Fragile days of revolution

As a centenary show at the Royal Academy of Art revives British interest in the design output of Russia after 1917, this review of Nina Lobanov‑Rostovsky, Revolutionary ceramics: Soviet porcelain 1917‑1927 (Studio Vista, 1990) highlights the contribution made by potters

What a book. There is almost too much richness here. Since ‘Art into Production’, Britain’s seminal 1985 exhibition of Soviet textiles and ceramics, we have known about the transcendent plates of Sergei Chekhonin and his collaborators at the State Porcelain Factory, Leningrad. Here he stands revealed as one of the twentieth century’s masters of graphics. He is in the top five, maybe the top three. Still no full biography of him exists.

Chekhonin recruited a series of brilliant artists, the majority of them women, to publicise the Russian Revolution and earn precious foreign exchange. The desperate shortage of food during War Communism (1919-21) meant that many of the designs were made to raise money for the starving; an equal lack of fuel meant that many, too, were executed in gloves.

You would not have guessed it. The delicacy of type, colour and layout is enough to make one weep. Chekhonin deftly combines folk art with Cubism, and, in a long plate full of the signatures of his Bolshevik heroes, carefully leaves out Stalin and his foolish ally in the realm of theory, Bukharin. Then, as Uncle Joe’s first Five Year Plan is looming, he has the good sense to emigrate to Paris, taking his Madonnaesque Famine and the heartrending Sorrow with him.

The plates of the plates, well introduced by the author, are beautifully printed – and come with many ironies. In the Gorbachev era it has been fashionable to see in Lenin’s War Communism the origins of Stalinism; to hate Jews, and to fear Germans. Here, by contrast, the Red Army inspires the iron tones of Mikhail Adamovitch, who served in it. He devotes a plate to its commander, Trotsky, and hand-letters a battery of internationalist slogans in German. The only thing Adamovitch would today resent about Berlin is that it functions as chief conduit for fakes of these historic designs.

Maria Lebedeva impresses with her jagged telephonist and chiseled secret policemen (in those days, they were heroes). Her friend Alexandra Shchekotikhina-Pototskaya, who designed costumes for Diaghilev, specialised in dancing calligraphy, as well as suns and moons and stars that turned into eyes: her plate ‘Motherhood’ is just ravishing. Among the Suprematists, Vasily Kandinsky and Ilya Chashnik score highly, and Kasimir Malevich turns in an architectonic teapot. First prize? An eight-piece tea set by Nikolai Suetin, complete with clear instructions on how it should be composed on a table.

My only criticism concerns Natalya Danko’s justly famous chess set of Reds vs Whites. Taught by a student of Rodin, Danko did figurines so sensitively, they were sought as far away as Australia. Here, however, upright communists and ghoulish counter-revolutionaries receive little space. It is a poor substitute for that moment when, in a 3D exhibition, you walk round to the front of the White pawns for the first time. Then you realise that they are all in chains. When I saw them in a show once, that literally took my breath away.

Revolutionary ceramics gives the lie to the idea that October 1917 turned totalitarian from the word go.  Even religious motifs ran riot in those brilliantly-hued early years. For £20, this is an unbeatable challenge to contemporary prejudices and contemporary design standards alike.