Khokhloma is a Nizhny Novgorod technique of painting and lacquering wooden objects, descending from the methods used to make old icons.
It is a traditional artistic craft of Nizhny Novgorod peasants. It arose in the second half of the 17th century on the territory of what is now Koverninsky District of Nizhny Novgorod Region; it took its name from the trading village of Khokhloma in the same region, the center for selling Khokhloma-painted goods in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Essence of the Phenomenon
Khokhloma painting is characterized by an original technique of coloring wood a golden hue without the use of gold. Objects carved from wood (mostly tableware) were primed with a solution of clay, raw linseed oil, and tin powder (aluminum in modern products). A floral pattern was then painted over this layer in a free, brush-drawn manner, after which the objects were coated with a varnish made from linseed oil (nowadays synthetic) and hardened at high temperature in an oven. The coloring of Khokhloma painting typically combines red and black with gold.
The common types of painting are "verkhovaya" (red and black on a golden background) and "pod fon" (a golden silhouette design on a colored background). The craft, which was fading at the beginning of the 20th century, has been revived in modern times; in the 1920s and early 1930s the craftsmen united into artels.
In the 1960s the "Khokhloma Artist" factory was founded in the craft's homeland, and the "Khokhloma Painting" production association was founded in the city of Semyonov; these became the centers of this artistic craft. They produce tableware, spoons, furniture, souvenirs, and more. In the 2020s, craftsmen of the creative laboratory of the "Khokhloma Painting" factory created Khokhloma elephants — items that combine Indian and Russian symbolism: the elephant, a symbol of India, was painted in the traditional Khokhloma technique. The items were presented at the INNOPROM. India exhibition on the stand of the Russia National Center, together with traditional swan-shaped ladles, vases, spoons, and matryoshka dolls.[1]
The best-known craftsmen: F. A. Bedin, A. T. Busova, O. N. and S. P. Veselov, E. N. Dospalova, Z. F. Kieva, O. P. Lushina, A. G. and F. N. Podogov, A. P. Savinova, M. F. Sineva, I. E. Tyukalov, and others.
Origins
The Khokhloma technique owes much to the schism in the Russian Orthodox Church (the division of believers in the 17th century by supporters of Patriarch Nikon's reforms) and to the flight into the forests of numerous groups of Old Believers — adherents of the old faith.
In the forested part of Zavolzhye — in the Semyonovsky, Gorodetsky, and Koverninsky Districts of Nizhny Novgorod Region — the craft of making various wooden articles for all kinds of household and everyday needs developed intensively: dishes, barrels, rakes, yokes, shovels, shaft-bows, sleighs, axe handles, and the like.
These goods acquired the common name goryanshchina — from the Old Slavic gora in the sense of "forest," by way of the adjective goryany or goryanoy (forest). (Not from gora in the sense of "hilly right bank of the Volga" by way of goryanin, "resident of the Volga's right bank," as M. Fasmer mistakenly thought).
On the basis of goryanshchina, there began to develop very early the so-called Khokhloma — the craft of artistic painting of household utensils and tableware, based on a modified icon-making technology. The craft took shape in roughly the complex form in which we know it from the end of the 17th century.
The Khokhloma design is characterized by a leaf-and-berry ornament, the so-called "grass" ornament (travny), created on a black, golden, or red background — images of wild strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries, currants, rowan berries, and the like — executed in combinations of red and gold, red and black, or gold and black.
A curious legend has arisen about the origin of Khokhloma. It says that in ancient times some Moscow tsar had a skilled icon painter, who dreamed of freedom and therefore ran away from the tsar into the remote Kerzhenets forests (along the Kerzhenets River, a left tributary of the Volga in the Nizhny Novgorod area) and here began making articles from linden, aspen, birch, and other wood. Further, according to the legend, when the tsar learned of this, he ordered the fugitive brought back, but the latter supposedly did not want to return and, having passed his art on to other craftsmen, vanished without a trace.
