Video: How Malevich's student became a legend of Soviet porcelain: Anna Leporskaya
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
The name of Anna Leporskaya is now known only to porcelain collectors, but her contribution to Soviet art is enormous. She worked with Malevich, took part in the creation of the famous "Black Square" and the Suprematist tombstone of the artist, decorated Soviet pavilions at world exhibitions, restored theaters in Leningrad after the blockade and gave it to the Leningrad Porcelain Factory for almost forty years …
Anna Leporskaya was born in the winter of 1900. Her father worked as a teacher of Latin at the Chernigov Theological Seminary. The family did not live well, and, according to Leporskaya's recollections, a desire for independence and independence was brought up in the children. When Anna was eight, the family moved to Pskov. No one doubted that, having matured, Anna would "teach". And so it happened - at the height of the civil war, Leporskaya got a job as a school teacher in a remote village. It was a strange and terrible time - eighteen-year-old Anna lived in a hut with a leaky roof, sometimes waking up simply in a snowdrift, in the fall everything got wet through, shooting was constantly heard, and it was simply impossible to keep track of whose troops were in the village - it was either white or red, then someone else … In the end, at the insistence of her parents, Anna moved to Pskov, where she entered an art-industrial school and studied there for four years until the school was closed.
During these years, Leporskaya became interested in ceramics, although many years later she grew up to become a real ceramist. But even then she was fascinated by the process itself - how something new is created from a shapeless piece of clay, something full of benefit and beauty, and the metamorphosis itself is both accidental and subordinate to the will of the artist … Filled with faith in her creative powers, Leporskaya enters the Academy of Arts in Petrograd, among her teachers there are many famous painters of those years.
However, Anna soon learned that Malevich had arrived from Vitebsk with a group of like-minded people - and was planning to launch a large-scale work at the State Institute of Artistic Culture. They talked a lot about Malevich then and argued even more, and Anna felt that she was not attracted to academic art, she was drawn to experiments. So she became a graduate student of GINHUK and took over the secretarial work in Malevich's color laboratory. It is thanks to her systematic and accurate work that the archive of the works of the creator of Suprematism was formed and preserved. In her own work, Anna relied on the example of a teacher, but quickly grew out of the geometric emasculation of Suprematism, endowing her works with a lyrical mood and drawing inspiration from childhood memories - about the hard work of peasant women, flowering gardens, noisy bazaars …
According to the artist's recollections, Malevich came up with the "Black Square" - but at that moment the brush was in her hands. "He said - paint over …" - she wrote with good irony.
Soon, in this stormy, always arguing, quarreling, but fruitful environment, Anna met her closest companion in creativity … and love - Nikolai Suetin, Malevich's student and colleague, who was engaged in porcelain. Leporskaya and Suetin did a lot to preserve Malevich's creative heritage. When the artist was arrested, many of his friends in horror rushed to get rid of any mention of the connection with him - from letters, drawings, sketches … Anna literally snatched the work of her teacher out of the fire. After Malevich's death, in 1935, she worked with her husband on the creation of a Suprematist tombstone.
Few of Malevich's students later successfully worked in the USSR, but Leporskaya and Suetin were lucky. Anna was once instructed to design Soviet pavilions - for example, at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1937 and at the International Exhibition in New York in 1939.
When the war began, Anna Leporskaya remained in Leningrad. During the blockade, suffering from dystrophy and scurvy, she gave all her strength to her beloved city. Leporskaya took on any feasible (and even overwhelming!) Business - she prepared Hermitage exhibits for evacuation, worked in a hospital, worked on the production of mines, which were immediately sent to the front. Mines could not be collected in mittens or gloves, and Anna severely frostbitten her hands, and injuring her hands for an artist is a little better than losing her sight. Fortunately, there were no significant injuries, and soon Anna already took up the brush - at that time she managed to create a series of "blockade" landscapes … During the war Leporskaya also completed two major government orders - she was engaged in the design of the grave of Alexander Nevsky (in connection with the establishment military order named after Alexander Nevsky) and the badly damaged interiors of the Kirov State Opera and Ballet Theater.
In the post-war years and until her last breath, ceramics became the main thing in the life of Anna Leporskaya. Her husband, Nikolai Suetin, was the chief artist of the Leningrad Porcelain Factory. Lomonosov - the very one whose abbreviation "LFZ" adorns countless plates, teapots and vases in the homes of Russians to this day. It was he who brought his wife to the porcelain factory - understanding like no one else what she was capable of.
Recalling the Ukrainian ceramics seen in childhood and the experience of cooperation with Malevich, Anna managed to create a kind of figurative synthesis, which immediately fell in love with the bosses, and ordinary people, and art critics - and now Leporskaya's works for LFZ have become a collectible. She liked to create graceful, architectonic vases of light shades (she especially loved white), geometrized tea sets, to build a "bridge" between folk art, avant-garde and classical porcelain. Researchers called her style rather neoclassicism - but there was always a Suprematist trace in the very accuracy, in the correctness of the forms, in the sharpness and laconicism of the paintings.
The artist died in 1982. Nowadays, it is thanks to her archives and memoirs that many exhibitions and studies of the work of Kazimir Malevich have been held.
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