“Blue Rose” Movement: Twenty-First Century. Moscow Symbolism in the Light of Recent Studies

Abstract

The article traces the history of perception and study of the masters of the “Blue Rose” as a symbolist movement in the Russian art of the early twentieth century. The versatile sphere of expression of the leading representatives of the “second wave” of Russian Symbolism, traditionally associated with the Moscow decadence of the 1900s, is subjected to more thorough and differentiated analysis in the context of recent research. If the first art historians of the “Blue Rose” group phenomenon concentrated on movement’s generalized description, nowadays the program aspects of the Blue Rose aesthetics are being explored in details, the poorly studied artists’ creative biographies are brought up to date. The growing archive base allows us to take a new look at the key moments of “Blue Rose” poetics’ formation and its involvement in the development of modernism, indicating a new stage in the study of the works of Moscow symbolists.