Page 251 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Visualising the ‘Byzantine Malevich’
More than fifty years ago, a Russian theologian and thinker Paul Evdokimov (1901–1970) stated: “Without being able to prove it, one has an intuition that contemporary abstract art springs from Christian iconography, from the Islamic arabesque, from the panhuman nostalgia for the transcendental.”1 This statement was quite groundbreaking at the time it was published. As we shall discuss, today we are much closer to being able to tangibly demonstrate – if not prove – the existence of a highly pertinent aesthetic connection between the abstract painting of the 20th century and Late Byzantine painting. In this chapter we shall aspire to gradually visualise the cryptically encoded Late Byzantine aspects of the painting of Kazimir Malevich. To this end we shall adhere to a number of visual comparisons, visual demonstrations, as well as experimentations.
At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, the invention of the photo- graphic and later cinematic technologies had suffocated any objective need for “authen- tic” realism in the domain of visual art.2 Prior to this period, the phenomenon of art-mak- ing was comprehended and interpreted through the thought of German Idealism and Neo-Kantianism, both of which pertain to a kind of Neo-Platonism where the creation of an artwork is understood as a process in which the idea becomes alienated within its material encasement. Important German aesthetic thinkers regarded Byzantine art as decadent and until the early 20th century many scholars considered Byzantine art to be barbarous – a perception which originally occurred in the post-Renaissance period. As observed by Andrei Nakov, at the beginning of the 20th century, “the new ontological
1 Our translation of: «Χωρίς να μπορεί κανείς να το αποδείξει, διαισθάνεται ότι η σύγχρονη αφηρημένη τέχνη πηγάζει από τη χριστιανική εικονογραφία, από το μουσουλμανικό αραβούργημα, από την πανανθρώπινη νοσταλγία για το υπερβατικό.» Paul Evdokimov, “L’art Moderne ou la Sophia Désaffectée,” in Περί Ύλης και Τέχνης, ed. Philip Sherrard (Αθήνα: Σειρά “σύνορο,” 1971), 117.
2 The question of how and why the Western tradition arrived at a dead-end of representational art could undoubt- edly be a topic of a separate comprehensive study.
249