Porcelain and propaganda.(Current and coming)(Fragile Persuasion: Russian Porcelain and the Fine Art of Propaganda)

An exhibition opening this month at the Hillwood Museum in Washington explores the ways that Russian porcelain has been used for the purposes of political and social propaganda from the late nineteenth century to the present. Though many of the plates, vases, and small figures included, all on loan from the Russian collector Yuri Traisman, appear innocuous enough ("in the vein," a curator at Hillwood notes, "of popular Hummels or Lladro figurines"), closer examination of the contexts in which they were made reveals them to be rich in meaning.

The subject of the seizure by the Bolsheviks of the Imperial Porcelain Factory and private manufactories in the wake of the 1917 Revolution and the subsequent production of objects adorned with Communist slogans and images is not uncharted territory for museum exhibitions and scholarly publications. In 1990 Nina Lobanov-Rostovsky published Revolutionary Ceramics: Soviet Porcelain, 1917-1927, which explored the Bolshevik propaganda produced during the first ten years of the new Soviet State Porcelain Factory. In 1992 the Cooper-Hewitt in New York mounted Revolution, Life, and Labor: Soviet Porcelains (1918-1985), and the Art Institute of Chicago showed Soviet porcelain from the collection of Craig H. and Kay A. Tuber, both of which were accompanied by catalogues. More recently, in May 2005 The Magazine ANTIQUES reported on an exhibition at Somerset House in London called Circling the Square: Avant-Garde Porcelain from Revolutionary Russia, which focused on propaganda porcelain from the 1920s and 1930s. Hillwoods ...