Sergei Chekhonin’s Dish The Horror (1922): An Allegory of the Revolution Destroying Orthodoxy

Abstract

The article continues the author’s series of publications about the works of the early Soviet porcelain. As it is known, after the October Revolution of 1917, the themes of the porcelain works produced were gradually reduced to agitation and propaganda for the new government. The dish The Horror, created by the master of propaganda porcelain, ‘miriskusnik’ Sergey V. Chekhonin, already carries the opposite statement of ‘anti-agitation’. The plot of the dish is a great field for imagination and reflection. The unique dish created in a single copy fell out of the cultural context for 95 years and was unknown to the general public. In the article, the author aims to systematize the information of the anti-religious time and study the artist’s interpretation of the plot, as well as the interpretation of the image hiding behind the mask of the red monster. The dish has not been adequately described and studied to date. The published essay by E.F. Gollerbach (1922) gives only a superficial description of the image on the dish. The author of this article for the first time attempts to analyse the painting of the dish in a brief essay on the exhibit in the catalogue of the Hermitage exhibition The Voice of Time (2017). The purpose of this article is to complement the existing ideas about the works of the early Soviet porcelain. The relevance of the research is seen in the growing interest in the art of the 1920s and their reinterpretation in the 21st century, as well as in the fact that the chosen research object was included in the fundamental exhibition of the State Hermitage Museum entitled The Voice of Time, which directly corresponds to the dish by Chekhonin.

Keywords

• s.v. chekhonin
• e.f. gollerbach
• the state porcelain factory
• masks
• famine in the volga region
• soviet porcelain
• the voice of time exhibition