Requiem. Mikhail Vrubel’s Last Watercolor. On the 170th Anniversary of the Artist’s Birth

The article is dedicated to the 170th anniversary of the birth of Mikhail Alexandrovich Vrubel (1856–1910), an outstanding Russian artist of the Art Nouveau era and the leader of Russian Symbolism. The main subject of the study is a graphic sheet from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg), inv. ERR-5058, with the official title Composition Without a Topic and the general date of creation ‘Early 20th Century’. This composition, which due to its ambiguous subject matter was not mentioned as an artifact in its own right by the artist’s first biographers, remained in the periphery of art historians’ attention. The author of the article has analysed the watercolour from the Hermitage collection in the context of new documentary evidence (including the facts hidden within the iconography of the work itself) and based on a long-term empirical study of Mikhail Vrubel’s artistic language. The analysis has revealed that the artwork under study plays an important role in the artist’s creative legacy. As a result of the comprehensive research, it has been established that the composition from the Hermitage collection, which embodies Mikhail Vrubel’s unquenchable artistic will, became the last work the master created during the period of nearly complete vision loss. For the first time, the article introduces the circumstances and the exact date of the creation of Mikhail Vrubel’s last work, as well as characterizes the plastic aspects of its language, which are conceptually linked both to the poetics of the master’s earlier work and to the figurative search for a new, associative, and abstract understanding of visual narratives in the 20th-century art

Iconography · Literal and figurative language · Poetics · Contemporary art, education, critique · Decadence, Literature, and Society · Vladimir Nabokov Literary Studies