As the summer of surrealism and Dali fades away, the Museum of Folk Graphics is serving notice that a traditional, distinctively Russian art form is alive and well.


Graphics printed on birch bark are a creative trademark of this part of the world, partly because paper was not easy to find in the hamlets of Russia and Belarus before the 20th century. People had to use lub, as the bark is called in Russian, not only for writing and wrapping things, but for art as well.


Although wealthy people from the 17th century on could afford to invest in ornate icons painted on wood or canvas, peasants had to buy lubki, or birch-bark prints, in order to decorate their homes with religious pictures.


The Folk Graphics Museum is currently hosting a collection of reprints made from these original wood engravings. They are not on birch bark, so they do not have the same roughness of genuine pictures, but the museum's director has done his best to make them seem as though they are centuries old. The result is an exhibit that is entertaining, educational and colorful.


From the beginning, this was a folk art form; at the market, you could buy apples at one stall and lubki at the next for no more than a kopek.


The earliest ones were based on stories from the bible, but lubok art soon became the country's first political cartoons, rich with social satire.


Lyudmila Balabana, a curator at the museum, says that the director, Viktor Penzin, traveled around Belarus and northern Russia in search of old birch-bark engravings. Looking in attics, basements and church storage rooms, he came up with some treasures, such as biblical etchings from the late 17th century.


Back in Moscow, he mixed paints in the old style, using natural ingredients, and colored the prints as they would have been before the 20th century. The show is rounded out by a display of the original wood carvings and some unfinished prints that have not yet been filled in with paints, to demonstrate how the process of making lubki works.


Even if you are not knowledgeable about the bible, the prints on view at this show are pleasing to look at. The illustrations carved for the book of Genesis are the best, and oldest, of the bunch. The scene in which God creates women could have come straight from Matisse's studio, except that it was done in the 1690s. In it, two women recline on a dark green Earth as a benevolent creator hovers above. The women's long, cream-colored bodies are lithe and graceful, reminiscent of the figures in Matisse's Dance paintings.


It should come as no surprise, Babalana says, that lubok pieces seem so much like modern art. Chagall and Gauguin, for example, used folk art in new and daring ways; the small-time artists who made birch-bark prints did too.


"These works are very traditional," Balabana says. "But at the same time, they are very modern."


The satirical prints are humorous and have an edge to them. One picture, from the early 18th century, is a biting critique of Peter the Great's decree requiring Russian men to dress in European styles and shave their beards.


It depicts a runtish Peter grabbing the beard of a burly Russian peasant and preparing to remove the long whiskers with a pair of scissors. The peasant, dressed in German clothes, looks skyward in pain.


Peter, however, wasn't likely to have seen such prints himself. Birch- paper prints were a populist art; anyone with a knack for carving was likely to take it up. The tsar would never have had a court lubok maker.


"Every peasant home had a picture somewhere," Babalana says. "This is art by poor people and for poor people." She added that "these pictures have sharp humor, and they tell tales of sins. They were meant to appeal to the masses."


Not every graphic is biting or biblical, however. One of the most pleasant pictures shows a chubby cat sitting on its haunches with its tail coiled into a perfect spiral. The stripes in its fur are hatched with short, simple black lines. This would be the perfect decoration for a child's room.


The art of lubok did not die out with the advent of communism in 1917. On the contrary, the Soviet government often used lubok to make political posters and other kinds of advertisements.


According to Balabana, the art of lubok is far from dead, and neither is the practice of yanking hair. One picture from 1986, made during Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign, showing a drunken man dragging his wife by her locks. The caption reads: "You can tell how much vodka a man drinks by the amount of tears his wife cries."


Although nothing from the current exhibit is on sale, you can buy other lubok prints there.


The museum itself is undergoing a transformation of sorts. The exhibit is clearly cramped -- some pictures are so close that their frames touch -- so expansion is in the works.


Renovation is underway on the ground floor, where Penzin plans to open an art boutique with traditional Russian toys, folkloric paintings, and of course, more lubok.





The Russian Lubok exhibit is scheduled to open at the beginning of September, but the friendly staff at the Folk Graphics Museum will allow you to see it in advance if you call first. The museum, located at 10 Maly Golovin Pereulok, is open from 10 A.M. to 6 P.M. Closed Monday and Tuesday. Tel. 208-5281. Nearest metro: Sukharevskaya.