Forgotten Furniture Designers of the Khrushchev “Thaw” Era

Abstract

Summary: Few names could be found in the research literature on the Soviet furniture design of the 1950–60s. Neither they are present in the most important historical sources on the subject – the catalogues of all-Union furniture exhibitions, where, as a rule, the mention is made of design organizations that presented certain pieces of furniture to the exhibition, and not the designers themselves. The article offers a method of processing sources that makes it possible to solve this problem. The method is based on the systematization of visual material: numerous photographs of interiors published in the late 1950s and 1960s in various specialized Soviet editions – exhibition catalogues; magazines on architecture and decorative art; advice literature on furnishing a house aimed at a wider public. The article refers to 36 sources (books and articles) with several hundred illustrations. It has been established that the visual material in the advice literature considered consists almost entirely of shots of the four largest furniture exhibitions held in Moscow at the turn of the decade – displays in the mock-up models of the apartments at the Permanent All-Union Exhibition of Construction and Architecture, the Exhibition of All-Union Competition of Furniture for Single-Family Apartments (both 1958), the exhibition “Iskusstvo – v byt” [Art to the Household] and the Second All-Union Furniture Competition (both 1961). The view of one and the same fragment of the display (sometimes even the same picture) in the 1960s publications is reproduced repeatedly. In addition, some pieces of furniture were presented at several exhibitions. Thus, in the sources the images of same piece of furniture was often published many times. Having identified the item in the photos and collected information from various sources related to these images, we could often find evidence of authorship. In this way it is possible to stablish the names of many participants in the four exhibitions mentioned above. In the article they are indicated together with the names of participants of the All-Union Furniture Exhibition of 1956 found in its catalogue (the only exhibition catalogue providing the names of designers) – a total of 82 names. Many of these designers participated not in one, but in several of exhibitions mentioned (some – in all five), many of them were awarded prizes. The analysis of sources allowed, firstly, to identify the most “successful” Soviet furniture designers of the 1950–60s, and, secondly, to attribute to them many of the projects whose authorship previously had not been established. In particular, significant arrays of images associated with the names of Yuri Sluchevsky, Elena Orlova (Bocharova), Konstantin Blomerius (Moscow), Lygija Marija Stapulionienė (Vilnius), Irma Karakis (Kiev) were collected. Of the 82 names given in the article, most are not found in historiography. Their introduction to scientific circulation makes it possible to expand the pool of search for personal archives necessary for further research of Soviet furniture design.