By: Sarah Zhong
In 1917, the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia, dethroning the Tsar and “declaring a revolutionary communist regime that would transfer the means of production to the people.” Within a year, the Bolsheviks renamed a porcelain-producing factory the “State Porcelain Manufactory,” seeing potential in it as a wheelhouse for an artistic revolution and the production of propaganda.
“The IMP hallmark was scratched out or painted over ad replaced with a cog (denoting industry and the worker’s part of a greater whole) and a sickle and hammer, emblems that symbolized the union of worker and peasant and would feature on the Soviet Union’s flag,” an article for BBC states. Bold images of smoking chimneys, telegraph wires, and tower blocks took the stage instead of the pastoral scenes and intricate gilded heraldry the factory was known for.
The china, which was decorated with calls to action, became known as agitation porcelain. “Its creators hoped to galvanize the proletariat, whose idealized hand-painted image also rolled off the –rather slow- production line.”
While the china was decorated with explosions and destruction, the conquering of the factory was a much softer approach to demonstrate the communists’ respect for Russian culture. Dr. Sjeng Scheijen, a historian and guest curator of the Hermitage Museum’s exhibition of the propaganda, said, “The main reason for the Bolsheviks to maintain the porcelain factory was the preservation of cultural heritage.”
The artists were all eager to experiment. “Most of the time the artists were just looking at the forms and how they could integrate their own extremely revolutionary, abstract language that they had developed, into these particular forms,” said Dr. Scheijen. Alexander Samokhvalov’s piece, The Seamstress, is an example. Samokhvalov made the plate’s circular shape part of the design while the center picture, a dressmaker in her studio, “echoes the geometric motifs of the plate’s decorative border.” “They were real, independent artworks,” Dr. Scheijen adds. “If you only look at them from a utilitarian aspect, either as a [table] service or as a service to the state, you do them an injustice.”
“Forced famine, mass incarceration, and summary executions had left the utopian vision of 1917 in tatters.” The porcelain mostly remained with the wealthy, so it didn’t affect the poor much. “We appreciate these pieces so much,” Birgit Boelens of the Hermitage exhibit says.
“The positive thing about this exhibition is we gave them, after all these years, a voice.” For her, the survival of these prized porcelain pieces and the fact that they are now enjoyed by so many people is a testimony to the importance and success of their art.
“It was a unique phenomenon, and so the fact that it happened gives us something to celebrate,” says Scheijen. “Imagine if the Wedgewood factory employed Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, and all the great modernists at the same time and let them do whatever they wanted? That’s an amazing thing, and it only happened there.”