A WORD from Editor-in-Chief

Dear friends!

The first issue of a journal intends to introduce you to Russian art of all eras. The roots of our undertaking go back to 1923, when A.N. Benois, A.V. Bakushinsky, I.E. Grabar, P.P. Muratov, N.N. Pu-nin, Ye.I. Zamyatin, O.E. Mandelstam, B.R. Vipper and other giants of Russian culture founded Russian Fine Art, a journal that survived only three issues before falling to the pressure of social-historical forces. Some 80 years later, EDIPRESS-KONLIGA revived the idea and published the first issue of the new Russian Fine Art in January 2004 in Russian. In mid-2005 came a first, experimental, issue in English on the theme of "Russian Artists in Switzerland."

A central focus of the current issue of Russian Fine Art is the Union of Russian Artists, an organization whose members included artists of the most varied tendency, aspiration and type. The Union of Russian Artists was that rare sort of group in which the work of individual artists was seen, with surprising subtlety and roundedness, in the art context of its time. No less is needed today. Notwithstanding the little time the first Russian Fine Art was given, its determination to see Russian art as a connected whole, whether in the relationships between and among eras, mediums and genres or in the relationship of Russian and world art, still seems to us the most effective, vital and productive approach. One of its most brilliant exemplars, Georgy Dionisovich Kostaki, world renowned as a collector and patron, is one of the principal subjects of this issue.

Let us take as our aim what the creators of the old Russian Fine Art set as their objective: "A journal... that preserves the finest pages of the art of the past but reads them anew. Reads them for the sake of that continuity without which neither art nor technology is possible."