The craft took its name from the large Nizhny Novgorod trading village of Khokhloma, which became the usual place for selling "Khokhloma goods." The name of the village itself, Khokhloma, is connected with the name of the little river Khokhlomka. The village is located precisely on the banks of this river. Gradually the collective name for the crafts of decorating objects — no longer necessarily wooden ones — with Khokhloma painting also became known, as everyone who felt like it took it up: the "Khokhloma crafts."
Development
Works of Khokhloma art preserved in museums allow us to form an idea of its individual periods of development. The earliest surviving pieces date to the turn of the 18th–19th centuries. These are cups, bratinas (communal drinking vessels), a mug, and a birch-bark container (tuyesok). They are decorated only with narrow golden bands. Evidently, silver powder was too expensive a material for coloring wooden tableware. The bratinas had the largest areas of golden surface.
The craftsmen gilded their necks and shoulders, while the body was painted with oil paint, over which an ornament was applied with a brush or a stamp. On one of the bratinas, a red flower with freely spread petals and leaves is painted in bold, spirited strokes. The artist daringly carried small petals over from the black background to the golden one, and the gold began to sparkle even more brightly from the fiery strokes of vermilion that fell upon it.
White highlights skillfully dashed onto the largest petals set it off even more against the black background. What is admirable in this ornament is not only the virtuoso mastery of the painting but also the poetry of the image created, which brings to mind the fairy-tale red flower that brings happiness, which, as legends tell, can be seen only on the night before Ivan Kupala.
The first half of the 19th century saw major changes in the art of Khokhloma painting. At this time, instead of silver, the craftsmen learned to use cheap tin, turning it into a powder convenient for applying to the surface of wood. A new period began in the history of the craft. Now the craftsmen could color almost entirely the walls of bratinas, cups, salt cellars, and stand-cupboards a golden color.
The Khokhloma "grass" designs, which allowed the most effective use of the "golden" coloring, developed still further at this time. The Khokhloma craftsmen mastered the laws of painting on a golden background. In its ornament, the devices of a flat, silhouette treatment of motifs, best suited to painting on a gold ground, were finally established. The white highlights that had created an impression of volume in the form disappeared from the painting. The color palette became restricted. Whereas earlier the craftsmen had used white, blue, light blue, pink, green, and brown paints, now the main colors of the ornament became red, black, and gold.
One often hears that the craftsmen used red and black paints only because they do not burn out in the oven during hardening. This is only partly true. Brown, green, and yellow paints also do not change color at high temperature, yet their use became quite limited. The artists preferred the combination of red, black, and gold above all for its special decorative qualities. Such a color scheme was also prized by the craftsmen of ancient Rus. But there was another reason. The golden color the craftsmen obtained was inferior to the color of gold in brightness and lacked the desired shade of warmth.
The craftsmen sought to make this shortcoming as inconspicuous as possible by applying the painting in red and black paint, which formed a resonant color chord with the golden background. The fiery-bright vermilion lent greater warmth to the golden background, while the black paint made it seem lighter and brighter. Executing the ornament on a golden background led to the establishment of the type of composition characteristic of "grass" painting, with an openwork pattern covering a considerable part of the object's surface. It was disadvantageous to expose the imitation gold background in large areas of smooth surface. Noticing this, the craftsmen began to make designs in which the background merely showed through the pattern and in the gaps between motifs.
The limited color palette of the herbal ornament, the abandonment of white highlights, and the flat, silhouette-like treatment of the motifs would seem bound to have destroyed its painterly qualities. Yet this does not happen. We perceive Khokhloma "grass" as a painterly ornament rather than a graphic one because its composition remains built on rhythmically arranged patches of color. The painterly quality of the grass patterns is also lent by the softness of the tonal relationships, achieved by combining in the ornament motifs painted with a broad stroke and adding fine herbal touches, executed with a light touch of the brush.
The freehand execution of the ornament with a brush was of great importance in shaping Khokhloma ornament. Now that the masters had moved on to working on broad surfaces of a golden background, the inclination toward breadth of handwriting, characteristic of the temperament of the Russian leaf ornament, could show itself still more vividly. The bold brushstroke became one of the basic elements of the herbal pattern. By combining elongated strokes of red and black paint in different ways — large and small, rich and full-bodied and light — the masters created motifs of grasses, flowers, bushes, and trees with lush, curly foliage. The design was complemented by motifs of berries and flowers applied with a dabber, a tampon, or a soft porous sponge. The lightness and ease of the master's ornamental hand became the criterion of a work's artistic merit.
