2. From Angels to Demons: Mikhail Vrubel and the Search for a Modernist Idiom

In his 1911 biography of Mikhail Vrubel (1856–1910), the artist Stepan Iaremich recounts a telling episode. In the spring of 1901, Iaremich had accompanied Vrubel to the twelfth-century Church of St Cyril in Kyiv, where the latter had both restored and recreated a large number of frescoes in 1884. Standing in front of his Lamentation mural (fig. 2.1), Vrubel commented that “in essence, this is the kind of work to which I should return”. At that point, Vrubel was based in Moscow and had alread..