On 26 December 2024, the latest exhibition in the Christmas Gift series – “Images of the Orient in Soviet and Contemporary Porcelain” – begins its run in the Moorish Hall of the Winter Palace. The event has been organized by the State Hermitage with the participation of the Imperial Porcelain Factory joint-stock company and the State Russian Museum.
On 26 December 2024, the latest exhibition in the Christmas Gift series – “Images of the Orient in Soviet and Contemporary Porcelain” – begins its run in the Moorish Hall of the Winter Palace. The event has been organized by the State Hermitage with the participation of the Imperial Porcelain Factory joint-stock company and the State Russian Museum.
“The Eastern theme in Saint Petersburg porcelain brilliantly combined three tendencies – the general European ‘Orientalism’, the refined exoticism of the World of Art and the ‘positive decolonialization’ of the Soviet era. The result was something unique,” Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, observes.
The very artform of porcelain is genetically connected to the East: this ceramic material first appeared in China round the turn of the 8th century. In the process of seeking an artistic language of its own and its subsequent renewal, European and Russian porcelain found inspiration in the art of Eastern lands, employing its motifs and decorative techniques.
The display contains some 120 works linked together by the idea of the East, one of the key themes for 20th-century porcelain. They include Yelizaveta Tripolskaya’s sculpture of An Afghan Woman Casting Off the Chador (1929), Mikhail Mokh’s The East Is Rising service (1930), Liubov Blak’s The East of the USSR service (1936), Rimma Nikolayeva’s sculpture Rustem (1937), items decorated by Mikhail Mokh with painting that uses motifs from Armenian art, and plates from Galina Shulyak’s Bukhara series (1989). The exhibition is completed by works from present-day porcelain artists and rare publications from the State Hermitage library.
In the early period of the evolution of Soviet porcelain art, looking to images of the East was a natural continuation of the artistic traditions of the World of Art movement and the aesthetics of Diaghilev’s Russian Seasons in Paris, which encouraged the spread of a vogue for Eastern exotica in Europe and Russia.
The culture of the East found striking embodiment in Soviet porcelain of the 1920s–80s in the decorative painting of table services, dishes and vases, as well as in plastic art. The artists and sculptors of the Leningrad Porcelain Factory named after Lomonosov turned their attention to the themes of rural labour and crafts, the culture and daily life of Eastern peoples, liberation from colonialism and patriarchal traditions. The literary heritage of the East was celebrated in articles made for notable anniversaries of Firdowsi, Shota Rustaveli, Alisher Navoi, the epic tale David of Sassoun and other occasions. The majority of the porcelain artists whose works are featured in the exhibition were personally familiar with the daily life, culture and art of the East. Many of them had spent time in the Crimea, the Caucasus, Central Asia and abroad (Iran, Egypt, Syria, Palestine). Some had been born in those parts (Tigran Davtian, Olga Manuilova) or lived there for several years (Renée O’Connell-Mikhailovskaya, Alexandra Shchekotikhina-Pototskaya). Others visited as tourists (Alexei Vorobyevsky, Ivan Riznich, Tamara Bezpalova-Mikhaleva) or were evacuated there during the Great Patriotic War (Mikhail Mokh, Liubov Blak, Anna Yefimova).
The Hermitage with its very rich collections of Eastern art became an inexhaustible source of knowledge about the cultural heritage of the East for many craftspeople. Still today, the East continues to stimulate porcelain artists to create their own original significant compositions.
The exhibition has been prepared by the Museum of the Imperial Porcelain Factory, a department of the State Hermitage, under the direction of its head, Anna Vladimirovna Ivanova.
A scholarly illustrated catalogue (in Russian) has been published to accompany the exhibition: Obrazy Vostoka v sovetskom i sovremennom farfore (State Hermitage Publishing House, 2024).
The author of the concept and compiler of the catalogue is Ida Alexandrovna Shik, Candidate of Art Studies.
The exhibition in the Moorish Hall (Hall 155) can be visited from 26 December 2024 to 30 March 2025 by all holders of entrance tickets to the Main Museum Complex.
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More about the exhibition
At the turn of the 20th century, Western Europe and Russia were gripped by an “Eastern Renaissance”. The East became a source of inspiration, a focus for scholarly research, and also the starting point of a search for spiritual meaning and reflections on one’s own identity by poets, artists, scholars and philosophers. Numerous journeys were made to the East; archaeological excavations were carried out in Central Asia. Academics actively engaged in Oriental studies, new historical and philosophical conceptions took shape. The art of the East, its sun-filled landscapes, ancient monuments and the customs of everyday life attracted many an artist.
An imaginary East, pictured as a realm of idle pleasures and raging passions, appears in works devoted to one of Pushkin’s most romantic poems, The Fountain of Bakhchisarai. To mark the poem’s 100th anniversary, in 1922–23 Natalia Danko (1892–1942) produced a porcelain triptych made up of the main protagonists: Girey, Maria and Zarema. In 1936 Mikhail Mokh (1911–1978) painted a service with the same name.