Painting freehand with a brush developed in the masters a habit of freely varying the ornament. The features of the herbal patterns were also influenced by the shapes of the turned wooden ware. The masters sought decorating techniques that were economical in labor and yet gave the greatest artistic effect; in the course of their work, Khokhloma found for each type of article standard painting compositions best suited to the character of its form and its size.
Let us describe some of them. The designs on bowls and dishes rest on a refined understanding of the methods of composing ornament within a circle. In painting cups and dishes, the masters clearly set off the bottom, placing on it a rosette with lines radiating from the center like sunbeams. On larger pieces, they drew around the rosette a square or rhombus with softly rounded corners, which they called a "pryanik" (gingerbread) because of its resemblance to a real patterned gingerbread placed in a cup. Around the center of the cup they executed a pattern tied to the circular movement of the brush. The simplest design consisted of vertical or slanted red and black strokes. To make it more elaborate, the masters placed two or three elongated red and black strokes side by side, joining their ends at the bottom. The result was the motif known as the "lapka" (little paw), reminiscent of a bird's track in the snow.
On large cups and dishes the masters often executed one type of herbal ornament — the "osochka" (little sedge). This is a design of stems and elongated blades of grass, as if bent by a gust of wind. The "osochki" were placed along the sides of cups and dishes, framing the rosette with its "pryanik." The dynamic rhythm of the stems and grasses on the concave spherical surface of the bowl was especially palpable thanks to the static pattern of the "pryanik."
The masters' love of nature showed itself in the "osochka" designs. Many masters speak of them as their favorite type of herbal ornament in the craft. "We always did it gladly," recalls the oldest woman master, A.N. Tyukalova. "There's a lot of open space in this design, and the cup isn't smeared up, and it's very rich." In the master's spare and apt words lies the folk understanding of the beauty of ornament. The sense of open space that delights us in nature is achieved in the "osochka" designs through the free placement of motifs on the golden background of the high sloping sides of the dishes. The golden background showing through the openwork pattern of the leaves and branches of the "osochka" gives the painting a festive and rich look.
One of the most beautiful dishes with the "osochka" ornament belongs to the Semyonov Museum. It was acquired, together with other painted items, from the house of the former merchants Vitushkin, who traded in Khokhloma ware. The dish is among the earliest surviving examples of Khokhloma herbal painting. According to the recollections of its owners, it passed down in the Vitushkin family from generation to generation among carefully kept keepsakes and may have been painted in the mid-19th century or even in the first half of it.
The dish is more than half a meter in diameter. At its center stands out the traditional square "pryanik" with golden leaves on a black background, and along the sides are large branches with red and black leaves and berries, executed confidently and crisply in broad strokes. A certain austerity, seen by the master in nature and perhaps native to his own character, suggested the stern and solemn rhythms of the ornament.
Large dishes were sometimes also decorated with a design of a wavy stem curving smoothly around the central rosette like a wreath. The Semyonov Museum holds a dish with such an ornament, which also came from the Vitushkin house. In date of creation it may be a contemporary of the dish with the "osochka," but it was executed by a different master, whose ornamental hand is distinguished by a particular grace and refinement. At the center of the dish, on a black background, is the traditional four-cornered "pryanik" rosette with golden leaves arranged crosswise. The ornament of the dish combines the methods of herbal painting and "pod fon" ("against the background") painting.
The calm shimmer of the large golden leaves of the rosette seems to flow into the radiance of the golden background with its herbal pattern. The dish is perceived as wholly golden, despite the small areas of black background carefully introduced into the rosette's composition, which are necessary to keep the drawing of the leaves sufficiently crisp. The light line work in this painting combines well with the rich red and black strokes of the Khokhloma grasses, thanks to the finest little stems and twigs in black paint placed beside them.
