User:Ceosad/sandbox/Agitation porcelain

Agitation porcelain, or propaganda porcelain, is a type of porcelain produced in the early Soviet Union. An abbreviation of agitfarfor was commonly used during the Soviet times to distinguish this type of porcelain.

Background
Imperial Porcelain Factory in Saint Petersburg was renamed to State Porcelain Factory after the Bolsheviks had taken control of the country. In March 1918 People's Commissariat for Public Education (Narkompos) took over the factory. The factory was already full of empty porcelain blanks which were ready to be put to use. Shortage of paper in the early Soviet regime was one of the contributing factors for producing porcelain as a medium of propaganda. In comparison, it took an another decade until painting was controlled in a similar decree as porcelain production.

World fame accrued to Petrograd applied art through the agitation porcelain produced by the State Porcelain Factory (previously the Imperial Porcelain Factory, later the Leningrad Lomonosov Porcelain Factory). The factory was found to have large stocks of unpainted items and the decision was taken to employ them not simply as tableware, but primarily as a vehicle of revolutionary propaganda. The inspiration and "spirit" of the factory’s artistic activities was Sergey Chekhonin, who became head of the painting department at the State Porcelain Factory in 1917. His very first works already had an agitation purpose, including the greatest of them – the anniversary dish produced for 25 October 1918 (the coat of arms of the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic worked in flowers). Sergey Chekhonin personally and others working from his drawings painted a large number of plates with slogans and the initials of the RSFSR, dishes, cups and whole services decorated with a pattern of many flowers and gilding. Besides the purely ornamental and allegorical pieces, the factory also produced from Sergey Chekhonin’s drawings a series of graphic portraits of the leaders of the world proletariat as well as a large oval dish bearing the autographs of all the most prominent figures of the October Revolution.

Production
Agitation porcelain was produced during the period of 1918–1927.

Only two stores sold the agitation porcelain. One of these stores was in Saint Petersburg, and the another one was in Moscow.

Artists
An innovative line of work was the festive decoration of Petrograd for the early anniversaries of the October Revolution. Among the many people involved were the artists Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Boris Kustodiev, Isaak Brodsky, Arkady Rylov, and Nathan Altman, the sculptors Leonid Sherwood and Sarah Lebedeva, the graphic artists Vladimir Lebedev, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky and Sergey Chekhonin, the architects Lev Rudnev and Ivan Fomin. Their ideas and approaches to a large extent determined the characteristics of the nascent new Soviet art of decorating public spaces that answered the call for monumental propaganda.

Artists involved in the creation of agitation porcelain included М. М. Adamovich, N. I. Altman, Alexandra Chekotikhina—Pototskaya, Natalia Danko, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Alexander Samokhvalov, Pavel Kuznetsov and Mstislav Dobuzhinsky.