Vladimir Markov (Voldemars Matvejs) (1877-1914) avoided the '-ism' plague in his writing. Yet he can be seen as orientalist, primitivist, archaist and modernist. All his published essays refer to art from China and it is this abiding concern with Chinese aesthetics that is the subject here. While leading towards the arguments developed in Chinese Flute [Svirel' Kitaya] (1914), this paper also analyses Markov's interpretation and examples of artistic principles he determined as Chinese, in his other studies. Thus we move from his concern for poetic structure, licence and appearance to 'non-constructiveness', 'chance', refinement, imitation, 'free creativity', collation of materials, framing, symbol and timbre. In essence these comprise an argument for ways to reform contemporary European art through core analysis of what comprises the making and stuff of art. While Markov's gaze is global, as, for instance, his investigations into African, Oceanic and North Asian art reveal, and while, simultaneously he can be described as a Byzantinist for all his concern for icons, these attributes sit alongside what we can view as modernist chinoiserie and sinological modernism. Our enquiry turns to this identification, examining how Markov's approach contextualises with developments in chinoiserie and sinology in the early twentieth century, and thereby positing relationships with the interpretational work of, for example, Vasiliy Alekseyev, Nikolay Vinogradov and Leopold Staff, as well as a range of early-twentieth-century Russian visual artists.
