Stone-cutting art of the Urals: a story with a sequel. Summary: Formation of the centers of art crafts of the Southern Urals

Formation of the centers of art crafts of the Southern Urals

1.3 Stone-cutting art of the Urals

In the Urals, stone things began to be made in the era of classicism, although stone-cutting production began to be established under V.N. Tatishchev. By the end of the 18th century, as a result of an expedition to search for colored stones, many new deposits of marble, jasper and other rocks were discovered here. By the same time, the main core of craftsmen had formed in the Urals, and stone-cutting art became a hereditary business.

During almost the entire 18th century, large orders were made from softer marble than jasper or agate. In particular, the Urals made marble details from it - steps, slabs, handrails, columns - for the Smolny Monastery, Peterhof and many buildings of Tsarskoye Selo, as well as many details and decorations for the famous Marble Palace in St. Petersburg, designed by the architect A. Rinaldi. From hard rocks (Murzin topaz, carnelian, rock crystal) in the 18th century, only small items were produced - seals, mouthpieces, snuff boxes, dagger handles, etc.

Since the 1780s, the Yekaterinburg grinding factory has completely switched to the processing of hard rocks, and the local craftsmen began to confidently take on rounded shapes that are difficult to manufacture.

The process of stone processing was laborious and multi-stage, the manufacture of products required caution and special care. For example, when planning to make a bowl from a 1000-pood pink orlets (rhodonite) monolith, Yekaterinburg experts wrote to the customer: order, can be made no earlier than four years. In fact, the manufacture of this vase took not four, but ten years of hard work.

First, the stones were cut with steel tools and cut with sheet iron saws. If a round product was being prepared, then the initial processing was carried out with pipes or cylinders, also made of sheet iron. Saws and drills were wetted with water and emery during operation. So the stone received the first rough design. Then he entered the detailed processing on the "barred" machine: the stone was pressed with screws to a rotating wooden pulley. On the contrary, a stone intended for a round product was strengthened in the center, rotated around its axis and received its shape from contact with graters and bars. After ornamental processing, they proceeded to grinding and polishing. Polished with emery and copper graters. Polished with tin graters or pulleys with a bang.

For things, the walls of which were decorated with relief images, they first made a wax model according to the drawing. After the figures were drawn on the stone with a copper pencil, outlined with a cutter and narrower, then turned, ground and polished.

However, this method was suitable for products made of marble, rhodonite, jasper and not very suitable for revealing the special beauty of malachite and lapis lazuli.

Meanwhile, a lot of products from malachite were produced by the Yekaterinburg cutting factory and sent to St. Petersburg. The Urals has the best and richest malachite deposits in the world. Pieces up to 1,500 kilograms in weight were mined at the Gumeshevsky mine near the Polevsk plant, and a block of 25 tons was discovered at the Mednorudyansky mine in the N. Tagil region. Subsequently, this block, broken into pieces weighing 2 tons, was used for facing the famous malachite hall of the Winter Palace. For the manufacture of malachite and lapis lazuli items, the Ural craftsmen used the technique of the so-called "Russian mosaic".

It turns out that huge malachite vases or countertops are not made from a whole piece of malachite: their volume is made from serpentine, marble or other stone. The natural features of malachite - the abundance of large and small voids, foreign inclusions, nostrility forced us to abandon the usual ideas about all the facade beauty of the stone, which makes it possible to make voluminous things. Malachite is cut into thin tiles and used as a facing material: they paste over the prepared shape, round, if it is a vase, or flat (countertop). In the West, such a technique - pasting a simple stone with plates of expensive rocks has been known for a long time, however, the originality of the "Russian mosaic" was that things with a rounded surface were also pasted over: vases, columns, things with relief ornamentation, and most importantly - colossal objects . (Appendix A, Figure A.2).

Products from malachite, lapis lazuli and jasper, made using the Russian mosaic method, were the pride of the Urals. In the middle of the 19th century, a general fashion for malachite in interior decoration developed: in the 1830-1840s, malachite turned from a stone used by jewelers into a material for architectural decoration. The artist A. Venetsianov, in one of his private letters, wrote about the creation of a “malachite room” in the newly finished (after a strong fire) Winter Palace: “The palace is almost finished (I haven’t been yet), and it will have a malachite room - malachite they wore rings, remember? .

In the middle of the 18th century in Yekaterinburg, in addition to marble products, the first steps were taken to process hard rocks and make various artistic objects from them. In the 1750s-1760s, the fashion for snuffboxes flourished, each costume was supposed to have a certain snuffbox, made of a wide variety of materials: metal, bone, porcelain, etc. In the Urals, stone snuff boxes were made in large quantities.

In 1754, students at the Yekaterinburg "mill" under the guidance of I. Susorov worked on products more complex in shape than snuffboxes, cups and trays of various shapes made of dark green jasper, etc. Mastering the technique of processing hard stone continues in subsequent years under the supervision of S. Vaganov. In 1769, small round bowls made of red agate, blue and black jaspers were already being processed. During these years, for the first time, there is information that the bowls were made “with a notch inside”, that is, hollow. Unexpected products were also encountered in production, for example, red jasper table spoons.

Since the 1780s, the Yekaterinburg grinding factory has completely switched to processing only hard rocks. At the beginning of September 1782, an order was received from St. Petersburg for the manufacture of vases and special drawings. Suitable stones were selected for each drawing, mainly jaspers of dark, restrained colors. Classicism, with its cult of clarity and architectonic forms, determines the style of the Ural products of the 1770-1780s. In the middle of the 18th century, the works of the Ural masters did not yet play such a role in interior decoration as in the final decades of the century, when the interiors were decorated with stone statues, vases, floor lamps. In the 1780s, a factory in Yekaterinburg began to create stone vases, for which the history of Russian stone-cutting became famous.

The greatest flourishing of production at the Yekaterinburg factory falls on the first half of the 19th century. During these years, stone vases, bowls, obelisks and floor lamps were created according to the designs of the largest Russian architects. The best products of the factory were repeatedly demonstrated at world exhibitions in Europe and received the highest awards. .

ancient greek culture

Spiritual culture in the context of historicism

The ancient Greeks called art "the ability to create things in accordance with certain rules." In addition to architecture and sculpture, they referred to art as handicrafts, and arithmetic, and in general any business ...

Stone-cutting products

Tyva is the land of hereditary masters of the art of stone carving. This art originated from time immemorial - Tuvan stone carving, Tuvans, especially the older generation, consider animals, beasts...

Arab culture

The specificity of the medieval art of the countries of the Arab East, as well as of the entire Near and Middle East, is very complex. It reflected the living content of reality, but, like the entire culture of the Middle Ages...

Arab culture

Studies carried out over the past few decades testify to the development in medieval Egypt of monumental painting, as well as miniatures, especially in the 11th - 12th centuries ...

Culture of Belarus in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries

Development of cognitive interest in the education of schoolchildren in the context of the integration of technological and historical education

Medieval Arab-Muslim culture

Medieval Arab architecture absorbed the traditions of the conquered countries - Greece, Rome, Iran, Spain. Art in the countries of Islam also developed, interacting with religion in a complex way. Mosques...

medieval society

Church-religious worldview had a decisive influence on the development of medieval art. The church saw its tasks in strengthening the religious feeling of believers...

* This work is not a scientific work, is not a final qualifying work and is the result of processing, structuring and formatting the collected information, intended to be used as a source of material for self-preparation of educational work.

Introduction

The artistic culture of the Urals is an integral part of the history of Russian culture. At the same time, it is not just a provincial version of a national culture, but an independent phenomenon with its own patterns and logic of development. This is the peculiarity of the existence of such a phenomenon as regional culture.

The unique location of the Ural Range - between the two main centers of world civilizations - Europe and Asia, created an opportunity for constant interaction between East and West; the diversity of the natural and geographical conditions of the Urals led to the diversity of cultural and economic structures that arose here since the Paleolithic era and had an impact on the entire further course of historical events.
The history of the culture of the Urals is inextricably linked with the development of the Ural and Siberian lands by the Russian people. From the 16th century Cities are built in the colonized territories. In the XVIII century. the settlement and development of the region continues: the Middle Urals becomes the mining center of the country. Here a unique mining culture arises, which differs from the culture of the rest of peasant Russia, which has received the most complete embodiment in the Ural art crafts, combining the traditions of folk art and new forms of the industrial method of organizing production.

The formation of professional art in the Urals takes place quite late, mainly in the 19th - early 20th centuries, when the first Ural writers, painters, and theater groups appeared. It was a time of growth of regional self-awareness, the emergence of a steady interest in the history of the region, its identity, the emergence of local history societies, and the creation of museums.
Modernization processes, the destruction of the traditional way of life of the early XX century. and especially the revolutionary upheavals in their own way affected the development of the Ural culture, dramatically changing its fate. Attempts to create a socialist culture were based on the denial of the cultural heritage of the past. An attempt was made to artificially create a new tradition of professional artistic creativity on the Ural soil.
Thus, the purpose of this work is to study the artistic culture of the Urals.

