 UK £80.00 US $120.00 Hardback 324 pages 387 colour illustrations; 47 black-and-white illustrations 33 x 26 cm (12.75 x 10.25 in) ISBN: 978-1-8589-4724-2 Published in the UK September 2025 Published in the US September 2025 | Russian Icons The Oleg Kushnirskiy Collection Anna Ivannikova, Dr Wendy R. Salmond, Dr Alex D. Epstein, Dr Clemena Antonova, Anastasia Likhenko The artistic quality and historical significance of Russian icons - religious paintings of characters and scenes from the Eastern Orthodox Bible - have been of a consistently high order ever since they first emerged in that country in the eleventh century CE. Less constant, however, have been the care with which these works have been treated and their commercial value. Russian icons were at various times encouraged, then vandalized, then exported, then banned from export; during the worst privations under the Tsars and the Bolsheviks, people felt forced to use them as bartering counters and even sometimes as firewood. After the collapse of Communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, Oleg Kushnirskiy (born 1960) came to the West and set about assembling a collection of Russian icons in the United States, where they would be well protected from physcial decay and safe from further religious and political upheavals. Acquired from a variety of sources - ecclesiastical, civic and domestic - the Kushnirskiy Collection is now stored in New York and exhibited periodically in universities, galleries and museums in numerous locations, thus fulfilling the collector's ambition to bring these masterpieces to a wider audience than ever before. This complete catalogue features sixty works, the oldest created in the mid-seventeenth century, the most recent in the early twentieth. Accompanying the images are insightful analytical commentaries by distinguished art historians.
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Author Profiles Anna Ivannikova graduated from St Petersburg State University in 2006. She began her career at the State Russian Museum's Department of Old Russian Art, where she worked from 2002 to 2007. From 2007 to 2017, she contributed significantly to the conceptual development and acquisition of collections at the Museum of Russian Icons in Moscow. Since 2017, she has curated late icon painting at the State Hermitage Museum's Department of History of Russian Culture. She is also a certified expert of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation.
Dr Wendy R. Salmond received her Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin (1989). She has been a visiting curator at Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens in Washington, DC. Dr Salmond is now Professor of Art History in the Department of Art at Chapman University, Orange, California. She is also the editor of the Journal of Icon Studies, published by the Icon Museum + Study Center in Clinton, Massachusetts. Dr Alek D. Epstein, a sociologist of culture and politics, has authored over 200 academic articles and 40 books. He received his Ph.D. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2001). His professional experience includes teaching at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Open University of Israel, Moscoe Lomonosov State University and the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. Dr Epstein currently serves as the curator of the Moshe Castel Museum of Art in Ma'ale Adumim, Israel. Dr Clemena Antonova received her Ph.D. from the University of Oxford. She has held research positions at various institutions, most recently CAPAS, the University of Heidelberg, the University of Aix-Marseille and the University of Cologne. Currently, she is Research Director of The World in Pieces programme at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria. She is working on her third monography, IKONA: The Modernist Invention of the Russian Icon, to be published by Bloomsbury. Anastasia Likhenko is a graduate of the Department of Theory and History of Art at Moscow State University. She worked at the largest museums in Moscow dealing with Russian medieval and Byzantine art (the Mikhail Abramov Museum of Russian Icons, 2017-2019; the Central Andrey Rublev Museum of Ancient Russian Culture and Art, 2019-2021). Since 2021, she has served as the Curator of Museum Objects at the Department of Old Russian Art at the State Tretyakov Gallery. | ||
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