Byzantium's Modernism? Modernism's Modernism.

Nelson, Robert S. "Modernism's Byzantium Byzantium's Modernism." In Byzantium/Modernism: The Byzantine as Method in Modernity, 15-36. Boston: Brill, 2015.

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Nelson discusses the work of several modern artists in connection with Byzantine art, notably Klimt (Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer, title photo), Matisse, architect Paul Tournon, and Fernand Leger. He demonstrates modernism's view of Byzantine art as abstract and simple "according to the aesthetics of the day", but then shows the striking naturalism of the face of a cherubim in a pendentive at Hagia Sophia, recently cleaned, and uses it to suggest that Byzantine art is in fact an art of significance, but perhaps not an art of abstraction.

To my mind, the chapter's long on examples, light on analysis. Nelson has gone halfway to a theory of Byztantium's modernism, perhaps as far as it's possible to go in an article based off a colloquium presentation, but there seems much more to say. While he writes that the cherubim breaks out of the "chiastic trap" of his title, it really only does so if you're defining modernism as an art of abstraction. Viz, the seraph/cherub -- 

Isn't "abstract" because it's an almost naturalistic rendition of an individualized face. (Knowing medieval art, I wouldn't be surprised to learn it was the face of someone in particular.) But then, neither is Klimt's portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer. While it's certainly stylized, the face isn't just any face; if anything, the very particularism of it is stunning, almost startling. 

Arguably, Klimt and this pendentive mosaic have a tremendous amount in common. The question that reverbs is why do they? Again, John Berger's Ways of Seeing compels questions of context, of who saw and how. This seraph's naturalism is evident in a close-up photograph, but much less so from farther away--on the ground, say. Klimt, on the other hand, is meant to be viewed from a more intimate distance. One's a devotional image in a church, the other's a...well, quite possibly a devotional image of a different sort (cf. the selfie in contemporary circles). Is that why they're visually similar?

Nelson's contribution is suggestive, open-ended in a way that makes me want to think a lot more about the "Otherness" of Byzantium in the 20th century as compared to the "Otherness" of Cezanne's Martinique and Tahiti. Also to consider "Primitivism" in modernism rather than abstraction and simplicity.