From this follow the following tasks:
 consider iron art casting;
 to analyze the Zlatoust engraving on steel;
 to study the Nizhny Tagil painting on metal;
 highlight ceramic products in the Urals.

1. Folk art

A special place in folk culture is played by the master - a special creative person, spiritually connected with his people, with the culture and nature of the region where he lives. He is the bearer of tradition and collective spiritual experience.
M. A. Nekrasova writes about the place the master occupies in folk culture: “Since the concept of “culture” includes everything that has been settled in time, the values ​​​​of the enduring, then their carriers are most often representatives of older generations, famous people. … Those masters who are able to synthesize the experience of the team in their work. … The ancestral continuity of craftsmanship was valued. The level of the school was determined by the master's works. Such a concept of a master ... included not only his skill, but also the high qualities of the personality of a person respected by all. In folk representations, wisdom and experience were associated with skill. The moral criterion was inseparable from the concept of "folk master" as a creative person, carrying the poetic world.

What is this personality? First of all, it is distinguished by historical consciousness, concern for preserving the values ​​of the past and transferring them to the future, and a moral assessment of reality. Such consciousness creates an image of a special vision of the world. … Often, a folk craftsman is endowed with the features of a special, unusual person, sometimes he is famous as an eccentric. And all these are the facets of folk talent, spiritual talent. Its individual coloring does not contradict the involvement in the whole, which constitutes the worldview of the folk master, determines his cultural role as a creative person.
Kasli casting, Zlatoust steel engraving, Nizhny Tagil painting on metal, Suksun copper, stone-cutting and jewelry art - we can say that their significance is on a par with the value of the region as a historically established metallurgical center. They were generated and became an expression of the Gornoural way of life, where peasant traditions largely determined the work of workers and artisans, where the creativity of single handicraftsmen coexisted with industrial production, where the main material was iron and stone, where the connection with the spirit of traditions did not reject, but assumed constant a wide search, where works were created that adorned the capital's palaces and peasant huts, merchants' mansions and working life.

The works of Ural industrial art, with all the diversity of the nature and forms of existence of crafts, are distinguished by a close connection with everyday life, with the practical needs of life itself. However, there is no narrowly utilitarian attitude to the created things. This type of relationship is characteristic of traditional folk culture, which, due to its syncretism, does not know an extra-aesthetic attitude to reality. The meaning and main content of this art is not limited to the production of beautiful objects. The process of making any object in this culture acts as not only a practical, but also a spiritual development of the surrounding world.
Folk art at all times is an ongoing creation of the world. Therefore, each work is at the same time the affirmation of the world as a whole and the self-affirmation of man as a member of the genus-collective. The world of folk culture is a whole cosmos: it includes all the elements of life, which determines the high figurative structure of works of folk art.

Features of the Ural folk crafts, formed in the bowels of the mining culture, were determined by the significance of the role of creative individuality, the importance acquired by the search for their own expressive means and artistic novelty, interaction with industrial production technologies, the peculiarities of the social existence of both the producers themselves and consumers of their products, among which were people from different walks of life.

In one of the tales, P. P. Bazhov draws a way of organizing labor in times of active existence of crafts: “It also happened that in one hut, by the stove, knives and forks were cut into a pattern, at the window they sharpened and polished the stone, and weaved matting under the curtains” . It emphasizes the special nature of the work of not only single handicraftsmen, but also factory workers of that time: the primitiveness of production technology, based mainly on manual labor, made the quality of the product dependent on the experience and individuality of the master. This gave rise to competitiveness and competition among artisans, professional secrets were passed down in family dynasties of casters, blacksmiths, stone cutters from generation to generation. It is no coincidence that such a place in the minds of the Urals is occupied by the image of the Master, striving to cognize the Mystery.

The phenomenon of the Master is rooted in folk culture to the craftsman who is responsible for his work, responsible for himself and for his loved ones. His work is little mechanized, it is more manual than machine, it keeps the warmth of human hands. Of course, the work of an artisan is work for the market. But it was never thoughtless replication.

A real master is in no hurry to part with the secrets of his skill. He is on his own mind, he will teach his business only "smart and not lazy for work", to whom a "spell word" can be opened. It is interesting that the attitude of others towards the master depended on how much the person understood the value of his work.
The value of folk culture lies in the fact that it allows us to realize the connection between modernity and tradition. Folk art can perish where the connection between a person and his land is lost. This can be fully felt by referring to the history of the Ural crafts, the fate of which developed in different ways. Separate types of Ural industrial art, having flourished, were relegated to the background, disappeared, they were replaced by others. But despite all the vicissitudes of history, they were and remain spokesmen for the self-consciousness of the people who created them.

2. Cast iron art casting

Cast iron in the Urals was associated primarily with household needs: the need for oven doors, boilers, braziers, molds for baking gingerbread and rolls leads to the fact that household items are made in many Ural factories in the 18th - 19th centuries. For a long time, the manufacture of objects, even those related to artistic casting, was put on a par with other products of iron foundries.
At that time, Ural iron products were very popular: they were used to decorate architectural structures and in the interiors of mansions. Patterned cast-iron gratings, which still retain the charm of lace knitting, have gained particular fame. And in the first third of the XIX century. there is a new powerful upsurge in Russian architecture, grandiose ensembles are being created, architects make extensive use of sculpture and iron casting. During the XVIII - XIX centuries. artistic iron casting in the Urals is produced at many enterprises, both private and state-owned: at Kamenskoi, Kyshtymsky, Kushvinsky, Verkh-Isetsky, Kasli, Chermozovsky, Pozhevsky, Nizhny Tagil, Bilimbaevsky plants.

In 1830 - 1840. figured iron casting appears at the Kasli plant. Grilles, garden furniture, fireplaces, and chamber sculpture were cast in Kasli. They were different in form, but always amazed by the skill of execution. Kaslinsky’s success was largely facilitated by cooperation with talented sculptors P. Klodt, M. Kanaev, N. Bach (the motifs of the Ural nature sound in his works), as well as the creation of castings according to the models of E. Lansere, A. Ober, N. Liberich and many others .

After the revolution, the development of artistic iron casting underwent significant changes: first, the production technology began to change, for the sake of speed, casting traditions were destroyed, and preference was given to the production of "pure" cast iron. Cast iron ceased to occupy any significant place, where it turned into a decrease in the artistic level of products.

3. Zlatoust engraving on steel

In the armory of the Moscow Kremlin and in the collections of the Ural museums, unique exhibits are presented - weapons decorated with engraving. At the beginning of the XIX century. in the Urals, a special center for the manufacture of cold decorated weapons appeared in the city of Zlatoust. It was in greatest demand at a time when the Russian army was fighting, or during the anniversaries of the glorious victories of Russian weapons, when it became necessary to reward distinguished officers and generals.

Initially, Zlatoust engraving on steel was influenced by German gunsmiths: they worked at the factory at the invitation of the government. The saber blade (1822), engraved by master Shaf, is called the most significant work of that time by researchers. The chronicle of the battles of the Patriotic War of 1812 from Moscow to Paris is engraved on the blade.
Ural artists create the unique style of Zlatoust engraving on steel in the 1920s and 1930s. 19th century They introduce into the engraving not only ornamental motifs, as was customary among German gunsmiths, but also plot scenes.

4.Household and artistic copper of the Ural factories

The Urals is known for its household and artistic copper products. Crockery and church utensils, candlesticks and bells, hanging washstands and lamps made at mining factories dispersed throughout Russia.
One of the first to manufacture copper utensils was the craftsmen of the Yekaterinburg state-owned factory. On June 12, 1723, V. de Gennin, the organizer of the mining business and one of the founding fathers of Yekaterinburg, sent a letter to the wife of Peter I, Ekaterina Alekseevna, along with a tray of refined copper. It was square, “with forked corners and a curved side”, branded with an octagonal cartouche, in the form of a half-folded scroll, which depicts the coat of arms under the imperial crown with the following inscription: “His Majesty and Autocrat of All Russia at the newly built plant Katharinburkh and the first sample of Siberian copper completely in forging conveniently made to the glory of the name of Their Majesty by the diligence of the Artillery, Major General Vilim Gennin. June 8 days. 1723. The dating of the tray raises doubts among researchers. It turns out that it was made ... before the plant was built. Obviously, the time of creation of the tray is later - 1728 - 1729. Now this tray is stored in the State Hermitage.

Various household utensils were produced at the Yekaterinburg plant. They say that the dishes made here were quite cheap and were in steady demand at the Irbit and Orenburg fairs. One should not think that the manufacture of utilitarian objects did not require mastery of copper processing. High art is evidenced by the fact cited by the art historian A. S. Maksyashin: in 1728, a bell was cast at the Yekaterinburg plant for the Ascension Church with. Brusnyansky, Aramilskaya Sloboda. And in 1732, Yekaterinburg craftsmen cast bells for St. Petersburg (8 poods) and 50 poods for Irkutsk. The largest of the surviving bells cast in Yekaterinburg, ten pounds, is now stored in the local museum of local lore.

