Page 371 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

APPENDIX
Note on Andrew Spira, The Avant-Garde Icon:
Russian Avant-Garde Art and the Icon Painting Tradition
The book by Andrew Spira, entitled The Avant-Garde Icon: Russian Avant-Garde Art and the Icon Painting Tradition, explores the complex and intricate role that icons have played in the development of avant-garde art in Russia. Generally speaking, Spira’s book man- ages to provide a lucid understanding of a topic whose broadness, complexity as well as significance cannot be underestimated. The study could have easily been entitled “The Iconological Roots of Russian Avant-Garde Art.” It begins with a historical approach, by providing a synoptic outline of the history and theology of icons from their source in Byzantium up until the end of the 18th century.
Spira also exploits this first chapter as an introduction to what will later be said in his work about the theological dimension of the influence of the icons in the Suprematist work of Kazimir Malevich. It is noteworthy that early in the first chapter, he cites Pavel Florensky, who said that an icon is in itself “proof of the existence of God”1 – a citation that might be understood as a deliberate resonance of the title of one of Malevich’s most important texts which Spira discusses and cites from in the fourth chapter, being the text entitled God is Not Cast Down.2 In this manner Spira attempts to gradually lead the read- er into deciphering the cryptic and, in our opinion, underdeveloped and thus difficult to classify theological-philosophical thought behind Malevich’s writings and paintings.
1 Andrew Spira, The Avant-Garde Icon: Russian Avant-Garde Art and the Icon Painting Tradition (Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2008), 20.
2 Ibid., 148.
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