In front of you is a wonderful book about an extraordinary person—an artist, a Christian—Sergei Mikhailovich Romanovich. Through his great pictorial legacy, especially his brilliant images of Christ, he develops a philosophy, because when an artist plunges into the deepest spiritual world and then recreates it in colors, he delivers a new revelation of Love, Light, Knowledge, and Wisdom. Thus, Romanovich’s painting is, precisely, philosophy.
Sergei Mikhailovich wrote: “When beauty opens itself to an artist, he cannot but depict it in colors, words, and sounds.” His articles about artists, notes on art, letters, and poems are philosophy of the beautiful, given in a surprisingly expressive and understandable language for everyone. It offers clear, convincing answers to many and many pressing disputes of modern aesthetics. On the essence of abstract art, realism, and the significance of creativity by Picasso, Larionov, Ge, and Van Gogh—he gives a clear, persuasive response. About Sergei Mikhailovich, his relatives, friends, fellow comrades, students, and admirers of his talent wrote.
Romanovich joked: “The word ‘artist’ comes not from the word ‘bad,’ but from ‘drizzle.’” All of Sergei Mikhailovich’s creative work—both pictorial and literary—is precisely like a drizzle that is pouring now onto once-dried soil of modern culture.
In Sergei Mikhailovich Romanovich’s articles and letters, the spelling and punctuation of the sources are preserved.
Sergei Mikhailovich Romanovich is an artist with a unique fate. Even Mikhail Larionov, the head of the Russian avant-garde, counted him—at nineteen, a student of MUZhVZ—among the core of artists, makers of modern art. In 1922, he was one of the leading figures in the society “Makovets.” Then he went underground, and there was complete obscurity and poverty until the end of his life. He worked “in the drawer” (half of the works were based on Bible plots) for a better future. Alas, fame did not come to him yet, and even in Russia people almost don’t know him. But he is one of the pillars of the spirituality of the future. Yet understanding of his work does not come right away. Instead, when you contemplate his paintings, they do not shine on the surface—they enter consciousness ever more fully with their mysterious depth. Romanovich’s work opens up the world of the beautiful, and in a living—mind and spirit— it is born in the soul of the human being.