At the Suksun plant of the Demidovs, there were a copper foundry and a bell factory, a workshop for melting red copper into brass, and a turning workshop for turning dishes and bells. This plant is called the second most important center for the manufacture of copper products after Yekaterinburg. As historians testify, A.F. Turchaninov (1701 - 1787) was the best among the breeders who managed to set up the “copper business” at the Troitsk plant, founded in 1734.
Various objects were made from copper both for the needs of an individual family and for entire cities. Many copper items were decorated with ornaments. Ornaments were graphic and relief.

Usually the craftsmen worked on stencils, but the artist's imagination often prevailed over the regulations, especially when not replicated, but a custom-made, gift item was made.

The virtuoso craftsmanship in the manufacture and decoration of copper products is now almost lost: there are no coppersmiths, the secrets of the ancient craft have been lost. Now we can meet with their products only in the museum.

5. Nizhny Tagil painting on metal

Since the middle of the XVIII century. at a number of Ural factories, in addition to household items, utensils necessary for the household, they begin to produce "lacquer dishes and trays."
Nizhny Tagil became the fishing center. “The art of painting”, - notes the researcher of the Ural painting V. A. Baradulin, - developed here in the areas inhabited by the Old Believers on Vyya and in the Keys. The problem of labor at the Nizhny Tagil plant had been resolved by that time, so the plant owners began more often to allow serf masters to pay off the mandatory factory labor or hire free people instead, which gave them the opportunity to engage only in crafts, including painting.

The trays made by the craftsmen of Nizhny Tagil have the same artistic value as, for example, the well-known Zhostovo trays. There were two types of trays: trays-pictures and actual trays. They differed in the nature of their use: "tablecloth" (they were the entire width of the table and, as it were, replaced the tabletop), "tea", "glass" ...
The trays were decorated with “decorative flower painting”, a significant place was occupied by “decorative cutting” - painting “under malachite”, “under the turtle”, “under the tree”.

Trays-pictures were used to decorate the home, they often depicted landscapes, plot scenes, and still lifes. Plots for painting trays most often represented scenes of heroic and romantic content. When choosing a plot, artists were attracted by the opportunity to create bright decorative panels. Picturesque images were framed with a red and black stripe with an ornamental belt, as well as a rich gilded pattern.
Now the trays of Tagil residents are exhibited at many exhibitions in Russia and abroad, the works of contemporary masters are kept in the expositions of local and metropolitan museums. That's just the secret of "crystal lacquer" remained unsolved ...

6. The serf artists Khudoyarovs

The Khudoyarov family occupies a special place in the development of pictorial art in Nizhny Tagil. Popular rumor attributed the invention of "crystal varnish" to one of the Khudoyarov brothers.
The Khudoyarovs are descended from the Old Believers. As family tradition testifies, their ancestors fled from the Volga to the Urals in order to preserve the "old faith". The Khudoyarovs were known as icon painters. This craft, under the influence of local conditions, received a new direction, becoming predominantly secular.

A significant part of the work of the Khudoyarovs was carried out on orders from N. A. Demidov for his Moscow and St. Petersburg palaces. In the Moscow suburban house of Demidov there was a room with a mirror ceiling, decorated on the walls with "varnished, covered with paintings", on which the most diverse and colorful birds and butterflies are depicted with great art. For this work, amazing in its subtlety and skill, Demidov “granted” his serf painters each with a sash, hat and “caftans”, and his father, Andrei Khudoyarov, “fired from factory work.”

7. Chest fishing

Signed in the Urals, not only trays, but also chests, caskets. Upholstered in tin, with "cunning" locks, richly decorated, they were a necessary attribute in the Ural house. Wedding chests were of particular importance.
Chests and caskets were made of very different sizes: the largest ones reached 1.5 meters, the smallest caskets were from 27 to 55 cm. The most popular were the "place" of four caskets and three or four chests.

To make a chest, the efforts of craftsmen of different specialties were required, sometimes their number reached seven: some made wooden boxes, others made metal locks, others made handles, hinges, fourth prepared iron and tin, varnished it, printers and chasers decorated sheets with patterns.

The chest was a complete piece of arts and crafts, its volumes and planes harmoniously connected, the painting either had a common theme, or could have a completely independent picture on each side, but then the framing pattern gave unity. They painted "mass" chests and caskets on the outside on a black or dark green background. On the lid was the main composition in the form of a bouquet or garland of large roses and tulips with small leaves, two smaller groups of flowers were written on the front wall, the side ones were decorated even more modestly.

Until very recently, in the houses of the Urals one could see chests with painted front walls, lids and sides painted with green, blue or red paint, upholstered in an oblique cage with strips of iron.

8. Stone-cutting products of the Ural masters

The Yekaterinburg cutting factory dates back to 1726 with a small cutting workshop at the Yekaterinburg plant. Developing, the cutting industry created many branches, branches of processing of ornamental stones (mainly malachite, selenite jasper). After the abolition of serfdom, many cutters worked at home: in one house the family made key chains, in another - Easter eggs, in the third - ashtrays, in the fourth - matchboxes; malachite was used to make paperweights and ink boards. Over time, handicraftsmen began to use an ornamental stone for making jewelry: beads made of crystal, amethyst, malachite, selenite, jasper was widely used in brooches, bracelets, earrings, cufflinks.

Unique products from the Ural stones, marble and malachite, made in the 18th - 19th centuries, adorn many museums and palaces in Europe and our country. The collections of the State Hermitage contain vases, floor lamps, and candlesticks made at the Yekaterinburg Lapidary Factory.

A distinctive feature of the development of cutting and jewelry production in the 1940s - 1950s. there was a solution to the problems of "technical reconstruction", the transfer of craft, where there is "a lot of subjective" (from the techniques of the master to his own special "life of stone"), to mechanization and automation. This led to the replication of products, the loss of their uniqueness.
In the early 1960s With a change in attitude to decorative and applied arts, cutters and jewelers of the Urals are trying to create products of new forms, turning to the traditions of folk art, to the experience of colleagues from the Baltic States, Georgia, Armenia, and Ukraine.

9. Ceramic products in the Urals

Products made of ceramics, as well as copper, occupied a prominent place in the everyday life of the Urals. Back in the 17th century in the Urals, an independent ceramic production arose. Among the products produced in Solikamsk were, in particular, tiles - tiles for facing walls, fireplaces, stoves. A large collection of tiles is kept in the Usolsky and Cherdynsky museums.
Initially, temples were decorated with tiles: they framed windows, surrounded towers. Then tiles began to be made for lining stoves. At the Solikamsk plant, rectangular tiles were made, curved, convex or concave, belted, for laying out friezes, "shaped towns", "corner rosettes", and chimney arches. All of them were decorated with paintings.
The tiles differed in their use of color: they were monochrome and polychrome. One-color ones were covered with white glaze and painted with blue enamel. The arrangement of the drawing on the tile was different: sometimes the drawing resembled a medallion, the central image was enclosed in an ornamented frame, sometimes the drawing was freely located over the entire plane.

Multi-colored tiles were painted on a white background with light green, yellow, brown paints. In the center, male figures were depicted in the style of popular prints. the figures were outlined with a thin, clear brown line and, together with the inscription, were enclosed in a rectangular frame. Along the very edge of the tiles were decorated with colored ornaments.
Tiles are another evidence of how the utilitarian and the artistic intertwined in the culture of the Urals.
In the Urals, there were also handicrafts that "worked clay." Basically, of course, dishes were made, but toys were also made. Known are the ancient Vyatka crafts in the Dymkovo settlement and later Tavolozhian ones (the village of Nizhnie Tavolgi near Nevyansk). Everyone knows about the Dymkovo or Filimonovo toy, less is known about the Tavolozhskaya toy, partly because the manufacture of toys or whistles was not an independent trade: in their free time for their own or neighbor's children, less often for sale, they were sculpted by a Ural master. They were distinguished by a special type of decoration - not by color, but by glazing of individual parts.

Porcelain and faience dishes were rarely decorated with hand-painted. Usually the drawing was engraved on copper boards, printed on paper, which was then pasted onto the dishes. When fired in an oven, the paper burned, leaving a colorful pattern on the product. The plots of the drawings in most cases were borrowed from magazines, much less often they depicted local landscapes or portraits of Ermak Timofeevich, beloved by the people.

Conclusion

The Urals have crossed the threshold of the 21st century. It still remains one of the leading industrial, scientific, technical and cultural centers of the country. The economic and ethno-cultural unity of the region continues to be preserved. Together with the whole country, the Urals went through various stages in its development. In the vicissitudes of the formation of his artistic culture, as in a mirror, many collisions of national history and his own fate were reflected.

