Plate

Vilde’s career began in 1905 as a ceramics painter at the Imperial Porcelain Factory where a year later he became head of the workshop. In this position until 1930, Vilde was part of the factory’s revolutionary transformation from producing wares exclusively for the Tzar and his court to repurposing the many imperial blanks for propagandistic ends as part of the new mandate for the State Porcelain Factory, rechristened after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Under the leadership of Sergi Chekhonin, artistic director from 1918–1923, a nationalistic yet stylistically diverse visual program was incorporated into the decoration of simple utilitarian objects, such as plates, bowls, and small tea sets. The wares ranged in style from the avant-garde abstraction of Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism, to the folk-derived social realism of Vilde’s example here. It was this later style that eventually triumphed as the prevailing Stalinist aesthetic.

Vilde painted this plate depicting a Bolshevik worker heroically coming to rescue the Volga region’s populace from starvation, personified as the Grim Reaper carrying off a bundle of wheat, during the famine which lasted through 1922. As a result of the First World War and the Russian Civil Wars which followed, the production of grain fell drastically, leading to widespread food shortages. The famine, which killed an estimated 6 million Russians, was most devastating in the Volga and Ural regions. In 1921, Lenin initiated reforms to food distribution and consumption under the New Economic Policy in an effort to curtail the devastating effects of the famine. Vilde and his comrades at the State Porcelain Factory painted ceramics to raise funds to aid in the relief effort.