In the first and second acts of our perambulations through the exhibition Vera Mukhina: Against the Wind, a good many theatrical ‘guns’ had been hung upon the walls, and in the third act, bearing the charming title of ‘Lyrism’, it is high time for them to go off.
Vera Mukhina—supposedly the inventor of the faceted tumbler. Vera Mukhina, whose proud moniker was borne by the Leningrad Higher School of Arts and Crafts, now the Stieglitz Academy. Vera Mukhina, who immortalised Professor Kachalov in portraiture. At last, we reached the gallery that brought all these threads together: the tales of artistic glassware, so intimately and indelibly bound up with Leningrad.
Glass Town and Lomonosov Porcelain
To be found in the northernmost reaches of the Nevsky District in Saint Petersburg, just across the Obvodny Canal from the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, lies the historic Glass Town. Should you fail to locate the appellation upon a modern map, you will unfailingly stumble upon it via its eloquent nomenclature: Khrustalnaya (Crystal), Steklyannaya (Glass), Glazurnaya (Glazed), and Fayansovaya (Faience) streets, not to forgetting Zerkalny (Mirror) Lane. There, too, runs the very street named after that same Professor Kachalov.
In 1779, Catherine the Great’s favourite, Prince Grigory Potemkin, transported a glass manufactory from Naziya to his estate in these parts. Following his demise, it was escheated to the Crown and elevated to the status of the Imperial Glassworks, complete with a dedicated mirror-making workshop. Mikhail Lomonosov busied himself there with the recipes for coloured glass, whilst Ivan Kulibin laboured over large-format mirrors. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was amalgamated with the porcelain works situated further to the south, whereupon all production—save for the mirror workshops—was shifted thither. In the 1920s the enterprise was duly nationalised, and by 1940, at the instigation of Kachalov, Mukhina, and the novelist Alexey Tolstoy, the Leningrad Art Glass Plant was brought into being upon those very foundations. Alas, it weathered not the turbulent 1990s, yet the historical collections of the factory’s output are safely housed within the Museum of the Imperial Porcelain Factory, the Hermitage, and the Yelagin Palace.
From Paris to Soviet Laboratories
Vera Mukhina first clapped eyes upon a glass sculpture during a jaunt to Paris in 1928. It dawned upon her that this most tractable of mediums might serve to body forth her plastic conceptions—Mukhina was quite captivated by the artistic potentials afforded by the crafts of crystal-cutting, glass-blowing, and the slumping of molten glass.
But the art glass industry in the homeland was destroyed after the revolution. In 1939, Mukhina, together with the chemist-technologist, professor of Leningrad Institute of Technology Nikolay Kachalov and the writer Alexey Tolstoy, proposed to the Soviet government to create an experimental art laboratory that would develop highly artistic glass samples for mass production, as well as glass sculptures to decorate the Palace of the Soviets under construction (which was built by the same Iofan, the creator of the Soviet pavilion at the Paris Exhibition).
Mukhina stated the philosophy governing her approach to the world of everyday objects with admirable crispness:
Beauty must become an integral part of everyday existence, permeating our domestic habits. I maintain that a repast served upon an agreeable plate and tea sipped from an agreeable cup possess a superior savour, and are consequently the more wholesome. Art surrounds man at every turn, softening his manners and cultivating his taste…
In the closing months of 1939, an experimental workshop was inaugurated in Leningrad hard by the mirror factory, with Kachalov assuming the scientific directorship and Mukhina the artistic. Kachalov had been associated with the Imperial Glassworks since 1913, where his energies were devoted to the manufacture of optical glass. In Mukhina’s correspondence dating from the late thirties, the learned gentleman makes much of the notion that the renaissance of art glass was rendered feasible purely thanks to those venerable craftsmen who yet survived and with whom he kept up a correspondence.
It was within this very establishment that Vera Mukhina engaged in spirited experimentation with glass, fashioning both vases and freestanding sculptures. She took a particular fancy to the technique of slumping—the thermal shaping of curvilinear articles from heated glass—as well as the matting of glass via hydrofluoric acid. The matted, slumped surfaces of her sculptures possessed a most delicately gentle quality in their diffusion of light. It was likewise there that she perfected the recipe for a peculiar smoky glass known as ‘a drop of milk in a tumbler of water’.
The Glass Triad: From Vases to the Tragedy of the Siege
Throughout the years 1940 and 1941, operating within the newly renovated works, Mukhina succeeded in producing the majority of those vases which have come down to us—vases distinguished by severe yet triumphant silhouettes, a most opulent palette of hues, technological diversity, and formidable intricacy. Yet neither prior to nor following WWII was any single one of these exemplars committed to mass manufacture. Plainly, the technological arduousness precluded the ready replication of the objects displayed in this gallery. Even in our own day, to reproduce certain among them appears well-nigh impossible.
The earliest tentative ventures into glass sculpture were essayed at that same juncture, back in 1940. Dating from this period is the head of a maiden with tresses streaming in the breeze, entitled Wind, exhibited among the decorative vases. Then descended WWII. During the dark days of the Siege of Leningrad, the experimental workshop suspended its labours, and over the grimmest phase of the conflict, all the veteran artisans of the glassworks met their end. In 1945, with Victory achieved, Mukhina and Kachalov returned to the notion of glass sculpture at the resurrected enterprise. Among these post-war triumphs must be counted the figure of a seated girl—a cast of one of Vera Mukhina’s earliest (the plaster model bearing the date 1913) and most lyrical sculptural endeavours.
These excursions into artistic glass served the sculptor as an emotional sanctuary during those intervals when her grand monumental schemes, proposals, and daydreams were left to languish unfulfilled. Glass became for Mukhina a medium of transcendence. Within that fragile, luminous substance she discovered precisely what official monumentality so frequently lacked—unfettered plastic liberty and the intimate pulse of life itself.
We have but a single step remaining to conclude our odyssey through this exhibition. Looming before us is the final gallery of the display—“Allegory”, wherein Mukhina is revealed in the full stature of her philosophical contemplation of form.
Pray, do not desert us!
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