Information about the author: 

Abstract:

Huysmans and Muratov represent two stadial opposite poles in the history of art criticism at the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The French author stands at the origins of Modernism forming the initially Decadent paradigm and then transforming it into the characteristic model of “Catholic renewal”. Muratov, on the other hand, in many ways summarizes the path taken by the modernist aesthetics of the “belle époque” (“Silver Age”). What in Huysmans’s aesthetics was sharpened as a significant contradiction, a fruitful antinomy (“Spiritual Naturalism” in the interpretation of, for example, Matthias Grünewald’s work), in Muratov’s criticism found a harmonious resolution in the space of “spiritualized aestheticism”, reconciling the canon with the freedom of individual artistic creative expression. The difference of approaches of two critics is especially noticeable in their interpretation of Fra Beato Angelico’s work. At the same time, the differences — sometimes reaching antithesis — between both authors require mandatory comprehension against the background of the unity of their common Modernist ground. It is no coincidence that for both Huysmans and Muratov, the most important and necessary stage that prepared the artistic consciousness at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries for realizing the outstanding role of Italian primitives and Old Russian iconography in cultural history was associated with the revelations of Impressionism and the early “new art” creators.