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The Eternal Icon
| Article
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20017 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1992 |
1,482 Words |
| Author
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Eric Gibson
Eric Gibson, art critic for the Washington Times, last wrote
on Henry Ossewa Tanner in the September 1991 issue of The
World & I. |
Gates of Mystery: The Art of Holy Russia is one of those exhibitions that looks backward and forward at the same time. First and foremost it is a deeply affecting look at medieval Russian icons by means of some of that country's most beautiful treasures--primarily paintings, but also including, among its roughly one hundred objects, textiles, illuminated manuscripts, gilt and silver liturgical vessels, wooden sculpture, and carved icons in stone and ivory.
At the same time, however, Gates of Mystery is an exhibition that reminds us, as only the presence of the real thing can, of the influence Russian icon painting exerted on modern artists in Russia at the beginning of this century. And it raises the question whether this particular art form may not once again offer inspiration to painter and sculptors working today.
Gates of Mystery opened this fall at the Walters Gallery of Art, Baltimore, which organized the exhibition in conjunction with the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg and InterCultura, a Fort Worth-based arts and educational organization in Texas. Currently at the Art Museum of Princeton University until February 7, 1993, the show will travel to several other cities in the United States next year. The exhibition presents choice works from the State Russian Museum's holdings, and, because churches in the former Soviet Union are seeking to retrieve icons housed for decades in Soviet museums, it may be a very long time--if ever--before we see such an exhibition again.
The exhibition's title, Gates of Mystery, refers to the paradoxical nature of the icon itself--paradoxical at any rate to a mind used to taking images at face value. An icon isn't an illustration or a portrait, a literal representation of the subject in question, whether it be Christ or a saint. Instead, an icon is something else, a category of image that stands somewhere between the concrete and the ineffable.
The Greek word for icon, eikon, means "image," and in Orthodox belief, the term has a profound meaning. Humanity, made in God's image, is an icon of its Creator; the Orthodox church is an icon of the cosmos, a priest an icon of Christ. Central to the understanding of pictorial icons is the idea of the Incarnation. As God incarnated Himself in Christ, an icon is on some level an incarnation of its subject, participating in its divine essence. The artist seeks to be filled with the light of the Holy Spirit as he paints, so that the image may be imbued with divine energy and the holy presence of the one portrayed. A sensitive believer, upon
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