Maria Taroutina's new book Mikhail Vrubel From the Academy to the Avant-Garde is already regarded as a definitive English-language study of Vrubel’s innovative art and influence on modernism.
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel (1856–1910) was one of Russia’s most innovative fin-de-siècle artists, bridging Symbolism, Art Nouveau and the emerging currents of modernism. This biography traces Vrubel’s career from his formative years at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg to his untimely death, revealing how his visionary work anticipated the formal and conceptual breakthroughs of the twentieth century. Vrubel’s paintings, drawings and designs are examined alongside contemporaneous movements in France, Germany, Austria and Britain, highlighting his role in a transnational artistic dialogue. Featuring high-quality reproductions, previously unpublished works and extensive original research, this book, one of the first English-language monograph in over forty years, reassesses Vrubel’s legacy and situates him as a crucial precursor to the Russian avant-garde, illuminating his enduring influence on modern art.
Maria Taroutina is Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies at Brown University. She is the author of The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival (2018), which was awarded the 2019 University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies.
Reaktion Books, 256pp 24cm x 17cm, illustrated hardback, 2026
