On 25 December 2015, the exhibition “Once upon a time in a kingdom…” opened in the State Hermitage as the latest in the Christmas Present series.
Fairy-tale motifs and images have served as an inexhaustible source of inspiration for many generations of artists, including Alexandra Shchekotikhina-Pototskaya, Zinaida Kobyletskaya, Natalya Danko, Tamara Bezpalova-Makhaleva, Liubov Blak, Eduard Krimmer, Nikolai Suyetin, Bronislav Bystrushkin and Elvira Yeropkina.
Fantastic tales retold by porcelain artists feature on unique items from the collection of the State Hermitage, works by contemporary artists from the “Heritage” collection of the Imperial Porcelain Factory and private collections.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the artistic interests of the craftspeople at the Imperial Porcelain Factory were shaped in part by the influence of such artists as Leon Bakst, Ivan Bilibin, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Mikhail Vrubel and Nikolai Roerich, who devoted a significant part of their work to fairy-tale motifs.
After 1917, those who created porcelain in the period of great change – Vladimir Kuznetsov, Natalya Danko, Alexandra Shchekotikhina-Pototskaya and others – found inspiration for their work in Early Russian art, the lubok (popular print), woodcarving, embroidery and printed cloth.
In the first two decades after the revolution porcelain reflected the most avant-garde tendencies in contemporary art, but alongside the agitation and Suprematist trends the factory’s artists continued to turn to folklore and fairy-tale themes and fantasy motifs.
The factory artists’ circle of interests naturally came to include a fascination with the enchanting heady exoticism of the East. Tigran Davtian, Natalya and Yelena Danko, Yelizaveta Tripolskaya, Rene O’Connell-Mikhailovskaya, Zinaida Kobyletskaya, Alexandra Shchekotikhina-Pototskaya, Mikhail Mokh, Alexei Vorobyevsky and others at the factory created an attractive world far removed from reality that whisked the viewer away to a fabulous fairyland with an oriental flavour. The artist with the strongest and most consistent attachment to the art of the East proved to be Mikhail Mokh, who displayed in full measure his admiration for Persian miniatures in his intricate painting of the Eastern Craftsmen (1932) and Fountain of Bakhchisarai (1936) services and the Shahnameh vase, with motifs from the Iranian national epic of the same name. In that same period, Anna Yefimova painted the Knight in the Tiger Skin service (1940) inspired by the outstanding work of the Georgian poet Shota Rustaveli.
The creation of pieces with fairy-tale subject matter was inspired by major anniversaries of writers and poets or of the publication of their works. The artists’ response was strongest to the 100th anniversary of Pushkin’s death in 1937.
Natalya Danko, the porcelain factory’s leading sculptor, turned her attention repeatedly to the image of the national poet and his writings. In the early 1920s she already produced the statuettes Girei, Zarema and Maria in the Fountain of Bakhchisarai triptych on his poem of the same name.
Inspired by Pushkin’s fairy tales, many artists in the 1930s produced colourful illustrations on services with new Constructivist shapes. One of the best suited to the placement of pictures that tell a story proved to be Nikolai Suyetin’s Crocus design. In Varvara Freze’s Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish service, she put a different episode of the story on each facet of a four-sided shape, making the surface of the porcelain resemble the pages of a book. In his decoration of the vase entitled Six Episodes from the Poem “Ruslan and Ludmila” Alexei Vorobyevsky used the hexagonal shape that was superbly suited to the sequential presentation of freely selected moments from the fairy-tale poem to produce a strikingly individual work of art in its own right.
In the second half of the 1940s and the 1950s, fairy-tale episodes and images began to be actively used in porcelain sculpture as well. The prominent Leningrad graphic artist Nikolai Muratov developed a strong interest in modelling and worked for several years on a series of sculptures inspired by Alexei Tolstoy’s children’s story The Golden Key or the Adventures of Buratino. The superb book illustrator and children's writer Yevgeny Charushkin’s work in the medium of porcelain became a distinctive phenomenon. (As a rule, when reproduced in ceramic, his models were further enhanced by painting done by the factory’s artists Ivan Riznich and Yelizaveta Lupanova.)
In this period sculptures inspired by well-known Russian and foreign fairy tales were produced by A.I. Grigoryev (Alionushka, Snow-White and Rose-Red and Little Red Riding-Hood and the Grey Wolf); Boris Vorobyev (sculptural studies – Knight, Head, Ruslan and Chernomor); Sophia Velikhova (The Scarlet Flower, Lel and Snow-White); Galina Yakimova (her models of The Mother Goat and Seven Kids and Ivanushka and the Fire-Bird were a success when painted by the factory’s artists and were repeated several times) and Bronislav Bystrushkin, the creator of various patterns of carafes and services (the Little Fish nightlight, the Girl with Pails and Tsarevich Ivan and Vasilisa the Beautiful carafes).
The following generations of artists continued to develop the traditions of Russia’s oldest porcelain factory, drawing upon the outstanding achievements of the national culture. Interest in the fairy-tale theme was not as general as in the 1930s–50s, but it still attracted the attention of artists, who came up with new motifs, as well as unusual interpretations of widely known images. The artistic idiom of the world produced was becoming more energetic, emotional and picturesque. Elvira Yeropkina’s figurine of Snow-White and Olga Matveyeva’s of The Spinster and Sister Alionushka to some extent continue the line of literary illustrativeness that was dominant in the sculpture of the 1940s–60s, but each piece displays its own unique inventions that add a contemporary note.
In the artistic porcelain of the 1990s a whole variety of tendencies coexisted peacefully. In the stylized paintings of Yulia Zhukova and Tatyana Charina fantastic symbolic images arise. The strange creatures of Early Slav mythology became the personages of the ornate painting, richly coloured and fairy-tale in mood, on the dressing-table boxes The Alkonost Bird and The Sirin Went for Water, the dish Sirin White Night, the Slavic Bestiary series of plates and the Lukomorye service.
The works of such dissimilar artists as Galina Shuliak, Yulia Zhukova, Tatyana Charina, Vera Bakastova, Olga Belova-Weber, Maria Matveyeva, Marina Nikolskaya, Sophia Kolchina, Tatyana Afanasyeva, Sergei Sokolov, Vladimir Bogdanov and Sergei Rusakov are linked by the historically formed Petersburg-Leningrad traditions of artistic porcelain that still endure today.
The curator of the exhibition is Natalya Anatolyevna Shchetinina, junior researcher in the Museum of the Imperial Porcelain Factory, a department of the State Hermitage. She is also the author of the introduction to the richly illustrated catalogue (State Hermitage Publishing House).