The traditions of the World of Art movement found continuation in the works born out of the impressions of Iranian culture obtained by Renée O’Connell-Mikhailovskaya (1890–1981), who spent over two years in Persia. The experience of direct acquaintance with the art and culture of Iran can be detected in her painting of the Woman Smoker cup and saucer and the Persian Motifs service (both 1923), as well as other works. Images of Persian life continued to feature in the porcelain of the early 1930s. Models created by Tigran Davtyan (1905–1938), who was born on the territory of Iran, were used to make Persian Reading a Book, Persian with a Pipe, Persian with a Little Bowl, Persian Wearing a Turban and other sculptures.
Journeys to the East had a special significance for the creative formation of Russian artists. In 1923–25 Alexandra Shchekotikhina-Pototskaya (1892–1967) and her husband, the artist Ivan Bilibin, travelled around Egypt, Syria and Palestine. She produced a number of items featuring sketches from the life of the contemporary East. They include a plate with a depiction of Arabs and the Arab Woman lidded cup. Of particular interest is the decoration of a plate with an orange crescent (1923) which can be read as In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.
Ornamentation – “endless by its nature”, capable of expressing abstract ideas and meanings – always played a leading role in the art of the Islamic East. Calligraphic, plant and geometric patterns can be found in architecture, ceramics, artistic metalwork, jewellery, fabrics, carpets, embroidery and the decoration of books. The variations on the theme of Eastern ornamentation in porcelain are incredibly diverse.
In works from the late 1920s and early 1930s the artists give preference to strict geometrical patterns, which are used to emphasize the Oriental subject matter of the painting and its connections with the cultural traditions of the peoples of the East. From the second half of the 1930s, the tendency to pursue decorativeness in porcelain art grew stronger. The design variations became more complex and replete with different elements. Ornament evolves into an independent painted composition.
A typical example of this tendency is the decoration of the Arabesques service (1936) by Alexei Vorobyevsky (1906–1992). He would go on to repeatedly draw upon motifs from Oriental patterns, integrating them into his own creations or making them the theme of separate works. The Indian cucumber or buta pattern, traditional in the art of the East, adorns pieces from Yulia Zhukova’s Turkish Nights service (1988). The intense cobalt-blue splendidly conveys the deep, mysterious darkness of warm southern nights.
Images reflecting the culture and daily lives of the peoples of the Caucasus and Central Asia, as well as Socialist construction in the Soviet East began to appear in the decorative painting of porcelain artists. In the early 1930s they were drawn to the subjects of crafts (Ivan Riznich’s Bakhchiserai Artisans service) and rural labour (Mikhail Mokh’s Crimean Aul vase), as well as the leisure opportunities available to the citizens of the new state (Mokh’s Peasant Sanatorium). The description “programmatic works” might be applied to the painting of the service The East of the USSR (1936) done by Liubov Blak (1908–1983) and the writing set by Natalia Danko (1892–1942) entitled Discussion of the Draft Stalin Constitution in Uzbekistan.
The folk epics, literary images and cultural heritage of the East became an object of interest for many porcelain artists including Rimma Nikolayeva (the sculptural group Rustem depicting a mythical champion from the Persian poem Shahnameh), Gleb Sadikov (a stylized sculptural portrait of Alisher Navoi), Natalia Danko (an inkwell marking the 750th anniversary of Shota Rustaveli’s epic The Knight in the Panther’s Skin with a depiction of the poet), Anna Yefimova (The Knight in the Panther’s Skin service), Mikhail Mokh (a Knight in the Panther’s Skin coffeepot intended as a gift to Iosif Orbeli with depictions of the most iconic episodes in Rustaveli’s poem).
Images from the folk epic David of Sassoun were embodied in porcelain by Mikhail Mokh (1911–1978), who drew inspiration from works of mediaeval Armenian art. For the 500th anniversary of the Uzbek poet Alisher Navoi, commemorated at the Hermitage in the early days of the siege (1941), Mokh painted a porcelain casket and goblet. The artist “dragged a muffle kiln on a sledge in order to fire them” and “painted the porcelain with frozen fingers”. In the 1940s Mokh produced a number of unique items for presentation to Iosfi Orbeli, Boris Piotrovsky, his wife Ripsime Dzhanpoladian-Piotrovskaya, and Kamilla Trever.
In the 21st century too, the East attracts the attention of porcelain artists producing their own significant compositions. The exhibition features works by present-day artists and sculptors of the Imperial Porcelain Factory joint-stock company – Tatiana Afanasyeva, Anatoly Danilov, Sergei Rusakov, Sergei Sokolov, Nina Troitskaya, Anna Trofimova, Liubov Tsvetkova and Violetta Shal.