The Leeds Review - Issue #1The Hermitage Rooms Exhibition of State Porcelain at Somerset House ended in July 2005. The Hermitage Rooms present a year-round programme of Russian art, lent by the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, Russia.
The Suprematist artists who worked at the State Porcelain Factory near St. Petersburg in the early days of the Soviet Union were employed by the Kremlin to represent the birth and rise of Socialism in Russia with their avant-garde creations. Kazimir Malevich, founder of the Suprematist movement and his students created cutting edge illustrations which were later copied by skilled artisans onto plates and vases before their shipment to the grandest drawing rooms of european Society. From the 1917 revolution onwards, the factory was producing modern masterpieces; each one celebrating the freedom of creative expression in Lenin's new Russia in its bold and abstract design.
Like many of St. Petersburg's cultural centres, the State Porcelain Factory had been a bastion of Imperial taste. A formerly Tsarist institution, it had throughout the 1920s survived efforts by the newly-formed Soviet regime to raze every symbol of Tsarist prestige and power by shrewdly transforming itself into a handmaiden of the new State. Previously a centre for 'Imperial Porcelain', the factory dropped its old-guard name during the revolutionary period to become a focus for modern art and remained a magnet for creative talent, drawing such promising artists as Wassily Kandinsky and Nikolai Suetin. Throughout the early '20s resident artists at the Lomonsov Factory, as it became known, unveiled piece after piece of exquisite porcelain adorned with fresh, exciting designs. Signs of a post-revolutionary sense of renewal in Russia can be gleaned from the pieces on display at the Hermitage Rooms. Some of the work is astonishingly modern for a country which had, until recently, been characterised by art planted in its Tsarist past and modelled on its European neighbours' grandiose tastes.
Sadly, the later half of the 1920s brought a decline in innovation at the Lomonsov factory; the Kremlin wanted clearer depictions of socialist ideals on its porcelain. Furthermore, the nation's overarching progression toward standardised mass-production did not escape the porcelain factory. The factory was condemned to suffer from the nationwide demise into artistic mediocrity. The state commissioned new designs to show farm labourers standing shoulder to shoulder with steel workers, designs commemorating every national event from Women's Labourers' Day to the anniversary of the October Revolution. The remorseless march of creative repression from the Soviet authorities is demonstrated in the evolution of the displayed pieces, which depict scenes becoming noticeably more rooted in safe, Soviet values such as the family and the value of hard work. Garish illustrations of dancing young men and women and fruitful harvests were finding their way onto cups, saucers and plates, while opportunities for artists' to truly express themselves within the official creative economy were dwindling. Toward the end of the decade, top designers at the Lomonsov factory were leaving to pursue their talents elsewhere.
Of course, despite the Kremlin's efforts to gradually sovietise the factory's artistic output - and notwithstanding its penchant for glorified depiction of a hard-working labouring class on its national porcelain - such ordinary workers remained too poor to afford the pieces turned out, even after the factory's shift to mass production in the 1930s.
Eventually the factory fell into disuse itself after the Kremlin deemed the workshops inefficient and unnecessary in the ealrly 1930s. Neither was it any longer acceptable to sell fripperies to European high society, so the factory was not able to export its products for profit. During the war, heavy industry took priority and the factory was given over to meeting this need.
Thus the Kremlin shut away the delights of St. Petersburg's art from the West after 200 years at 'the window on the world', as Peter the Great had originally intended for his city of treasures. Workers were laid off and pottery wheels slowed to a standstill as all attention was drawn to the need for peace and bread over exported luxuries. The window that Peter the Great had opened for us onto Russian art would remain shuttered and bolted for six decades before the West could once again view the gilded splendours within.
And what splendours there are to see; St. Petersburg has recently celebrated its 300th anniversary with a spectacular resurgence of style, restoring itself to former glory. Its pastel-coloured facades are freshly gilt-edged and glittering. The doors of the Hermitage, perhaps the most beautiful museum in the world, have been once again thrown open. Inside, world class art and ceramics are displayed from Europe and all over the Islamic world. Bridges and buildings spanning the Neva River are crumbling and gorgeous, illuminated in summer by beloe nochi - the white nights - and by dappled reflections from the city's canals. Many of St Petersburg's treasures have fortuitously been preserved in their original form from the Tsarist era, as a result, ironically, of Soviet-era neglect. Yet Russia's second revolution in 1989 came too late to save the crumbling Lomonsov Porcelain Factory; the old workshop itself had long since joined the list of institutional fatalities caused by the great march of Soviet repression.
Somerset House is situated at Aldwych on The Strand, London.
Charlotte FitzGerald Info