Konstantin Korovin’s Borderline Modernism: Vanguard Art and Imperial Expansion

Between 1895 and 1900, Moscow-born artist Konstantin Korovin (1861–1939) received two major commissions: the first, from philanthropist and railway tycoon Savva Mamontov, to depict the Arctic north for a fair in Nizhny Novgorod, and the second, from the imperial government, to represent the Russian Empire’s colonized geographies at the Universal Exposition of 1900 in Paris. Rather than continuing to compare Korovin’s art to Western modernists, which has garnered him the status of a second-rate "Impressionist," this article considers the two commissions against the backdrop of Russian territorial expansion. It demonstrates that their modernist aesthetic arose in relation to uncompromising attempts to expand the empire’s railroad network, and argues that the emergence of a Russian artistic avant-garde intersected with the Empire’s study, maintenance, and representation of its borderlands.