mystic Productivism ’
Maria Taroutina
Yale-NUS College, Singapore.
Abstract This essay examines the multiple discursive intersections between the
theories of perception and representation articulated by Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944)
and Pavel Florensky (1882–1937) in the first two decades of the twentieth century. More
specifically, it traces Kandinsky’s latent interest in medieval visuality and resituates his
well-known formulation of a new spiritual art in the form of abstraction within the realm
of Orthodox theology and aesthetics as theorized by Florensky. This article thus proposes
an entirely novel set of as yet unexplored interpretative possibilities for understanding
Kandinsky’s oeuvre on the one hand, and the broader dialectical relationship between
medieval revivalism and avant-garde experimentation on the other.
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2016) 7, 55–65.
doi:10.1057/pmed.2015.48
In ‘The Return of the Middle Ages,’ the theorist Umberto Eco argues that
‘modern ages have revisited the Middle Ages from the moment when, according
to historical books, they came to an end’ (Eco, 1986, 65). More specifically, he
claims that these returns tended to occur at moments of historical transition or
cultural and social crisis (Eco, 1986, 74). This hypothesis certainly holds true in
early twentieth-century Russia, which, in the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution
and on the eve of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, saw a rise of interest in the
Byzantine and Russian Middle Ages. Rejecting the positivist, materialist and
© 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 7, 1, 55–65
www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/