The events of the recent past are already becoming part of history. The development of the artistic culture of the Urals in the XX century. appears as a complex, sometimes contradictory process, not devoid of internal drama, but with its own logic. 20th century found the Urals in a "transitional state". The region faced a large-scale task - to find its place in the cultural space of Russia. Artistic culture was called upon to play an important role in this process, inevitably turning into one of the forms of regional self-consciousness.

End of XX century became a time of reassessment of values, revision of the meaning of many events and phenomena in the history of national culture. The guiding thread is the desire to restore the broken "connection of times". This, under new conditions, at a new stage, brings us back to resolving the issues that confronted the Urals at the beginning of the century. Finding the prospect of further development largely depends on how we will be able to comprehend the experience of the past.

The source for the development of stone-cutting and jewelry art in the Urals was the extraordinary wealth of its mineral resources. Colored ornamental stones (the so-called gems) were discovered in the 17th century. Around 1635, copper ores of malachite were discovered in the foothills of the Urals. Even earlier, “patterned stones” were found here - carnelian, agate, jasper. And in 1668, Mikhail Tumashev discovered the richest deposit of colored stones near Murzinskaya Sloboda, not far from Verkhoturye, and in 1700 - a jasper mountain on the Argun River.

The real heyday came in 1700, when Peter I took up mining research in earnest and ordered the establishment of a special order for mining in Moscow. Natural scientists traveling around the Urals with scientific expeditions brought new news about newly discovered stones. In 1720, Peter I sent Tatishchev to the Urals, entrusting him with the management of state-owned factories. Soon after arriving at the place, V.N. Tatishchev plans to build a plant on the Iset River. In 1723, a new city arose in the center of the Urals - Yekaterinburg, which became the center of the mining industry in the Urals. The development of the Ural stone-cutting art in the XVIII-XIX centuries was also connected with the growth and development of Yekaterinburg. In 1738, a stone-cutting workshop was founded in the city of Yekaterinburg, which in 1765 became the Yekaterinburg cutting factory. It was discovered in the immediate vicinity of large marble deposits, followed by Kolyvanskaya and Loktevskaya. The first products prepared in the late 1920s in the Urals were small items made of hard rocks. However, interest in various breeds of colorful jaspers is gradually increasing.

Since 1726, for the first time, small stone-cut plastic began to be used in the form of inserts in horse harnesses, mouthpieces, in knife and dagger handles, and in snuff boxes; from 1782 - in seals made of agate and rock crystal; from 1786 - in inkwells; from 1787 - in buttons.

At the beginning of the 18th century, the Ural handicraftsmen learned how to process the newly discovered colored stone, thus establishing the traditions of the local school of stone-cutting art. Ural masters approached stone processing from a philosophical point of view. The Ural school of stone cutters has always been distinguished by a special love for stone, an understanding of its natural beauty. The main principle of the stone cutter was not to violate the beauty of the stone given by nature, but only to bring it out and emphasize it as best as possible. One of the founders of artistic stone processing in the Urals should rightfully be considered a Russian nugget mechanic Nikita Bakharev. Bakharev, having built a factory, constantly improves the mechanisms. He, for example, reconstructed a carving machine. Ivan Susorov is a talented Ural mechanic-inventor, a student of Bakharev. Together they created water-acting mechanisms.

In the Urals, precious stones mined at the mines flowed into the pantries of the Yekaterinburg cutting factory, which already in 1774 grew into a powerful gem processing enterprise. Here, at the factory, the art of cutters is gradually taking shape and developing.
Widespread in Rus' in the 16th-17th centuries, the turning of a precious stone into a cabochon was long known to the people of the Urals. The principles of European cutting began to penetrate here only in the 18th century. Their distribution is associated with the names of lieutenant Ref, sent to the Urals by Peter I in 1725, as well as the Italian masters I. Batista and V. Tortori, workers of the Peterhof factory F. Tupylev, I. Nazarov, S. Kuzmin, who came from Ya. Dannenberg.
Cabochon - a round or oval stone polished on top.

The heyday of jewelry and stone-cutting art came at the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th century. At that time, the Yekaterinburg Lapidary Factory was in a “blooming state”. There was a well-established team of craftsmen who perfectly mastered various methods of stone processing - both a smooth surface, and the most complex ornament, and magnificent Russian mosaics. Masters created works of art according to the designs of famous Russian architects and sculptors: Voronikhin, Rossi, Stasov, Montferrand, Bryullov and others. etc. The Ural stone-cutting art owes its rapid flourishing to them.

At the end of the 18th and especially in the first half of the 19th century, when stone mining reached its peak of activity, large ceremonial vases and bowls, columns, sculptures were made from ornamental gems, walls, floors and ceilings of majestic palaces and temples were lined with stone mosaics and tiles. . A lot of products from malachite were produced by the Yekaterinburg cutting factory and sent to St. Petersburg.

Nowhere, except in Russia, did they know how and do not know how to make things from jasper that immediately became masterpieces of world art. This primarily applies to the works made by the Ural stone cutters Yakov Vasilyevich Kokovin and Gavrila Firsovich Nalimov. They worked in the 19th century. at the Yekaterinburg cutting factory. Thanks to the talented stone cutters of Yuzhno-Uralsk, jasper became known to the whole world.

The initial processing of stones consisted of cutting them with steel tools, cutting the stone with sheet iron saws and drilling with iron drills. All tools were wetted with water and emery. After rough processing, the stone was transferred for detailed processing on a “barred” machine, where the stone was pressed against a rotating wooden pulley with screws.

The hard stone processing technology consists of the following stages: sorting of raw materials, sawing, drilling (plucking), tamping, grinding. polishing. The stone is sorted by color and pattern; essential quality indicators, which are paid attention to when sorting, are uniformity and absence of cracks.

From 1802 to 1847 there was a school for the carving of "antiques". They made fashionable cameos at that time. At the beginning of the 19th century, with the establishment of high classicism, cameos carved from precious and semiprecious stones became extremely popular among the nobility. Cameos were inserted into brooches, medallions, rings, showered with diamonds, emeralds. The cameos depicted Greek and Roman heroes, deities, ancient poets and philosophers, Russian emperors and empresses. For cutting, ribbon jasper, agate, sardonyx with even straight layers were chosen. Figures were cut on light layers, and darker ones were left under the background. But as high classicism decayed, the fashion for cameos passed, their production curtailed.

One of the most common products of the Ural stone cutters are stone seals. The beginning of the production of seals dates back to the end of the 18th century. The bulk is made up of seals made of rock crystal and smoky quartz, followed by seals of jasper, rhodonite, agate, malachite, lapis lazuli and rare samples of seals - of amethyst, aquamarine, citrine. Seals were made not only at the imperial factory, but to a greater extent in private workshops. In earlier samples, the shape of the handles was prismatic, the main decorative role was assigned to the stone itself. By the second half of the 19th century. there are seals with carved handles in the form of a miniature sculpture.

Since the 1840s, paperweights have come into fashion. Until the end of the 19th century, they underwent a transformation - from plates of polished colored stone to plates of Kalkan jasper or slate with color pictures using the Florentine mosaic technique, and further to luxurious relief still lifes of various fruits and berries.

The malachite era in stone-cutting art was the 30-40s of the 19th century, when malachite in monumental decorative items became the emblem of Russian riches. Malachite items were made using the technique of "Russian mosaic".

Technique "Russian mosaic" - a mosaic technique in stone-cutting art, in which plates of colored ornamental stone (usually malachite) are pasted over a base of inexpensive durable stone. At the same time, the plates are very carefully selected according to color and pattern, and the product looks like it is made of a monolith. The technique of Russian mosaic allows you to maximize the beauty of the stone.

The Russian mosaic differs from the Florentine mosaic also in that it is performed not only on a flat base, but also on curved surfaces (spherical, cylindrical, etc.). They are widely used in decorating not only small items of stone-cutting art (caskets, countertops, writing instruments, etc.), but also for decorative interior decoration.

In the stone-cutting technique of Russian mosaic, the following techniques are used:

Tape(jet) pattern - stone plates are arranged in a continuous strip and are selected so that the lines of the pattern from one plate smoothly pass into lines on another. The pattern should flow continuously.

Soft velvet- the technique is used when finishing large areas of the surface, while the plates are selected in such a way that the lines of the pattern smoothly pass into each other in all directions, and the whole set would give the impression of a single stone.

Pattern on two or four sides- to implement this technique, you need to saw off a plate from a colored stone with a thickness of 3 mm to 6 mm. The patterns on both sections of the plate are the same, therefore, by sawing off the second plate and aligning it with the first, you can get a symmetrical pattern on two sides. If two more plates are sawn off from the same stone and connected with the first two, then a four-sided pattern will be obtained. In the same way, you can make compositions on six or more sides, combining them into various patterns and decorating various things.

