Picture book art spans key era in Russian history
The lush pictures of butterflies fluttering over mushrooms and fanciful prints of half-human half-bird creatures hanging in the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst mark the end of an era.
The fairy tale images that crammed Russian children's books during the reign of Nicholas and Alexandra were about to be erased with the October Revolution of 1917 when the Bolsheviks thrust Marxist ideology on the country under the leadership of Lenin.
Gone were the Silver Age's folkloric stories decorated with fanciful artistry influenced by German French and Italian painters. Instead the fables long told in children's books were replaced with the instruction manual dictates of the emerging Communist Party. The juvenile literature once meant to foster creativity and imagination was quickly replaced with manifestos and dogma.
One need look no further than at a copy of "Where Do Dishes Come From" to get the point. The book cover features a lonely teapot emblazoned with the Communist Party's hammer and sickle logo.
"They were saying 'Let's get away from fairy tales and give children stories founded in empirical issues" said Nicholas Clark founding director of the Picture Book museum which is exhibiting "From the Silver Age to Stalin Russian Children's Book Illustration from the Sasha Lurye Collection" until Jan. 18.
"It was a movement to de-romanticize things and focus on the revolution" he said.
And it wasn't just a matter of art imitating life. It was art being forced to serve the ideology of a new world order.
Artists who clung to their western-influenced styles and a flair for the art nouveau style of the late 1800s and early 1900s often found their names blacklisted in Pravda the Communist Party's official publication.
"If an artist or writer was denounced in Pravda they either capitulated to what the Party wanted or were sent to the gulags" said Michael Patrick Hearn who curated the show. "If you didn't follow the party line you were finished."
Many of the works in the exhibit exude a flat stripped-down regurgitation of Party propaganda. But some children's books artists found ways to experiment with different forms and styles.
Among the best known was Vladimir Lebedev who incorporated New-Primitivist and Cubist elements in his work.
Still the message of the Party was delivered. In Lebedev's "Ice Cream" a portly man decked out in a suit and bowler eats so much of the frozen dessert he eventually explodes.
"He's the epitome of bourgeois decadence" Clark said. "He literally eats himself to death. It's the embodiment of what the Revolution wanted to do away with."
Along with the attacks on bourgeois fat cats and the literacy of the intelligentsia some of the children's books tried to foster a sense of pride in the rally for workers of the world to unite.
The cover of 1925's "Yesterday and Today" contrasts images like a hunched-over man carrying pails of water on his shoulder with an upright plumber marching along with a pipe clutched mightily in his hand.
Another book gives a biography of Lenin's childhood days and "How People Travel" boasts the transportation successes of Russian technology.
"This is not 'Little Red Riding Hood"' Clark said. "There was a clear message here that was being planted by the Party."
The books and posters in the exhibit are drawn from the acquisitions of Sasha Lurye a New York City collector.
Much of the Communist-era material has decayed and disintegrated from being read and reread and many of the earlier books were either hidden by their owners or destroyed by the Party's censors.
"It's miraculous that some of this material has survived" Clark said. "There may be more out there that's been well-hidden or well-preserved but this is giving us a first real chance to see this happy survival of a body of material."
"From the Silver Age to Stalin Russian Children's Book Illustration in the Sasha Lurye Collection" is on display at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art until Jan. 18.
WHERE 125 West Bay Road Amherst.
HOURS Tuesday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Sunday 12 p.m. to 4 p.m.
ADMISSION Adults $4; Seniors $3; Youth and students $2; Children under — free.
INFORMATION Call (413) 658-1100 or " TARGET="_blank"http//www.picturebookart.org/index.asp
This story appeared on Page C3 of The Standard-Times on November 16 2003.