View All By First Five Books Explore the books that started a
collection. Explore the Guggenheim’s 20th-century collection in
this exhibition featuring 40 paintings, sculptures, and works on
paper. Preview the upcoming exhibition schedule. Published in
2005 14 pages, fully illustrated Providing an introduction to
the exhibition catalogue Russia!, James Billington discusses the
development and culture of Russia, looking particularly at its
geography, its religion, and its perplexing relationship with
Western Europe. Billington provides a background on Russian
icons, the Orthodox Church, the nation's architecture, the
lineage of tsars, and the Soviet era. Between the birth of a
popular national culture in the tsarist nineteenth century and
its destruction in the Soviet twentieth century, Russia produced
one of the world's most innovative explosions of artistic
modernism. This extraordinarily creative period between the late
1890s and the outbreak of World War I is sometimes called the
Silver Age, but is also mo