Pair of Soviet propaganda faience wall plates or platters made by an unknown artist at the Pesochnya Faience Factory, Rybinsk, USSR, circa 1930 

Faience, enamel glazes

Dia. (of each) 13 in. (33 cm)

Inv. no. ab_1153 and ab_1154

Provenance: 

The Sandretti Collection

Exhibited: 

Rovereto, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, “Soviet Ceramics: The Sandretti Collection of 20th Century Russian Art, 11 December 2004 – 13 February 2005, nos. 135 and 136. 

Publications:

Andreeva, Lidia. Sovetskii farfor: fond Sandretti russkogo iskusstva XX veka = Soviet ceramics: the Sandretti Collection of 20th century Russian art. Bad Breisig: Palace Editions, 2004. Cat. nos. 135-136, p. 82.

In the period after 1917, the former Imperial Porcelain Factory (subsequently renamed the State Porcelain), produced an astounding group of hand-painted bright, modern designs celebrating the ideals of the new state. That factory had been organized to produce only a small number of items for the exclusive use of the Imperial court and had limited capacity. The reformed State Porcelain Factory’s artists and managers worked diligently to find ways to make their innovative propaganda designs more widely available. At Pesochnya, a factory built for large-scale production, new designs were produced more rapidly by using stencils or air brush rather than hand-painting. These large wall plates decorated using airbrush stenciling are part of that effort. 

The images represent many Soviet symbolic and cultural ideals: a male worker in a cap and a woman in a headscarf accompanied by a cog symbolizing industrial production and the working class and a scythe standing in for agriculture and the peasantry. The two platters, once completed, formed a pair appropriate for decorating some official political-cultural space like the factory-sponsored workers’ clubs.