Borisov-Musatov

In the history of art, the artist’s oeuvre outlives its creator. The year 2020 has a special symbolic meaning in regard to the creative fate of one of the leading masters of the Russian Art Nouveau, Viktor Elpidiforovich Borisov-Musatov (1870-1905), as it opens and closes the path of the artist’s life with landmark dates: the 150th anniversary of his birth and the 115th anniversary of his death. These anniversaries stimulate us to not only recall and clarify the documentary aspects of the master’s biography, but also to analyse on a new level the ways in which the poetic principles of his creative thinking were manifested in his work. Considered together, the iconographic structure of Borisov-Musatov's artworks and the individual qualities of his artistic language form an authentic artistic universum, which, in accordance with the laws of symbolism, possesses its own Time and Space characteristics.

FLOURISHING IN THE LATE 19TH-EARLY 20TH CENTURIES, SYMBOLISM ASPIRED TO CONVEY IN ART INTUITIVE INSIGHTS INTO DIFFERENT REALITIES - THE REALITY OF DREAM, REVERIE, MEMORY, FAIRY TALE, LEGEND, OR THAT OF A DIFFERENT, HIGHER WORLD. THIS NEW WORLDVIEW, REPLACING POSITIVISM, BECAME ONE OF THE FEATURES OF THE CULTURAL SILVER AGE IN RUSSIA, AND EMBRACED ALL AREAS OF CREATIVE ENDEAVOUR, INCLUDING LITERATURE, RAINTING AND MUSIC RUSSIAN WRITERS AND POETS SUCH AS ALEXANDER BLOK, ANDREI BELY AND VY-ACHESLAV IVANOV, AND THE RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHERS VLADIMIR SOLOVIEV, PAVEL FLORENSKY AND SERGEI BULGAKOV BECAME EVANGELISTS AND INTERPRETERS OF THE NEW MOVEMENT: THEY PREACHED ABOUT THE MYSTICAL AND EVEN DIVINE ESSENCE OF ART WHICH WAS BOUND TO TRANSFORM THE WORLD.