Exhibition "Brooch of the twentieth century. World of Russian jewelry miniatures"

From March 7 to April 9, 2018, the All-Russian Museum of Decorative and Applied Arts will host the exhibition “Brooch of the twentieth century. The world of Russian jewelry miniatures. " For the first time, a full-scale jewelry collection of Soviet-era brooches and contemporary author’s art, stored in the funds of VMDPNI, will be shown.

A brooch is a traditional female breast jewelry that has passed the path from a brooch to a conceptual art object over its thousand-year history. As an art object, the brooch expressively and accurately reflects the main trends of world fashion and contemporary copyright art, demonstrates the variety of design of mass products of industrial jewelry production and the work of folk artists. The twentieth century was the era of the rapid evolution of the brooch from a functional object and precious jewelry to an exclusive author’s work of decorative and applied art.

The brooch expresses not only the author’s idea of the master, but also the features of the aesthetic perception and personality of the owner, becoming a kind of sign, a form of non-verbal communication in modern society. An example of such communication is Madeleine Albright, whose phrase “Read my brooches” has become well-known. In its content and imagery, in many plots and principles of decorative solutions, the brooch can be attributed to the genre of chamber, miniature works, which are part of modern art space and are part of the system of classical, avant-garde and folk decorative art.

Exhibition “Brooch of the 20th century. The World of Russian Jewelry Miniatures ”is a wide historical and art panoramic display of about 130 exhibits of a collection of brooches from the collection of the All-Russian Museum of Decorative, Applied and Folk Art and private collections.

Most of the exposition is devoted to jewelry production of the 1920-1940s, the work of artists of jewelry artels and the Scientific Research Institute of the Art Industry (hereinafter NIIHP), the works of domestic artists-jewelers of the 1940-1990s, with whose names the main directions of modern domestic copyright art.

The thematic sections of the exhibition included both works by Russian jewelry companies and workshops, whose fame already brought Russian fame to Russian jewelry manufacturers by the beginning of the 20th century, as well as works by craftsmen, NIIHP artists and contemporary decorative and applied artists. The exposition demonstrates the characteristic features of workshops or art production, traditional techniques of technical, decorative and imaginative solutions. The exposition included brooches of such artels and crafts as Kholmogory, Finift, Kubachi, Gotsatlin, Northern Chern, Mstera, Fedoskino, Kholuy, Khokhloma and others. Also presented are jewelry from the beginning of the 20th century, avant-garde and conceptual works of jewelry.

For the first time, the domestic audience will have a unique opportunity to admire and appreciate the jewelry of the first Soviet artels and cooperative unions made for the international exhibitions of 1937, 1939, 1958 and the All-Russian exhibitions of the second half of the 20th century.