On standing cups and salt cellars of cylindrical shape, the masters created designs of four "flowers" or "trees," depicting shoots rising from the earth. On the golden background they placed two red and two black stems with patterned foliage on the branches, as if reaching toward light and sun. Even today the oldest Khokhloma artists remember how they were taught to paint this design: "Don't paint it crowded — let each flower spread its leaves freely and wide, like a person who lives in comfort and freedom." On flour scoops they usually painted stems heavy with fruit — a design suggested by the long-forgotten symbolism of the harvest. Almost all the motifs of Khokhloma ornament had their own names, tied to the masters' poetic ideas about nature.
Knowing the traditional motifs and standard compositions, even rank-and-file painters could create highly artistic works. Their work — and this is perhaps the most valuable thing — never turned into the labor of a copyist. The standard compositions served only as guideposts that eased the work.
Plant ornament in the "pod fon" technique and "kudrina" designs were executed by the masters in the 19th century much less often than herbal patterns, so in this area the artistic legacy of Khokhloma is far poorer. Both of these types of painting were more labor-intensive than herbal painting, and for a long time only the most experienced masters commanded them. Designs with "pod fon" ornament are found on items made to special order or as gifts. These objects sometimes preserve an inscription giving the date of creation, the owner's name, and sometimes the master's name. They include distaff bases and sewing boxes, bast baskets for berries, little benches, yokes, and shaft bows.
Dated items with "pod fon" painting from the mid-19th century are almost unique. The Nizhny Novgorod Regional Museum holds a shaft bow marked 1857. Its painting has a composition widely used in decorating such items: paired heraldic golden lions at the base and a rosette at the top by the hole for attaching a bell. The main part of the bow's surface is decorated with an ornament resembling the designs of patterned fabrics, with golden leaves and bunches of grapes. The painting was executed by the hand of an experienced ornamentalist. The intricate curves of the grapevines are carefully and delicately drawn. And although the painting is interesting for its ingenuity, it lacks that boldness and freedom of hand that we especially value in Khokhloma.
On later shaft bows the "pod fon" ornament is executed in a more relaxed manner. Only in the second half of the 19th century, with the development of furniture production in Khokhloma, did the "pod fon" technique become more widespread. Ornaments with golden flowers and birds on a black background, executed especially often on children's tables and chairs, attract attention with the beauty of a pattern laid down by free movements of the brush. As in the herbal designs, "pod fon" painting developed its own clearly worked-out methods of ornamental shorthand. Compositions became stricter, more laconic, and at the same time more emotionally expressive.
The methods of executing the "kudrina" ornament are less labor-intensive than "pod fon" painting. From the mid-19th century many Khokhloma masters already commanded them widely. "Kudrina" designs were painted on cups and on large "artel" dishes. With their large monumental forms they resembled the patterns of Volga house carving. In the second half of the 19th century, "kudrina" motifs were also often executed in the painting of spoons. In every workshop the most skilled masters painted them on so-called spoons "with a face," which were laid one at a time on top of a crate of cheap plain spoons to show the ability and skill of the "scribes."
As documentary materials attest, as early as the mid-18th century the inhabitants of several dozen villages were engaged in Khokhloma painting. Turned wooden ware was brought in large quantities to the Makaryev Yarmarka. Bright, patterned golden bowls and bratinas stood in rows on the Volga bank, sparkling in the sun. From there they were shipped on barges throughout the country and beyond its borders.
In the second half of the 19th century Khokhloma produced quite a few types of items. Here they made large plank dishes up to a meter in diameter, known as "artel" or barge-hauler dishes, cups and plates of various sizes, standing cups, salt cellars, kandeyki (small lidded bowls), flour scoops, and other items. For themselves and to order for fellow villagers, the masters painted shaft bows, distaffs, sewing boxes, baskets for berries and mushrooms, and bast "mochesniki" for storing spindles.
At this time the craft was a vast artisan production of painted ware. A clear division of labor had formed among the inhabitants of different villages. In some settlements they procured timber, in others they did turning, in others they carved spoons from wood, and in still others they painted the items. The whole of this complex system of production was run by middlemen. They bought semi-finished goods from some masters and resold them to others, and bought up the finished products.
