Within and Against the Canon: Nikolai Khardzhiev's Avant-Garde Art History
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2025-07-07
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en
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This thesis provides a robust investigation of art historian Nikolai Khardzhiev's (1903–1996) archive. Largely underexamined and now housed in the storage of the Stedelijk Museum, these materials reveal an intensely personal and affective historiographic project centered on Russian Futurism. Khardzhiev, along with the collection he curated, occupied multiple roles in relation to the Futurist movement in Russia. As a collector with strong personal ties to many of the artists he archived, he exercised decisive control over what was considered worthy of preservation—or otherwise censored and edited out from his and historical viewpoints. This personal relationship manifested both in Khardzhiev's connection to the collected art and manuscripts, and in his self-positioning as the sole authoritative historical voice of the avant-garde movement in Russia. In parallel, his methodology, annotations, and archival arrangements constitute an art historical practice in their own right. This thesis approaches the archive as a site of art historiographic production. At the same time, it seeks to detach from Khardzhiev's authorial presence in certain parts, allowing the objects themselves—the artworks, manuscripts, books, collages, and ephemera—to articulate their own historical cosmologies, when placed outside Khardzhiev's authorial framing. These perspectives are explored through a thesis structure that alternates between broader reflections on the archive's role in historical canon formation and close readings of specific items that open onto the movement's particularities. The narrative thread running through all chapters is the act of auto-historicization—how the movement wrote itself into history, both in tension with and through the European lineage-dominated art historical consensus on modernism.
The first chapter examines how the history and origins of Russian Futurism have remained a contested field, a struggle reflected in Khardzhiev's marginalia. His comparison-laden annotations reveal a continuous, personal engagement with debates over historical interpretations. The second chapter turns to collectively authored texts—particularly as published and arranged in Futurist almanacs—as sites of shared avant-garde vocabulary formation. I argue that such text collections function as acts of auto-historicization, consolidating and extending the canon of Futurism and later avant-gardes. The third chapter investigates how these collective historicizing narratives are reproduced in visual forms—drawings, visual poetry, and pedagogical collages—where the impulse toward historiographic expression is fixed beyond purely textual media. By paving an argumentative pathway from the private art historian's annotations to teaching tools collaboratively authored by avant-gardists, the thesis moves away from a chronological or linear view of artistic progression. Instead, it proposes a methodological arc: from intimate, affective acts of writing art history to the public formalization of the avant-garde.
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