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Design Education and the Quest for National Identity in Late Imperial Russia: The Case of the Stroganov School
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Salmond, Wendy |
| Copyright Year | 1994 |
| Abstract | Of the three major industrial art schools operating in Russia on the eve of the 1917 Revolution, the Imperial Central Stroganov School of Technical Design in Moscow was the oldest, the most innovative, and the most controversial.1 The Stroganov School was the first art institution in Russia to confront the daunting problems of molding consumer taste and of improving manufactured goods aesthetically by providing the Empire's factories, workshops, and schools with well-trained industrial artists. For over half a century, it blazed a trail for other industrial art schools to follow, as its museum facilities, curriculum, publications, exhibitions, workshops, and factory internships all demonstrated a thoughtful and imaginative adaptation of modern Western ideas to local conditions. Above all, the Stroganov was known for championing a distinctively Russian style in manufactured objects, its mission being to wean Russian consumers from what was considered their inordinate love of foreign products while at the same time opening up new markets for Russian goods abroad. None of these goals was at all unique to Russia, of course. That the national economy of any industrializing nation could benefit from the injection of aesthetics and the marks of national distinctiveness into various manufacturing sectors was an accepted fact by the mid-nineteenth century, and the proliferation of industrial art schools throughout Europe, England, and America acknowledged the role that art education was believed capable of playing in economic life. What made the Stroganov School's mission so unusual, and so problematic, was the matrix of social, cultural, and economic factors in which it operated. Allocated a central part in the creation of a new Russian producer and consumer, the Stroganov came face to face with long-standing issues of Russian identity that it was powerless to resolve. In its efforts to forge a stylistic compromise between Russian and European culture (the so-called Stroganov style was essentially a Russian variant of Art Nouveau), the school involuntarily exacerbated the tensions that arose when a traditional agrarian culture confronted the demands of modern industrial society. |
| Starting Page | 2 |
| Ending Page | 24 |
| Page Count | 23 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1086/studdecoarts.1.2.40662491 |
| Volume Number | 1 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1009&context=art_articles&httpsredir=1&referer= |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
