The Painted Work of Vladimir Komarovskij

Despite some recent rediscoveries (the exhibition of the Nukus Museum collection at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, in 2017; the restoration of the frescoes in the church of Sofia, Wisdom of God, Moscow, in the same year), the work of the artist Vladimir Komarovskij (1882-1937, executed in Butovo), remains largely unknown in Russian art history. Its reception by the Russian Orthodox Church also seems to be waning. Yet still, the philosopher Pavel Florenskij (1882-1937) was a great promoter of this artist, whose work helps us to understand, from the perspective of the problem of representation in the Byzantine sense, what was at stake in the artistic research of this time: the quest for “true” realism (and the militant struggles against so-called “formalism”), and this beyond Russia, since such were indeed the aspirations in the international modernist art movement. Unable to engage in a search of the artist's fragmentarily preserved work in Russia in person, in view of the current war, this article addresses this historiographical gap by taking as its support mostly proposed representations. While acknowledging an obscuring tendency, the paper presents what can (rather) be seen and reconstructs that which can only be assumed. It touches briefly on the author's posthumously edited writings and questions thereby the causes of this dynamic, which conditioned the creation of Komarovskij. The focus is foremost to present what can be known of the artist's painted work and thereby at least open a way for its subsequent analysis, as well as that of the Byzantine heritage in the artistic context of the 20th century.