Speaking about the development of stone-cutting and jewelry art in the Urals, one cannot fail to mention the Ural Society of Natural Science Lovers (UOLE), founded in 1870. Its products were collections of colored stones and rocks of the Urals. Especially famous were the table "slides" made by skilled craftsmen D.K. Kubin, A.V. Oberyukhtin, N.V. Frolov. At the initiative of the society, the Scientific and Mineralogical Workshop was subsequently created, at which a workshop for cutting Ural stones was formed.

The works of the masters of the factory received world recognition, they were admired by Europe. Craftsmen also made malachite bracelets and necklaces, crystal and amethyst beads, used jasper in brooches, bracelets, earrings, and cufflinks. The main ornamental motif at that time was a floral motif covering the surface of the product with a continuous mesh. Subsequently, the craftsmen developed a special type of brooch-twig, imitating a bunch of grapes and currants in stone. These jewelry items were distinguished by their variety, invention, and craftsmanship.

By the 80s of the 19th century, the main centers of cutting handicrafts were formed in Yekaterinburg and its environs: Berezovsky, Nizhne-Isetsk, Verkhne-Isetsk, Uktus, Polevskoy, Mramorskoye. The processing of hard rocks of stones developed not only in Yekaterinburg, but also in the areas adjacent to it - Berezovsky, Shartashsky, Nizhne-Isetsky and Verkh-Isetsky plants. In the Berezovsky factory, they were mainly engaged in cutting beads, cufflinks, preparing sparks or inserts. In the Nizhne-Isetsky and Verkh-Isetsky factories, handicraftsmen mainly cut colored stones.

The 20th century became a period of severe trials for the Ural stone-cutting and jewelry art. Handicraft cutters turned out to be completely dependent on customers. Large buyers kept workshops and shops not only in Yekaterinburg. They sold at exorbitant prices the products of handicraftsmen bought for next to nothing. In pursuit of earnings, the craftsmen were forced to spend more than 15 hours a day on work, not caring about the elegance of the products. Forced speed, which led to the deterioration of products, led to a new, even greater reduction in prices. The fishery expanded, grew and ... died out.

The First World War and the October Revolution that followed it call into question the very existence of stone-cutting and jewelry making. Established masters go to the front, those of them who return after the war cannot find a job in their old specialty. Thus, in 1918, a decision was made to close the Yekaterinburg cutting factory and sell off its property.

20s - the beginning of the revival

1919 - order of the Supreme Council of National Economy on the restoration of the cutting business, the return of the cutting masters and jewelers to the factory

In 1938 a cutting workshop was founded

In 1941 - a jewelry workshop, and jewelry production was organized

1938 - organization of a gem-cutting shop

1941 - reorganization of the mineralogical workshop into a jewelry and cutting factory.

1945 - opening of the Art and Craft School No. 42, which trained jewelers

In 1959, at the Sverdlovsk jewelry and cutting factory, the Ural cutters A.A. Chizhikov and E.A. Andreev for the first time in Russia made diamonds from diamonds. The 1960s was a period of great technical innovation.

The revival began in 1919. As soon as the Urals was liberated from the Kolchakites, the mountain council of the Supreme Council of National Economy issued an order to restore the cutting business. In the fifties, homework was put an end to in Sverdlovsk. A new, younger generation of workers came to the factory, who received good training in the art and vocational school, opened in 1948. The first specialists, technologists, engineers appeared. A lot of technical and technological innovations are being introduced, the process of gilding things, and the smelting of precious metals are being improved.

In the first half of the twentieth century. A significant contribution to stone sculpture in the animalistic genre was made by A.K. Denisov-Uralsky and N.D. Tataurov. From the middle of the twentieth century the choice of products became more diverse, and in the last third of the century, the production of souvenirs and badges developed.

The most important direction of jewelry art is jewelry: earrings, crosses, beads, bracelets; salaries for icons from jasper, rhodonite, emerald, malachite and other stones.

The art of Kyiv master jewelers had a huge influence on the formation of the Ural jewelry school. The fact is that during the Great Patriotic War, the Kiev Jewelry Factory was evacuated to Sverdlovsk. With the assistance of its specialists, in 1942, a workshop was organized at the Sverdlovsk factory for the assembly and restoration of watches, watch movements, the manufacture of dials, as well as the jewelry production of gold and silver jewelry.
After the war, the factory stood firmly on its feet, which was greatly facilitated by the use of new technologies. Already in the works of the Ural jewelers of that period, one can see the emphasis on the natural beauty of the stone, combined with vivid imagery.

Current state

With the beginning of the market era, the Ural Mountains were again in demand - today the stone-cutting art of Russia is experiencing a rebirth, the number of excellent craftsmen who can sometimes stand on the same level with the great craftsmen of past centuries is growing, and the best available material is, of course, gems mined in the Urals, which they are loved and known all over Russia, and in far and near abroad.

Modern schools of jewelers working with precious, semi-precious and semi-precious stones, complemented by granulation and filigree, formed in the Urals in the second half. 20th century Its representatives: V.Ya.Bakulin, V.F.Vetrov, B.A.Gladkov, V.U.Komarov, L.F.Ustyantsev, V.N.Ustyuzhanin, V.N. Khramtsov.

Grain - small gold, platinum or silver jewelry in the form of balls with a diameter of 0.4 mm, which are soldered in jewelry to a filigree ornament.

Filigree, filigree - type of jewelry technique: openwork or soldered

on a metal background, a pattern of thin gold, silver or copper wire, smooth or twisted into ropes. Products from filigree are often supplemented with granulation and enamel.

Such an event in Russian history as the discovery of Yakut diamonds also had a huge impact on the formation of the Ural jewelry school: after all, in 1959, it was the Ural cutters A. A. Chizhikov and E. A. Andreev who for the first time in Russia made diamonds from diamonds. The Urals did not forget about their natural wealth: in the same 1961, a stone-cutting section was created at the factory (which later became the Sverdlovsk Jewelry Factory, and then the Jewelers of the Urals enterprise). Here they made jewelry inserts from ornamental stone: jasper, rhodonite, agate, turquoise, malachite, carnelian, smoky quartz, obsidian, lapis lazuli, amazonite, onyx, belomorite, chalcedony...

In the 60-70s of the twentieth century, the Ural jewelry school finally took shape - original and bright. It was already possible to speak with confidence about its distinctive feature: in the composition of jewelry, the Ural jewelers invariably gave preference not to metal, but to stone. In the second half of the XIX century. handicraftsmen played a decisive role in their production.

Young craftsmen were determined to create jewelry, to push out the old, boring, obsolete. And most importantly - to revive the beauty of the natural Ural gem in the products.

With the emergence of this group, the assortment of mass products made of gold and silver with semi-precious and semi-precious stones is being updated, products with diamonds are being developed and mastered, stylistic features of the Ural jewelry art and its direction are being formed.

In the works of recent years, reminiscences of Baroque and Art Nouveau decorations are noticeable. Gold products occupy a significant place in factory production. They are produced in large and small series. The massive assortment of gold items consists mainly of rings, earrings, pendants, cufflinks, designed for special occasions: elegant daytime jewelry, small evening jewelry and formal sets.

Today, two trends stand out in stone-cutting art. Some craftsmen continue their creative search in the traditional forms of the Ural stone-cutting industry. Others develop their author's products in the style of modern design. Glyptic (carving on colored stone) is widely used, three-dimensional mosaics and bulk paintings are created. In their works, the craftsmen strive to reveal the decorative qualities and natural beauty of the semi-precious Ural stone with the greatest completeness.

Now there are many enterprises and firms involved in the artistic processing of stone ("Stones of the Urals", "KaRo", "Silhouette"). The range of their products is wide and varied: natural stone souvenirs, decorative clocks, writing instruments, vases, boxes, panels, chess tables, backgammon, candlesticks, etc.

2005 - OAO Jewelers of the Urals received the main prize of the competition "Russian National Olympus"

Today, the jewelry and stone-cutting art of the Urals is a kaleidoscope of manners and styles.

Artistic directions - from classics to modern avant-garde. The works of the Ural artists are notable for their purity of style and pronounced national character. Their works attract with classical simplicity and clarity of form.

©2015-2019 site
All rights belong to their authors. This site does not claim authorship, but provides free use.
Page creation date: 2017-12-29

Ural factories in the 18th century grew thousands of miles away from inhabited places, sometimes in a dense forest thicket. And already in this fact lies their enormous role in the development of the entire Russian artistic culture: together with the factories, the art born by them also matured here.

The richness and diversity of Russian artistic culture is truly limitless. Formed in the process of formation and development of the self-consciousness of the Russian people, the formation of the Russian nation, Russian artistic culture was created by the labor of the people - talented folk craftsmen, outstanding artists who expressed the interests and thoughts of the broad masses of the people.

