The exhibition Mir Iskusstva: Russia’s Age of Elegance at the Princeton University Art Museum coincides with several recent exhibitions on aspects of Russian art, mostly contemporary, that have been inspired by last year’s big Russia! show at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. The Princeton exhibition stands out, however, as a crucially important addition to the Guggenheim blockbuster, because it represents a major historic epoch in Russian art and culture that was almost overlooked by the organizers of the Guggenheim show. Mir Iskusstva, or World of Art, was not only the name of a group of artists formed around a periodical with the same title, it was a movement that reflected the Belle Epoch of an elegant and cosmopolitan turn-of-the-century Russia; this parallel to the Vienna Secession was expressed not only in fine arts, but in theater, graphic and book design, interior decoration, and porcelain, as well as poetry and music. It influenced—mainly through Sergei Diaghilev’s famous Russian Seasons in Western Europe, and later through emigration—not only European art, but theater, fashion, and an entire lifestyle of the 1910s and 1920s. The organizers of the Princeton exhibition chose a broad cultural approach to represent through the prism of Mir Iskusstva this important...