Agitation China: Propaganda on a Pie Plate

In 1941, a gas bomb fell near Maria Mironova's apartment, and she watched her teacups fall one by one off the windowsill.


She shuts her eyes, recalling each one as they shattered on the floor, and remembering who painted them: the star artists of the Imperial China Factory in post-revolutionary Petrograd.


It takes strong nerves to be a china collector, and the actress, 84, has since switched to cheese boards. Lined up sturdily, side by side, cheese boards cover the walls once dedicated to agitatsionny farfor, or agitation china. Together with her husband, the actor Alexander Menaker, Mironova gathered one of the world's few complete collections of the rare china, which was produced in the decade after the revolution during a flush of artistic enthusiasm for socialist ideals.


She stewarded the collection through three decades of marriage, a series of apartments, and the celebrated stage careers of herself, her husband, and her son, Andrei Mironov.


When her son and husband died, Mironova was finished with agitation china. She remains wedded to her career, and rehearses five days a week during her 67th theater season, but the collection is done. For a fraction of the price that the set would have brought in the West, Mironova donated the whole lot -- uncataloged, uncounted -- to the All-Russian Decorative and Folk Museum.


"I had already made the decision," she said. "When my son died, I began to think that no one was interested in it, except how much it cost. I decided not to get involved in that kind of commerce."


In a Western auction house, each piece of the Mironova collection would sell for more than $1,500, said Elvira Sametskaya, chief of the museum's ceramics department. Only one other private collector and the St. Petersburg factory itself have similar examples of the china, whose best styles developed during a narrow window of opportunity between 1920 and 1930, Sametskaya said. During that decade, the convergence of talented artists and steady government commissions produced an avant-garde ceramic style that has never been equaled in Russia, she said.


But Mironova's friends laughed when she began collecting the china. "It cost us kopeks along the Arbat," the actress remembered, "and everyone was asking, 'What are you doing with that nonsense?' They were all buying antiques."


Menaker and Mironova were drawn to the works for the same reason Sotheby's appraisers are now: their historical value. The Imperial China Factory put out plates that honored party congresses, Russian-German unity and wartime food vouchers with an equal degree of creativity.


"We had no idea what it was worth. We liked it because it was an epoch," Mironova said. "Like no other kind of china, this china reveals an epoch. They painted food vouchers. I don't know why you would want to agitate for food vouchers -- or to whom -- but it shows that they existed."


During the first post-revolutionary decade, the Imperial China Factory's artists portrayed themes like "The Children of the Workers Will Meld Labor and Science" and "He Who Works, Eats," with a playfulness and technical mastery that disappeared from later Soviet art.


"On one hand, this is clearly propaganda," said Sametskaya. "On the other hand, when it's not just done as an exercise, when your propaganda is created by talented people, it is frequently also good art."


The factory's team of artists -- especially luminaries like Sergei Chekhonin and Alexandra Shchekatikhina-Pototskaya -- were painters and set designers who worked on china for the steady salary, Sametskaya said. Many were commissioned for international competitions and grandiose events of state.


Each item is "an author's work," signed and painted in a distinct personal style, Sametskaya said. The works -- which are often painted on old china -- display strong individual styles, but the non-representational graphics in particular are playfully art nouveau. Hammer-and-sickles swoop over the plate's surface, and letters vary wildly in size and are nearly illegible.


Shchekatikhina-Pototskaya, who worked at the St. Petersburg factory from the late teens through the mid-1940s, painted some of the exhibit's most remarkable works. In her plates "For the Third International" (1921) and "Dominoes" (1921), Shchekatikhina-Pototskaya paints human figures in a one-dimensional style that evokes both cubism and traditional folk art.


"When you see a Shchekatikhina, you know you are seeing a Shchekatikhina," Sametskaya said. "You would never mistake it for anything else."





The Mironova and Menaker collection of agitation china is on permanent display on the second floor of the All-Russia Folk Art and Decorative Museum, at 3 Ulitsa Delegatskaya. Hours are 10 A.M. to 6 P.M. and 12:30 P.M. to 8 P.M. Tuesday and Thursday. Closed Friday. Tel. 973-0139. Nearest metro: Tsvetnoy Bulvar.