Various parts of Russia poured their gifts into the mighty stream of Russian art. There is no need to enumerate here everything that the Russian people contributed to their artistic treasury. But no matter how amazing the richness of the artistic culture of Russia, it cannot be imagined without the contribution of the Urals. The contribution of the Urals to the artistic culture of Russia was not only great, but also remarkably unique. A solid foundation, on which the decorative and applied art of the Urals flourished, was industry, its main centers were factories. The significance of industry in the development of the region and its culture was well understood by contemporaries themselves. In one of the official documents, we read: "Ekaterinburg owes both its existence and its flourishing state only to factories."

All this was a qualitatively new and unique phenomenon in the history of Russian art. The development of the Urals industry gave rise to the working class, its working intelligentsia, awakened creative and social thought. It was a favorable atmosphere for the development of art.

Ural factories in the 18th century grew thousands of miles away from inhabited places, sometimes in a dense forest thicket. And already in this fact lies their enormous role in the development of the entire Russian artistic culture: together with the factories, the art born by them also matured here. Bear corners have become centers of labor and creative activity of the Russian people, despite the terrible oppression and social lawlessness in which it proceeded. All this makes us now imagine in a new way the picture of the development of the artistic culture of Russia, which can no longer be limited in the East by the blue border of the Volga. The Urals becomes an outpost of Russian artistic culture, an important stage in its further advancement into the depths of Siberia and Asia, to the East. And therein lies its considerable historical significance.

The Urals is the birthplace of a number of types of Russian arts and crafts. It is here that the art of painting and varnishing metal products, which have gained such great popularity in the country, is born. The invention of transparent varnish in N. Tagil was of great importance. He imparted extraordinary strength to the painted products and further contributed to their fame. Under the undoubted influence of the Ural lacquered metal products, combining them with the traditions of local painting, the production of painted trays in Zhestovo was born and grew, which arose at the beginning of the 19th century. Painted chests in Makariev (now the Gorky region) also experienced the influence of painted Ural products.

With good reason, we can consider the Urals the birthplace of Russian industrial processing of marble, subordinated to the needs of domestic architecture, the creation of monumental and decorative works. It was these features from the first steps that determined the features of the Ural marble production, in contrast to other regions of the stone-cutting art of Russia. Academician A.E. Fersman pointed out, for example, that in the second half of the 18th century, marble was polished the least at the Peterhof Lapidary Factory. The preparation of vases, fireplaces, and architectural details made of marble did not receive a wide scope in the Olonetsky region either; in Altai, they processed mainly jasper and porphyry. It is important to note that the Ural masters were the first who made an attempt to use the Ural marble to create easel works of sculpture, in particular a portrait.

The Ural stone artists were the creators of the “Russian” mosaic, which enriched the ancient mosaic art.” The well-known in Italy method of pasting products with stone tiles was applied to works of small size. The invention of the "Russian mosaic" made the production of monumental decorative works from malachite, lapis lazuli, and some species of picturesque, colorful jaspers more economical, and opened the way for their even wider development. It was first used by the Urals in architecture, as we saw in the example of columns lined with motley, red-green Kushkulda jasper.

The industrial Urals raised to a new height and a number of art industries that previously existed in other regions of Russia poured fresh vitality into them. He developed and improved the ancient traditions of Russian art. So it was with Russian artistic weapons. In Ancient Rus', we know its magnificent samples, perfectly forged and skillfully “stuffed” with a gold pattern.

Zlatoust engraving on steel, precious gilding of blades, made by the Ural masters, continued the wonderful traditions of the past. But this was not a mechanical repetition of them, but the development of the very essence of this art, expressing in new historical conditions the ancient love of the people for patterned weapons, glorifying the courage and stamina of the Russian warrior, his love for the Motherland.

The skill of Russian blacksmiths, chasers, foundry workers, who created magnificent decorative works, was widely known. The well-known researcher of Russian artistic metal N. R. Levinson writes about the ancient Russian decorative art: “Various metals, ferrous and non-ferrous, have long been used not only for utilitarian purposes, but also for artistic creativity. Cold and hot forging, chasing, casting - all these types of processing and surface finishing of metals or their alloys created diverse opportunities for the artistic and technical perfection of objects.

The ancient Russian art of artistic metal processing in the conditions of a developed, technically improving Ural metallurgy is rising to a qualitatively new level of its development. Copper utensils decorated with ornaments, the origin and development of the Ural bronze, monumental and decorative and chamber iron casting, engraving on steel - all this is a further continuation of the national Russian traditions. The stone-cutting and cutting art of the Urals also continued the craving for colored stone inherent in the Russian people since ancient times. Passing a thorny path of development, each type of Ural art enriched the artistic pantry of Russia.

Ural art iron casting organically merged into Russian architecture when it was permeated with lofty patriotic ideas. It, expressing the ideas of outstanding architects, emphasized the beauty of buildings, giving it solemn majesty. Bridges, gratings, cast by the Urals, confidently entered the architectural ensembles, into the daily noisy life of cities. The iron casting of the Urals was associated with the problem of citizenship, which underlay Russian architecture of the 18th century - the first half of the 19th century.

The artistic processing of stone in the Urals enriched Russian art with magnificent stone-cutting works, mostly classical in form and created from domestic materials by the hands of folk craftsmen. Masters with a deep artistic flair managed to penetrate into the essence of the idea of ​​a particular product. The richness of their imagination, both in the choice of a natural pattern, and in the creation of its new pattern from malachite or lapis lazuli, is truly inexhaustible. The works of the Ural stone-cutting art were connected with life. They cannot be seen as something completely divorced from reality. With all the specifics of artistic forms, they reflected the beauty of the Russian land, the greenery of its forests and fields, the blue expanse of lakes, the depth of the sky, the bright colors of sunset hours.

All this gave the products of the Ural masters a national character, which is one of the distinguishing features of the development of artistic stone processing in the Urals. These products contain the feelings of a person, his experiences and impressions, which give the products immediacy, human warmth. The works of stone-cutting art of the Urals express an optimistic, life-affirming content.

Powerful stone vases, floor lamps and candelabra show not only technically perfect craftsmanship and a peculiar reflection of the mighty Russian nature, but also a sense of pride of the people-artist, highly appreciating the inexhaustible riches of their homeland. This is the patriotic meaning of stone-cutting art. Artistic items made of colored Ural stone have become truly Russian classic items that correspond to the nature of the development of Russian art.

The art of the industrial Urals is a branch of Russian artistic culture. But it also developed in close contact with Western European art. The strength of the Urals, its culture was not in isolation, but in connection with the entire world culture. Many foreign masters of varying degrees of knowledge and creative talent worked in the Urals.

The Italians, the Tortori brothers, who had a good knowledge of marble processing technology, the Germans Shafa, who mastered the technique of engraving on steel and gilding, and others, brought certain benefits. But no visiting masters could give anything if the seeds of their knowledge had not fallen on fertile ground. Such soil was the industrial Urals.

Here, in a number of regions, even before the arrival of foreign masters, there were their own artistic traditions. As, for example, it was in Zlatoust, where many talented artists worked at the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th centuries, whose work contributed to the successful development of the Zlatoust engraving, the growth of local artistic culture. That is why V. Bokov is absolutely wrong when he asserted that it was the Germans who “brought culture to Zlatoust a hundred years ago in a remote and remote place”. They brought knowledge of the technology of weapons production, and not culture in the broad sense of the word. One cannot unfoundedly deny the study of foreign culture by the Urals, its experience and achievements, as was done in the past, but it would be a gross mistake to underestimate the creative forces of the people.

The patriotic meaning of the art of the Ural masters was manifested in the fact that they created such works of stone, cast iron, steel, etc., which previously seemed inaccessible to Russia. And thanks to the skill of the Urals, as well as the art of the craftsmen of St. Petersburg, Tula, Altai, Peterhof, Olonets factories and others, such examples of industrial art were created that put Russia in one of the first places in Europe.

Even contemporaries understood the patriotic significance of the Ural art. They sensitively grasped the deepest meaning of the development of artistic culture in the distant Urals, rightly evaluating it as a manifestation of the mighty creative forces of Russia. The reviewer of the first exhibition of Russian manufactory products in 1829, considering the Ural painted metal products, directly comes to the conclusion: "According to this article, we can completely dispense with foreigners."

With a feeling of deep patriotic pride, the Otechestvennye Zapiski magazine noted the high qualities of Zlatoust artistic weapons: “Forging blades, polishing, drawing, grass, gilding, and in general all the decoration of weapons of this production by their own Russian gunsmiths alone and is not inferior in perfection to the best Versailles works of this kind” .

The famous Russian landscape painter Andrey Martynov, having visited the Urals and got acquainted with the artistic processing of stone, admiring the skill and talent of artists from the people, wrote about the Ural products, "which in many ways are not inferior to the ancient antiques, all this is done by Russian peasants." The artist also highly appreciated the painted Tagil trays, on which, as he noted, "even masterful painting was visible."

As if summarizing the opinion of the most advanced representatives of Russian society, "Mining Journal" wrote in 1826 about the Urals: his improvement."

