On January 9th, art historian Wendy Salmond presented an online lecture titled “The Old Russian Style and the Arts of Nostalgia.” This presentation was part of the Russian History Museum’s Second Saturday lecture series.
In the closing decades of the Russian Empire nostalgia for an imagined national past consumed Russia’s educated classes. Armed with scholarly publications and original artifacts, architects and designers developed an indispensable vocabulary of onion domes and boyars, manuscript illuminations and kokoshniki with which to conjure “Old Russia” for modern people. Throughout this presentation, Wendy Salmond explores the making and meanings of the “Old Russian Style” through a virtual tour of the Russian History Museum’s rich holdings, from luxury albums and costly icons to souvenir spoons and children’s books.
This program is funded in part by a Humanities New York CARES Grant with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the federal CARES Act.
About the Speaker
Born in New Zealand, Wendy Salmond received her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin and now teaches art history at Chapman University in Orange, CA. Her publications on Russian art include Arts and Crafts in Late Imperial Russia, Treasures into Tractors: The Selling of Russia’s Cultural Heritage, 1918-1938, Tradition in Transition: Russian Icons in the Age of the Romanovs, and most recently, “Eternity in Low Earth Orbit: Icons on the International Space Station.” She is currently editor of the Journal of Icon Studies, published by the Museum of Russian Icons in Clinton MA.