ABSTRACT
The decorative oeuvre of Mikhail Vrubel from the 1890s to early 1900s was doubly transgressive: it moved beyond the confines of a “minor” art on the one hand, and a narrowly regional and nationalist agenda on the other. The ceramic medium in particular allowed Vrubel the aesthetic and conceptual freedom to articulate some of his most revolutionary and innovative ideas, resulting in a distinct and original visual syntax, which sowed the seeds for subsequent Russian modernist movements, including the neoprimistivist, constructivist, and productivist avant-gardes—a link that has been rarely examined by scholars. More specifically, this essay considers how and why Vrubel had failed to finish his monumental panel Mikula Selianinovich and Volga (1896) for the Nizhnii Novgorod Fair of 1896 on account of his artistic frustrations with the piece, but was able to successfully recreate the same work three years later as a decorative majolica fireplace (1899–1900), which ultimately garnered him a gold medal at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 and elicited widespread praise both in the Russian and French press.
