Why did the creator of propaganda porcelain flee from the USSR: Sergei Chekhonin

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Soviet propaganda porcelain is now a collectible value, and once it served as a means of propaganda. Lenin among picturesque flowers, loud slogans, a sickle and a hammer woven into traditional patterns of Russian porcelain … Sergei Chekhonin is rightfully considered the brightest of the masters of this trend. He just began his career with the aesthetic "bourgeois" art, and ended with an escape from the Soviet Union …

The artist was born in 1878 in the Novgorod region. His father was a locomotive driver, and from his youth Sergei Chekhonin worked tirelessly as a clerk, draftsman, cashier … However, he was really drawn to art. Simple interest quickly grew into a real passion, and now eighteen-year-old Sergei Chekhonin goes to St. Petersburg - to the Drawing School of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts. Then he had a chance to study at the art workshops of Princess Tenisheva, who provides support to both young and established artists. Later Chekhonin worked as a ceramist. He spent a lot of time in the Talashkino estate under the patronage of the same Tenisheva, where many representatives of Russian Art Nouveau left their mark, and in the famous Mamontov workshops in Abramtsevo. As a ceramic artist Chekhonin had a hand in the creation of a number of works of monumental art, worked on majolica panels at the Metropol Hotel, tiles and paintings of the Church of the Feodorovskaya Mother of God and the Yusupov Palace.

During these years, he became close with representatives of the art association "World of Art", real esthetes, big fans of Empire, Rococo and Beardsley, and began to closely study book graphics.

He already had some experience in the field of graphic arts. In the 1910s, he became interested in political caricature, but not for long. Rather, he was interested in the decorative, purely aesthetic possibilities of book graphics, experiments with type, ornament, rhythm and color. In fact, Chekhonin was one of the first graphic designers in Russia. He designed the entire book in its entirety, from and to - the cover and illustrations, colonnumbers and bookplates … The best metropolitan publishing houses vied with each other to invite the young artist to work on the design of the books of classics and contemporaries. Ivan Bilibin himself, who raised the art of illustration to an unattainable height, argued that Sergei Chekhonin significantly surpasses him as a graphic artist.

Few representatives of the World of Art have calmly accepted the alarming changes that the October Revolution brought with it. Carried away by the old days, these sophisticated dreamers strove to renounce the harsh reality, to hide from it among vignettes and exquisite poems, but Chekhonin was not like that. Even before the revolution, he was well aware that an artist should not be limited only to painting and graphics, and was among those people of art who, figuratively speaking, “went to the factory”. He led several craft workshops in Rostov Veliky and Torzhok - and, according to researchers, greatly contributed to the preservation of local crafts. After the 1917 revolution, Chekhonin became even more active in decorative and applied art - now with a socialist tinge, which caused doubts and even some hostility from his former colleagues from the world of art. He invented the coat of arms of the RSFSR and the seal of the Council of People's Commissars, drew sketches for the creation of Soviet banknotes and coins … a porcelain factory in Petrograd (then Leningrad).

He devoted almost ten years to this enterprise, without ceasing to engage in other projects - book covers, illustrations, theatrical posters. It was Sergei Chekhonin who owned the first sketches of Soviet propaganda porcelain, and it was at the State Porcelain Factory in Petrograd that they ceased to be just drawings on paper.

On exquisite white porcelain, surrounded by skillful ornaments, among flowers and ribbons, bold slogans sprout like the first shoots of a new, Soviet Russia - "Blessed is free labor", "He who is not with us is against us", "The business of science is to serve people "," The mind does not tolerate bondage "…

It was believed that such dishes, which looked almost familiar, convey Soviet ideas in the best way possible even to the most illiterate and irresponsible members of society. Being determines consciousness - which means that being must be filled with images that will be close and understandable to everyone, but at the same time will latently form the thinking of a new Soviet person. In addition, Sergei Chekhonin introduced some innovations into the porcelain production technology.

In 1928 he left his homeland. Forever. Despite his enthusiasm and active work for the benefit of Soviet industry, the artist understood that his free years were coming to an end, and the clouds of brutal censorship were gathering over creative people. And he could not work on orders. Like his comrade in the World of Art association, K. A. Somov, Chekhonin volunteered to organize a foreign exhibition of Soviet art - and did not return. In France, he was actively involved in creative work, worked a lot for the theater, became interested in textile design and even invented a new method of multicolor printing. Still worried about the fate of his country, he first offered the plans to the Soviet light industry - but he was refused. The artist died of a heart attack in the year when his invention still began to be used - though not in the USSR, but in Germany. In the Soviet Union, his name was forgotten for a long time, and Chekhonin's book and theatrical graphics in Russia are now known almost exclusively to art critics. Porcelain, according to his sketches, is kept in museums around the world, collectors hunt for saucers and cups with the Soviet emblem among flowers, and the “revolutionary” font has firmly entered the history of socialist propaganda.