Some middlemen kept their own workshops, where turners, spoon-makers, and painters worked. The largest village in which the painting masters lived used to be called Bezdeli (now the village of Novopokrovskoye). It is so named in historical documents of the 18th–19th centuries. The name has not been forgotten even now. The masters explain its origin as follows: "The plowmen envied our occupation of art. They considered our work idleness. 'They don't work, they just fool around with a little brush,' they said about us, and so they nicknamed the village Bezdeli" (roughly, "Idleness").
But in the memory of the old-timers and in documentary materials many testimonies have survived to the hardship of the masters' forced labor for the middlemen. The middleman was the complete master of the craft and tried in every way to cut the workers' pay. In the painting shops people worked from two o'clock in the night until late in the evening. It was especially hard for children to work. Often on dark winter nights they fell asleep with the brush in their hands. The earnings barely sufficed for food. And in spite of all this, Khokhloma art lived on. In almost every village there were masters who composed new patterns. They decorated distaffs, sewing boxes, baskets, and standing cups with paintings.
The old-timers of the village of Novopokrovskoye even tell of how Ivan Mikhailovich Krasilnikov, shutting himself up in his workshop, painted the Serpent Gorynych on a piece of burlap. They also remember Ivan Mikhailovich's father, Mikhail Krasilnikov, who dreamed of going to St. Petersburg to study so as to become an artist. He decided to show his skill at the exhibition of 1884 and painted on a tabletop a picture titled "Peasant Morning." He depicted a village, a herdsman with a horn, peasants driving out their cattle, and surrounded the whole picture with a frame of golden "kudrina" curls. They say the work was a success at the exhibition: the master was summoned to St. Petersburg and awarded a watch and a sheepskin coat. But no one offered him the chance to study in the capital. Out of grief the master drank away both the watch and the coat.
Yakov Marusin was also considered an excellent painter in Novopokrovskoye — a man of rare, many-sided gifts, a joker and a freethinker. A mochesnik of his work survives in the Semyonov Museum.
In the former house of the middleman Tyukalov, where he lived for a long time as a farmhand, the doors painted by him are still there, showing a man in an eastern turban with a saber and a woman in a headscarf and sarafan. Yakov Marusin died in 1916 in Siberia, having gone there in search of happiness, which he never managed to find.
At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century hard times came for Khokhloma. Demand for painted wooden ware began to fall rapidly, gradually crowded out ever more by factory-made goods. The importance of the craft as a supplier of items for everyday peasant life declined. Trade in the items worsened especially during the Russo-Japanese War and the First World War. Many painting shops closed. Some of the masters were sent to the front.
The difficult situation in the folk crafts forced the Nizhny Novgorod zemstvo to take emergency measures. It paid particular attention to Khokhloma. Artists were sent there who tried to adapt its products to the tastes of city buyers.
At this time a deep interest in monuments of Russian antiquity arose among the Russian intelligentsia. They began to be studied and collected. This brought popularity to the products of folk crafts as well. To ensure sales of Khokhloma items, artists began producing "antique-style" samples for it.
This is how the craft came to produce ladles of fanciful shapes resembling snakes and dragons, chairs and sofas with horses' heads, unwieldy tables and sideboards with heavy turned legs, and needlework boxes resembling cast-iron weights. In decorating these items the motifs of "pod fon" and "kudrina" painting were distorted. An ornament of "Slavic vyaz" (decorative script) appeared — an unsuccessful imitation of the designs of old manuscript headpieces. It was characterized by dry stylized forms and coarse, garish coloring.
It could not be painted by the methods habitual to Khokhloma, so stencils appeared in the masters' work. Herbal painting at this time was executed only in those workshops that continued to paint cheap cups and dishes for the rural market. The "grass" acquired the disparaging name of plain coloring or "muzhik" ("peasant") designs. Herbal painting was paid half as much.
The folk art of the craft did not perish in these years either. The influence of the samples promoted by the zemstvo affected mainly masters who worked in the painting shops of wealthy owners. It scarcely touched the hovels of the poor, where the traditional herbal ornament was painted.
