This book argues that ikona, the Russian word for 'icon', is a modernist concept invented by Russian avant-garde artists and art critics at the turn of the 20th century. Clemena Antonova argues that the very notion of ikona is modernist in the sense that it grew naturally out of the evolution of Russian avant-garde art and art criticism. Quite literally then, the Russian icon was not 'discovered' at the beginning of the 20th century, as we are often told; it was invented. Further, this invention was not the work of backward-looking, religious mystics and Orthodox conservatives – an all too frequent implication – but, as Antonova convincingly contends, the creation of some of the most trailblazing figures among the avant-garde and circles associated with the avant-garde.

IKONA - The Modernist Invention of the Icon in the Russian Art World, 1900s-1920s casts a fresh look at the much misunderstood idea of the Russian icon. Rather than accepting the conventional view that the icon is a remnant of medieval art which continues to cast its spell over modern image-making, it approaches ikona as a concept that was developed at the crossroad of ideas that were central to the emergence of Russian modernism.