But the works of the Ural masters won fame not only in their own country, causing rave reviews from contemporaries. Having gone abroad, they did not lose their beauty and impressive strength there either. At all international exhibitions, stone-cutting products, iron castings, artistic weapons of the Urals were invariably marked with awards, acquiring world recognition and significance. For example, the works of Ural stone cutters at the World Exhibition of 1851 in London deserved high praise: “Amazing capitals and vases produced there (Ekaterinburg Lapidary Factory. - B.P.) from the heaviest materials, one can say, surpassed any similar works of ancient art ...". 12

Artwork from the distant Urals was unusually widely distributed throughout the world: they could be found not only in Europe, but even in distant Australia.13 They popularized the diversity of Russian art, the work of talented artists from the people.

The art of the industrial Urals marks one of the significant achievements of Russian artistic culture. It reflected the creative initiative, the inquisitive mind of the working man, the undying skill. Without it, one cannot imagine the whole true scope of Russian arts and crafts.

The history of the emergence of jewelry goes back thousands of years. The desire of man to adorn himself was manifested at the dawn of the birth of evolution. In the Stone Age, our distant ancestors created jewelry from colored pebbles, transparent rock crystal and shells. The famous Indian mineralogist Rao Bahadur claims that, judging by the archaeological finds in India and Burma, men and women not only wore various stone jewelry, but also decorated their homes, weapons and household items 7.5-10 thousand years ago. These were local stones - chalcedony, agate, jade. The use of emeralds began 2000 BC, sapphires and rubies from placers in Ceylon - 600 BC. Diamonds appeared in the same India - for 1000-500 years BC. Finds of products made of lapis lazuli, garnets, amethyst, amazonite in the territory of modern Egypt date back to the Neolithic. It is now established that emeralds were mined in the mountains on the Red Sea almost 2000 years BC. e.

Before the discovery of metals by man, precious stones were enclosed by ancient craftsmen in wood or were not framed at all. Among the ancient Egyptian products kept in the Cairo Museum, bracelets from the tomb of Pharaoh Djoser (beginning of the 3rd millennium BC) amaze with their perfection. Antique cultures are associated with the cultures of ancient Egypt and the East. Over the centuries, jewelers have perfected their art, discovering new ways of processing material.

During the heyday of the culture of jewelry in ancient Rome, not only the aesthetic, but also the material value of precious jewelry was realized. In subsequent centuries, more than one courtier sought to enrich himself, and dozens, hundreds of craftsmen created masterpieces of jewelry craftsmanship.

The art of jewelry has known ups and downs, rise and fall, while some part of it has been lost, something has been reborn. It should be noted that the jewelry art of Russia has absorbed not only the trends of ancient eras, but also the originality of the cultures of the West and East, which traditionally influence our culture as a whole.

Precious stones mined at the mines flowed into the pantries of the Yekaterinburg cutting factory, which already in 1774 grew into a powerful gem processing enterprise for its time. Here, at the factory, the art of cutters is gradually taking shape, developing, whose testaments have been preserved in the memory of centuries as folklore, as tales and legends that feed the work of modern Ural jewelers.

Widespread in Rus' in the 16th-17th centuries, the turning of a precious stone into a cabochon was long known to the people of the Urals. The principles of European cutting began to penetrate here only in the 18th century. Their distribution is associated with the names of lieutenant Ref, sent to the Urals by Peter I in 1725, as well as the Italian masters I. Batista and V. Tortori, workers of the Peterhof factory F. Tupylev, I. Nazarov, S. Kuzmin, who came from Ya. Dannenberg.

Cabochon - a round or oval stone polished on top.
Unfortunately, the first Ural cutters do not appear in the documents, but the names of the Solonins, Morozovs, Paderins, Kovalevs, Zhdanovskys, Semyonovs, Petrovskys are often found in the lists of names of the 19th century and in the payrolls for cutters. Who knows, maybe these are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who first joined the intricate edge.

Factory artisans quickly mastered the secrets and subtleties of cutting gems into an "asterisk", "rose", into a ribbon and diamond facet. However, the craft would have remained, probably, a craft, if not for the "living life in business", which brought the Urals out of the number of apprentices, gaining fame for them not only in Russia, but also among the jewelers of Europe.

No two gems are alike unless they are from the same crystal. This means that there cannot be the same cut. The lapidary thought over each pebble, looking for the corresponding facet, an expressive drawing. Sometimes a crystal fell in a narrow column. Why cut it off and cut it with a “brilliant”? Nature itself suggests - give an open edge. A stone with a dense color (sapphire, alexandrite, emerald, garnet) also requires an open polar face. Then it will become lighter, more beautiful.

Brilliant, Greek facet, or "rose", was used to cut transparent, light topazes, aquamarines, amethysts. On a large stone, the wedges were arranged in three or four tiers. To enhance the brilliance, experienced craftsmen made more fractures on the intermediate faces-layouts, and the number of planes sometimes reached 70-80. The planes were arranged with mathematical precision, the edges were sharp, distinct. For these qualities, the Yekaterinburg side was especially highly valued, they called it "cut-off".

Many facets-drawings were known by the Ural cutters. The reports of the factory supervisors mention "pear", "ellipt", round, oval "hood", four-sided, octagonal face.

In the 20-30s of the 19th century, the cutting of sparks from rock crystal and phenakite was widely used. The masters of the Berezovsky factory were especially famous. They made a large, medium and small spark. The large and medium ones went to the heads for crosses, the small one - to the scree of rings, diadems.

Cutting a good mineral is, of course, not an easy task, but not as troublesome as cutting a mineral with a flaw. It was then that the Urals showed their art.

Under the hand of the cutter, as if by magic, all sorts of defects in the stone disappeared. The masters knew a simple secret: a small edge will not hide a single crack, and a polished one will hide it. They put a crack under the canvas with a stand, polish it - and nothing is visible. Pale amethyst was thrown into a glass of water. The paint from the whole crystal ran into one bush. This bush was placed at the bottom of the stone. The light, refracted in the facets, reached the color point and poured it all over the stone. In order to achieve the purity of the polisher, the cutting wheels were changed in the course of work, they were allowed to run in the opposite direction. If you didn’t take ground tripoli, they used “fried” or crocus.

Faceted stones, with a few exceptions, were sent with convoys to St. Petersburg. The best samples "due to their rarity, excellent purity, deliberately good color" immediately fell into the hands of the capital's jewelers, such as Pozier, Gravereaux, Louis-David, Duval, who almost monopolized the creation of jewelry in Russia.

Factory cutters only occasionally received orders. From the local nobility, from visiting officials and the military. They mainly made caftan buttons from jasper and feldspar, handles for knives were also made from jasper, snuff boxes from malachite, various buckles and inserts for watch chains.
In addition, self-taught tried their hand at the complex art of carved gems3. The news about this interested the president of the Academy of Arts, Count A. S. Stroganov. Interested, of course, disinterestedly. The fact is that at the beginning of the 19th century, with the establishment of high classicism, cameos carved from precious and semiprecious stones became extremely popular among the nobility. Cameos were inserted into brooches, medallions, rings, showered with diamonds, emeralds. Peterhof craftsmen did not have time to cope with orders.

And in the spring of 1802, a letter4 arrived at the Yekaterinburg factory with a proposal to Pavel Ponomarev, Firs Nalimov, Mikhail Ptukhin, Andrey Matveev and Vasily Pykin to urgently go to Peterhof to learn antique carving. However, the Ural craftsmen refused to go, because "they have wives, families and elderly parents to support."
Stroganov did not retreat from his undertaking. At the end of April 1802, he sent Ivan Shteienfeld to Yekaterinburg to train artisans. “So that this art continues with great success,” he wrote, “Ivan Shteienfeld will teach, who will be paid 50 rubles a year.”

Upon arrival at the factory, I. Shteienfeld got down to business. The first students of the "school of antiques", which apparently lasted until 1847, were the workers already mentioned. Later they were joined by S. Odintsov, A. Pivovarov, A. Panov, D. Petrovsky, brothers Nikolai and Andrei Kalugins. Starting with copying drawings and samples, having been trained "on marbles", the Ural masters have achieved real virtuosity. “In terms of the smallness of the figures, clarity, correctness and purity,” the mine surveyor Grammatchikov writes in the “Mining Journal” for 1827, “we can say that this work is the second part of the art, brought to the desired perfection at the local factory.”

The cameos depicted Greek and Roman heroes, deities, ancient poets and philosophers, Russian emperors and empresses. For cutting, ribbon jasper,] agate, sardonyx with even straight layers were chosen. Figures were cut on light layers, and darker ones were left under the background. A subtle understanding of the plastic and decorative possibilities of stone is most valuable in the works of the Urals. They especially loved jasper, emphasizing its hardness, stubbornness, revealing the strong-willed principle in the image (“Head of a beardless man”), using the elements of its color to create an unusual, romantic image (“Poseidon”).