During the Great Patriotic War the craft lost a considerable part of the artists who had distinguished themselves in the art of the preceding years. The talented ornamentalist Anatoly Grigoryevich Podogov was killed in the battles on the Dnieper. Arkhip Mikhailovich Serov, Semyon Stepanovich Yuzikov, and Ivan Yegorovich Tyukalov were no more. Many masters did not return from the front.
The Modern Period
In the first postwar years the foremost task of the craft became restoring its creative collective and training young people. Experienced masters of the Semyonov Art School carried out a great deal of work in this direction. In the Koverninsky District of Gorky Region, remote from Semyonov, the oldest artists — Nikolay Grigoryevich and Nikanor Grigoryevich Podogov and Fyodor Andreyevich Bedin — worked with the young masters. The collection of Khokhloma ornaments created by Nikolay Grigoryevich Podogov helped them grasp the traditional foundations of the craft's art.
Aware of the importance of passing knowledge on to new generations of artists, the master began work on an album of Khokhloma ornaments back during the Great Patriotic War. Over several years he drew tables, recalling the patterns he had seen and writing down everything he had heard from his father and grandfather. In this work he was helped by his daughter Anna, who by then had become an experienced master herself. In this way four copies of the album were created, recording many ornaments of the 19th and early 20th centuries. This invaluable collection of drawings helped preserve the traditional painting techniques in the art of Khokhloma.
At the exhibitions of applied decorative art held in 1945–1946, many works by Khokhloma artists were presented. Like the masters of other crafts, they strove to create works imbued with the spirit of patriotism. The plant ornament took on a new meaning for them. It became a means of telling a special ornamental story about the richness and beauty of their native land.
The fascination with grass ornament that had characterized the preceding period gave way to the search for new designs in the "under the background" (pod fon) technique, whose possibilities matched the masters' desire to create a richer and more festive painting. Many works at this time were executed on a red cinnabar background.
A new understanding emerged of designs with a golden pattern and a joyful, resonant combination of cinnabar and gold, linked to ideas about the natural riches of the Russian land. Painting "under the background" also interested the masters because it allowed them to strengthen the role of graphic drawing in the composition, expanding the expressive possibilities of the ornament.
The desire to give ornamental painting a new voice showed itself in the choice of ornamental motifs and in how they were treated. The masters were especially drawn to motifs of ripe ears of grain, branches heavy with fruit, bunches of grapes, and lush flower garlands symbolizing abundance. In depicting them, the role of hatched modeling increased, strengthening the sense of the form's volume. This was a certain departure from the flat treatment traditional for Khokhloma.
Bolder combinations of motifs appeared in the painting. This can be seen, for example, in one of the most interesting works: a large cupboard made for the exhibition in honor of victory in the Great Patriotic War. Its author was the talented Koverninsky artist Lidia Ivanovna Maslova, one of the pupils of Anatoly Podogov.
On a black background she painted the white flowers of the rowan beside its red berries, on slender, flexible branches with green and golden foliage. Her ornament turned out remarkably ornate, combining spring blossoms with ripe autumn fruit. The appearance of such a painting provoked great debate among the Koverninsky masters. Many doubted whether an artist had the right to depict what cannot be seen in nature. Defending her position, Lidia Maslova explained: "In an ornament you can tell more about nature than we see in a single moment. So if we paint a rowan but are thinking of the forest, we do not violate the truth by painting flowers and berries together. It helps us convey the beauty of the forest and show it in one picture both blossoming in spring and golden with red autumn berries."
The artist's idea interested other masters as well. Designs with flowers and berries appeared in the works of L.A. Belyanina, E.A. Belova, and N.P. Kudryashov. In those same years they were often executed by the Semyonovsky artists — E.F. Sennikova, N.A. Chikalova, A.P. Savinova, A.E. Muravyov, and others. A distinctive ornamental suite on themes of Russian nature sounded in the cheerful, slightly naive paintings that A.V. Podogova made on cups. Her designs of "strawberries on black ground," "gooseberries on golden ground," "raspberries on yellow ground," and "a red little apple on brown ground" are imbued with a deeply individual poetic feeling.
