Under the Sign of the Avant-Garde: Jewelry in the Context of Left-Wing Trends in the Art of Russia in the First Third of the 20th Century

Abstract

In the context of left-wing trends and “industrial art” in Russia in the first third of the twentieth century, jewelry occupied a more than modest place. In this regard, special attention should be paid to the few jewelry artifacts known today that are directly or indirectly related to the aesthetic principles of the avant-garde artistic and stylistic trends of this time. During the study of the earliest stage of the genesis of Russian art jewelry in the Soviet period, several such monuments were identified, created by reformist artists: A. M. Rodchenko, N. M. Suetin, and others. Of particular interest is the synthesis of classic jewelry solutions and avant-garde graphic design-preserved examples of pre-revolutionary Faberge jewelry factories and three-dimensional graphic design. As a result, a capacious image of the transition era was formed, in all the contradiction of the denial of the artistic experience of the past and the approval of the stylistics of the future: agitation art, constructivism, Suprematism, and working art. Identified new archival data allowed us to make new attributions of some artifacts from Museum collections, representing different areas of existence of jewelry in the post-revolutionary era: faleristics, cinema, “production art”, Amateur. The study made it possible to conclude that the avant-garde stylistic trends “as the highest stage of all aestheticism” were not so “far from the tasks of introducing the language of new art into production”. Another thing is that the process of artistic integration does not always find an adequate response among consumers of art, including jewelry. At the same time, the synthesis of left-wing trends in art with jewelry played an important role in creating prerequisites for the formation of the genre of unique author’s jewelry works in Russia.