« Toutisme » et Renaissance

Studying the relation between the Russian avant-garde and the Renaissance leads to two questions : 1) Did Russian avant-garde artists identify with artists of the Renaissance ? 2) How did they perceive Renaissance art ? The painter Mihail Le-Dantju, the originator of Everythingness, who claimed the right to chose the forms of the future among those of the past, rewrote art history in his theoretical works in order to establish a lineage for his own concept. His rejection of “illusionism” (the laws of perspective) went beyond the usual ground of avant-garde attacks (the art of the Wanderers) to confront the Renaissance, which he presented as an indistinct whole, and accused of being contemptible imitation. As imitative of a period of Antiquity that itself only found expression in imitation, he ruthlessly rejected the Renaissance as a period of artistic decadence, in fact only large-scale academicism. Another reason for the rejection is ideological, making it possible to limit dependence on Western art, insofar as the Renaissance never happened in Russia. Since the Renaissance could not be a model, modern creators were called upon to identify with Byzantine artists. Inasmuch as these criticisms are complemented by specific formal recommendations to artists, it is legitimate to wonder whether everythingness contained the germs of academicism itself.