At the same time, the Khokhloma masters tried to introduce into plant ornament depictions of coats of arms, emblems, architectural monuments, and even portraits. In creating such paintings, the masters could not rely on previously accumulated experience, so they were forced to turn to the artistic means of other kinds of art, and above all to graphic art. Thus, in the 1940s and early 1950s a whole series of works appeared: A.E. Muravyov's goblet with a portrait of Alexander Nevsky; two large decorative platters by E.F. Sennikova with a drawing of the Order of Victory and the coat of arms of the USSR; a casket by N.A. Denisova-Chikalova with the Order of Victory; plates depicting Red Square by O.S. Bulganina and A.P. Kuznetsova; F.A. Bedin's large decorative vase "Victory Salute"; and others.
All these works were created by talented masters who worked with enthusiasm in a type of composition new to them. But in resorting to the artistic language of graphic art, the masters inevitably stepped outside the usual bounds of their art. And they could not yet find ways of depicting the new motifs that would be closer to Khokhloma. As a result, the paintings lacked unity of artistic solution.
Of the works named, the most successful was E.F. Sennikova's platter with the coat of arms of the USSR, presented at the exhibition marking the thirtieth anniversary of the Soviet state. Yet even in its composition, the ornament still turned out to be the most successful part. Surrounding the image of the coat of arms with a wreath of light, lush flowers, Sennikova managed to convey the jubilant flowering of nature. There are no repeating forms in the ornament. Gazing at each branch and each flower, you discern ever new motifs, united in a common pattern by the rhythm of circular movement.
In the 1940s and 1950s, two independent directions clearly emerged in the art of the craft, each of which carried on the shared artistic traditions in its own way. One was connected with the work of the masters of the Koverninsky District of Gorky Region, the other with the collective of the Semyonov factory and art school.
As in the 1930s, the Semyonov masters showed a tendency toward ornamental fantasy. On their wares they painted exotic flowers of complex forms, resembling the lilies, dahlias, and tulips that they so loved to grow in their front gardens. They were characterized by a turn to ornamental graphic art. The masters' paintings are distinguished by a special delicacy and care in the linear contour drawing with hatched modeling.
During this time the artists produced paintings for the "Tabaktorg" store and the "Moskva" restaurant in Gorky. In them, the striving for a special exoticism to some degree revived the not yet entirely forgotten "pseudo-Russian" style with its deliberate ornamentation and gilded sweetness.
Some large exhibition pieces the masters made jointly. For such works the deadlines were usually very tight, and a single artist could not cope alone. On such days the workshop heard only the word "we." Everything interesting that anyone managed to devise added to the common design. N.A. Chikalova was best of all at drawing the forms of large vases. Spreading out sheets of paper, she confidently sketched the silhouettes of goblets, caskets, and vases, recalling the forms of objects she had liked at exhibitions or in museums. The best of them were selected.
.."Paint more simply," Stepan Pavlovich Veselov often said. "In our work there is great beauty in strictness. A good master paints even the simplest little blade of grass with feeling. We see many beautiful herbs and flowers in nature and admire them all, but a true master will choose a few and express the essential. Art is the ability to choose."
Criticism
Like any other global phenomenon, Khokhloma has entered the ironic folklore of Nizhny Novgorod's urban environment.
There is a non-artistic expression in circulation, "to paint someone Khokhloma-style," meaning to inflict multiple bruises that stand out brightly on an opponent's body.
Interesting facts
- For President Medvedev's inauguration, a Khokhloma wooden spoon taller than he is was made.
- For the 50th birthday of the director Mikhalkov, who is considered a descendant of a high-ranking nobleman — a tsar's bedchamber attendant — a special Khokhloma set was made, consisting of the "Tsar's Feast" table set, a mustached matryoshka (archive), a wooden hat inscribed "To Nikita Mikhalkov on his jubilee," a decorative walking stick, and a plate depicting a family scene.
Nizhny Novgorod Khokhloma masters
See also
Sources
- Newsroom24 — In the 2020s, craftsmen of the creative laboratory of the Khokhloma Painting factory created Khokhloma elephants — items that combine Indian and Russian symbolism: the elephant (archive)