Following the campaigns of industrialization and collectivization as a result of which, according to party documents, "the triumph of Socialism in the USSR was assured", in the early 1930s "cultural construction" was implemented across a broad front. The Leningrad Porcelain Factory with its rich cultural traditions and professional staff became the base for the creation of a new style, appropriate to the Socialist way of life. In 1931 the country's first artistic laboratory was established here and a year later Nikolai Suetin became its head. The creative team that implemented the tasks set in porcelain included Alexei Vorobyevsky, Ivan Riznich, Mikhail Mokh, Anna Yefimova, Anna Yatskevich and Serafima Yakovleva.
The porcelain produced was marked by purity of forms, the whiteness of the material, the richness of the paints and the concrete nature of the images used in decoration. With great taste the artists depicted contemporary themes in porcelain, be it an allegory of Socialist construction in the painting of the service entitled From Taiga to Building, the theme of industrialization expressed by decorative means in the Industrial Service, or the glorification of the heroism of labour in the Metal Service. Quite often too the artists turned their hands to fairy-tale motifs.
In creating new Soviet porcelain, sculptors began to employ simple geometric forms. The principle of simplicity and understatement accorded with the aesthetic views of Suetin, the head of the team, who naturally expressed in porcelain the Suprematist ideas that he had adopted. He placed particular stress on the purity and clarity of form, the logical completeness of a composition, dynamism and concision in the painted decoration.
In 1933, under Suetin's direction Eva Stricker developed the first design of the Intourist Service for mass production. Slightly later came Suetin's designs Standard and the more flowing Crocus. The Tulip design for a service, created in 1936 by the young sculptor Serafima Yakovleva, became a classic shape for Soviet porcelain and a mainstay of the factory's production for many years.
In the second half of the 1930s, the factory resumed the production of large vases, began to cast sculpture and biscuit busts and to reproduce examples of tsarist porcelain. Portraiture- and picture-painting was revived on the large, presentation-piece vases. In sculpture and painted decoration depictions of the leaders of the Communist Party and the state predominated.
In 1936 a new mark appeared on the porcelain items - ЛФЗ (LFZ: the Leningrad Porcelain Factory named after Lomonosov) - a guarantee like its predecessors of quality and high professional standards.
In 1937 porcelain from the Leningrad factory was again awarded a gold medal at the World Exhibition in Paris. Among the eye-catching works of the pre-war years is the large vase The Lay of Igor's Host, created by the artist Alexei Vorobyevsky on motifs from the late-12th-century early Russian epic poem. The manner of decoration was based on the artistic structure of early Russian miniatures.
During the Second World War, the museum collection was evacuated to the Urals, far from the fighting. Many of the factory's workers went to the front or joined the people's volunteer corps, while the remainder played their part as members of the local anti-aircraft detachment.
For the first anniversary of the end of the war, the factory produced a monumental Victory Vase that was presented by the staff to Stalin. (Today it is in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.)
"To poeticize a person's surroundings with beauty" was the conception of porcelain art in the post-war years. Light and dashing, tender and fragile, frozen in an animated outburst - that is how we see Galina Ulanova in Yelena Yanson-Manizer's sculpture of her in the role of Odette from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. Enlarged many times and cast in bronze, in 1984 this sculpture was set up in front of the world's only Dance Museum in Stockholm.
