The Modern Icon Revival

After centuries in which Western-influenced naturalism had largely eclipsed the traditional icon in Orthodox lands, the twentieth century saw a deliberate recovery — a “return to the canon” led by theoreticians and iconographers in the Russian emigration and in Greece, and carried by the diaspora into the wider world. This file traces that revival — Ouspensky, Kontoglou, and their circles — and offers a measured assessment.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Situation to Be Recovered From

The revival can only be understood against the decline it answered. From the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Western academic religious painting had penetrated deeply into Orthodox church art: in Russia, the Balkans, and Greece, much ecclesiastical painting had adopted naturalistic perspective, modeling, and sentiment, so that the traditional canonical icon was in many places displaced by an “Italianate” or academic religious art, and the theology of the icon as a distinct thing was widely forgotten even within Orthodoxy (Leonid Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, SVS Press, 1992, vol. 2, on the Western captivity of Orthodox church painting; see The Divergence from Western Religious Art). Two developments prepared the recovery. In Russia, the cleaning and restoration of old icons in the early twentieth century — above all the uncovering, from beneath centuries of darkened varnish and overpainting, of the great medieval icons, and the epochal restoration of St. Andrei Rublev’s Trinity (revealed in its brilliance in 1904 and after) — disclosed to modern eyes the artistic and theological power of the canonical icon that the naturalistic centuries had obscured (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, SVS Press, 1982; the 1913 Moscow exhibition of cleaned icons was a landmark). And the Russian religious renaissance produced the first modern theological readings of the icon.

The Russian Recovery: Trubetskoy, Florensky, Ouspensky

The theological recovery of the icon began among Russian thinkers. Prince Eugene Trubetskoy, in essays written around 1915–1917, read the newly cleaned icons as “theology in color” — Umozrenie v kraskakh, “speculation in colors” — a spiritual vision of the world transfigured, and did much to teach educated Russians to see the icon as theology rather than as quaint antiquity (Eugene Trubetskoy, Icons: Theology in Color, trans. Gertrude Vakar, SVS Press, 1973). The priest, mathematician, and polymath Pavel Florensky gave the icon a profound (and later much-debated) philosophical-theological interpretation in Iconostasis and his essay on reverse perspective, reading the icon’s form as the visible boundary between the earthly and the heavenly worlds (Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis, trans. Sheehan and Andrejev, SVS Press, 1996; see The Language of the Icon).

The decisive figure for the practical and theological revival, however, was Leonid Ouspensky (1902–1987), a Russian émigré in Paris who both painted icons and taught the theology of the icon for decades, and whose two-volume Theology of the Icon and (with Vladimir Lossky) The Meaning of Icons became the standard modern statement of the Orthodox doctrine of the image and the manifesto of the “return to the canon” (Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, 1992; Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, 1982). Ouspensky’s program was explicit: to recover the canonical icon as theology, to expose the “Westernization” of Orthodox church art as a departure from the tradition, and to re-found the practice of iconography on the medieval and Byzantine canon rather than on academic naturalism. Through his teaching in Paris he formed a generation of iconographers and shaped the icon’s recovery across the diaspora and, eventually, in the Orthodox homelands (Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, SPCK, 2015, on Ouspensky and the icon in the Paris school).

The Greek Recovery: Photios Kontoglou

In the Greek world the parallel figure was Photios Kontoglou (1895–1965), a painter and writer from Asia Minor who turned decisively from Western academic art to the Byzantine tradition and became the leading force in the twentieth-century Greek return to canonical iconography (Kontoglou, Ekphrasis tes Orthodoxou Eikonographias [Expression of Orthodox Iconography], Athens, 1960). Kontoglou combined a polemical rejection of Western-style religious painting with a practical revival of Byzantine technique and a body of writing that taught the Greek Church to reclaim its own iconographic inheritance; his influence, like Ouspensky’s, ran through his many students and shaped church decoration across Greece and the Greek diaspora in the later twentieth century (John Yiannias, ed., The Byzantine Tradition after the Fall of Constantinople, Univ. of Virginia Press, 1991, on the modern Greek revival). Ouspensky in the Russian world and Kontoglou in the Greek thus led, from two directions, a single movement: the recovery of the traditional icon against the naturalism that had displaced it.

The Diaspora and the Spread of the Icon

A striking feature of the modern revival is that it flowered above all in the diaspora — in Paris, and then across Western Europe and North America — carried by the Russian and Greek emigrations, and that it made the icon known far beyond the Orthodox world. Through the emigration’s iconographers, publications, and teaching, and through the wider modern interest in the icon as art and as spirituality, the canonical icon became, in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, one of the most recognizable and widely admired expressions of Orthodox Christianity — reproduced, studied, collected, and (within Orthodoxy) once again painted according to the canon in workshops and monasteries around the world (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; the recovery is visible in the re-canonical decoration of new Orthodox churches across the diaspora). The icon, defended in the eighth and ninth centuries against emperors, thus found in the twentieth a new and unexpected vindication: recovered from within Orthodoxy against its own Westernization, and received without from a world hungry for its particular vision of the transfigured person.

Assessment

The modern icon revival is, by any measure, one of the genuine successes of twentieth-century Orthodoxy: it recovered a tradition that had been in real danger of being forgotten, restored the theology of the icon to the center of Orthodox self-understanding, and re-established canonical iconography as living practice. A sober assessment must add two cautions. First, the revival’s leading theoreticians — Ouspensky above all — wrote with a strong polemical edge against Western art and against the “decadent” post-Byzantine and synodal-era painting, and some scholars judge that this sometimes hardened into an over-schematic contrast, treating the whole later tradition as decline and idealizing a somewhat abstract “canon”; the historical picture of Orthodox art is richer and less binary than the manifesto version allows (this critical qualification is noted in art-historical scholarship on the modern revival, e.g. in discussions of Ouspensky’s normative reading; cf. Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). Second, the theological interpretations of Florensky and others, powerful as they are, are twentieth-century constructions and are received within Orthodoxy with admiration but also with debate, not as settled dogma (see The Language of the Icon). These qualifications do not diminish the achievement; they place it. The revival returned the Orthodox Church to its own iconographic tradition and gave the world again the icon as the Fathers and the Seventh Council understood it — a window to heaven, theology in line and color, the honor of which passes to the prototype (Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, 1992; and see the whole arc of this collection from What an Icon Is).

References

Ouspensky, Leonid. Theology of the Icon. 2 vols. Trans. Anthony Gythiel. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1992. (The “return to the canon”; the critique of the Westernization of Orthodox art.)
Ouspensky, Leonid, and Vladimir Lossky. The Meaning of Icons. Trans. G. E. H. Palmer and E. Kadloubovsky. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1982. (The recovered icons and their theology.)
Trubetskoy, Eugene N. Icons: Theology in Color. Trans. Gertrude Vakar. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1973. (The early Russian theological recovery.)
Florensky, Pavel. Iconostasis. Trans. Donald Sheehan and Olga Andrejev. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1996. (The philosophical-theological reading of the icon.)
Kontoglou, Photios. Ekphrasis tes Orthodoxou Eikonographias [Expression of Orthodox Iconography]. 2 vols. Athens, 1960. (The Greek revival of canonical iconography.)
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Ouspensky, the Paris school, and the modern recovery of the icon.)
Yiannias, John J., ed. The Byzantine Tradition after the Fall of Constantinople. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991. (The modern Greek iconographic revival.)