In the thirties of the 19th century, dozens of cameos were cut at the factory. There was enough work for both masters and students.

But as high classicism decayed, the fashion for cameos passed, their production curtailed. The last mentions of cameos are found in the inventories of “Goth-made things at the Ekaterinburg factory” of 1852, where it is reported that the cameo “Samson” is listed at the main parish of the factory, and the cameo “Ox of Dionisevsky” was sent to St. Petersburg.

No matter how short the existence of the “school of antiques” was, it left a trace in stone-cutting art (the final decoration of stone bowls became more perfect, finer, ornaments became more complicated, all kinds of overlays carved from colored stone in the form of clusters of berries, fruits, etc. e), and in the field of artistic processing of metals (graduates of the school N. Platonov, F. Ponomarev engraved on copper, made medals). Its influence can also be caught in that peculiar manifestation of the Ural glyptic4, which took shape in the second half of the 19th century. More precisely - after the i86i reform.

Having received "freedom", the cutters began to work at home. There was no particular habit to the earth, and stone work remained the first and most important. They bought a simple tool, put grinding wheels in the huts. By the 1980s, the main centers of cutting handicrafts were formed in Yekaterinburg and its environs: Berezovsky, Nizhne-Isetsk, Verkhne-Isetsk, Uktus, Polevskoy, Mramorsky.

The craftsmen, who had passed the factory training, kept the secrets of the craft strictly, did not work with outsiders, so that competitors would not appear. Nevertheless, more and more new generations adapted to stone processing. Partly by passing on the experience of father to son, partly by ferreting out secrets.
Developing, the cutting industry created many branches, industries for making things from ornamental stone. The main ones were malachite, jasper and selenite. And how many narrow specializations were in the industry! In one house, the family made key rings, in another - Easter eggs, in the third - ashtrays, in the fourth - matchboxes in the form of a shoe - really, you can’t count everything. And what is most interesting - handicraftsmen began to use ornamental stones for jewelry.

Malachite makers Ivanov, Turunev, Alekseev, Kvasnikov made malachite bracelets and necklaces from Gumeshev plush and light copper ore malachite, along with paperweights, ink boards, candlesticks, caskets. Up to a hundred pieces of balls, carved by hand, carefully selected in size and color, were contained in a thread. Sometimes all the beads were the same, sometimes their size increased gradually, and the largest was placed in the center.

The same beads were made from crystal, amethyst, less often from topaz. Beautiful, pinkish, silky selenite also went on necklaces, but, not having sufficient hardness, quickly faded, lost its original appearance. Therefore, selenite beads were made for the season and were inexpensive.

Jasper makers Semyonov, Kalugin, Plokhov, Khomyakov widely used wax and Kalkan jaspers in brooches, bracelets, earrings, and cufflinks.

A special industry was the cutting of the so-called “overlays” for paperweights: princesses from raspberry schorl, grapes from smoky crystal and amethyst, apples and pears from selenite, cherries from carnelian. Subsequently, the masters of the overlays developed a special type of brooch-twig, imitating a bunch of grapes, currants, etc. in stone.

At first, things were distinguished by variety, invention, virtuosity, which showed the life and beauty of the stone. What happened then, why did art suddenly turn into a common craft?
The thing is that the Ural cutting industry was not formed as a folk art center, like, say, Palekh, Mstera or Khokhloma, for which artistic traditions were something taken for granted. The craft was, or rather seemed to be, accessible to anyone who had hands. They were attached to the teaching not at will, but out of necessity, in order to feed themselves. The new generation of cutters lived according to the laws of the market, according to the laws of sale and purchase, which dictated their terms.
By the beginning of the 20th century, almost all handicrafts-cutters found themselves completely dependent on the "givers" of orders. Large buyers kept workshops, shops not only in Yekaterinburg. They had access to fairs in Irbit and Novgorod, where they sold handicrafts bought for next to nothing at exorbitant prices.
In pursuit of earnings, the craftsmen were forced to spend more than 15 hours a day on work, not caring about the elegance of the products. It was a vicious, vicious circle. Forced speed, which led to the deterioration of products, led to a new, even greater reduction in prices.

But gem-cutters suffered the most, perhaps. Buyers issued and accepted stones by weight. What was left for the master? Of course, to take care of the weight output of the stone, and not about the purity and accuracy of the edge.
Yes, the trade lived hard, nervously, even cruelly. The true master in it was the ruble, not art, the buyer, not the master. True, from time to time various ideas and projects were put forward to save him. In order to raise the artistic level of products, in 1896, at a real school in Yekaterinburg, courses were organized with "practical drawing for willing handicraftsmen." In 1902, the Artistic and Industrial School was opened with a cutting and jewelry workshop, which existed until 1917. However, few of its graduates remained in the Urals. They tried to settle in the capital cities.

The fishery expanded, grew and ... died out.

The revival began in 1919. As soon as the Urals was liberated from the Kolchakites, the mountain council of the Supreme Council of National Economy issued an order to restore the cutting business.

It was difficult at first. The civil war scattered the masters to different places. Who served in the army, who on the railroad, who adapted to repair sewing and typewriters. They searched, persuaded to take up the old business.

Gradually, the cutters resumed work. Some are still at home, some moved to the former Yekaterinburg factory, which was converted in those years into a state workshop, and some went to artels.

Among the handicraft "enterprises" there was an inconspicuous mineralogical workshop at the museum of the Ural Society of Natural Science Lovers. Its products were collections of colored stones and rocks of the Urals. Especially famous were the table "slides" made by skilled craftsmen D.K. Kubin, A.V. Oberyukhtin, N.V. Frolov.

All serious people crept up: mineralogists, geologists, miners, experienced cutters. And the work in the workshop imperceptibly, from year to year gained scope, solidity of the state enterprise. Already in 1938, along with the collection production, a gem-cutting workshop began to operate here, which took control of home-workers Pyshma, Berezovsky, Polevskoy. A year later, the production of jewelry was launched.

Old workers, veterans of the current jewelry factory, who began their career in this workshop, often remember Vladimir Gavrilovich Roshchin (1888-1960), an excellent craftsman with rich professional experience acquired in St. Petersburg in the workshops of the Faberge firm. Under his tutelage, the basics of jewelry were comprehended: metal melting, blank manufacturing, installation, grinding. At first they were engaged in the restoration of products, then they mastered the production of medallions, rings, brooches with crystal scree, wedding rings. Jewelry styles were taken from old catalogs that V. Roshchin was looking for. Under him, many styles were mastered, and with them all the main types of bartacks.

The growing enterprise, which already employed more than two hundred people, required modern forms of management, planning, procurement of raw materials, marketing of products, and training of personnel. In August 1941, the mineralogical workshop was reorganized into a jewelry and cutting factory.
War... Echelons with evacuees were drawn to the Urals in an endless line. I had to meet, place, arrange. In the turmoil of troublesome days filled to the limit with worries, the workers of the Kyiv Jewelry Factory unexpectedly showed up. And they didn't come empty-handed. They brought some of the equipment, semi-finished products.

Fulfilled mainly orders from the front. Buttons, army insignia, cigarette cases, chronometers, watches. Special mention can only be made of the restoration of silver utensils and jewelry, which came in large quantities from the State Fund of the USSR.

The factory huddled in a cramped one-story house. The urgent task of creating minimum working conditions and mechanizing production began to be addressed after the war.

In 1949-1950, the second floor of the main building was built on, an extension was built for a machine shop and an office, and semi-automatic cutting machines began to be introduced. In the fifties, homework was put an end to in Sverdlovsk. A new, younger generation of workers came to the factory, who received good training in the art and vocational school, opened in 1948. The first specialists, technologists, engineers appeared. A lot of technical and technological innovations are being introduced, the process of gilding things, and the smelting of precious metals are being improved.

The radical technical re-equipment of production made it possible to solve urgent complex problems. In 1958, the factory received the first batch of Yakut diamonds. Irregular crystals, uneven edges. Extraordinary hardness and the most ordinary fragility. Experienced masters and those retreated.

The best diamond cutters of Antwerp and Paris revealed to the people of Urals the secrets of turning an unprepossessing diamond into a sparkling diamond. Our craftsmen quickly mastered cutting, turning, polishing stone, and a new profession appeared in the Urals - a diamond cutter. The newspapers of those years reported on the first successes of J. Shar, N. Savinov, A. Khananov, N. Sonin. Typically, 57 facets are applied to a diamond. They also broke a kind of record, having received diamonds of 97 and N3 facets. Alexander Portnyagin cut a diamond in 121 facets and was the first in our country to make the smallest diamond weighing 0.02, and then in o,oi carats. Before him, such stones went to waste.

At the end of the fifties, another event falls - the development of filigree. It all started with earrings that were sent from Moscow with a request to repeat. Earrings are large, in an intricate filigree frame. The sample was made in Krasnoye Selo, but the famous filigree makers refused mass production. The technology was very difficult. And we could refuse, but they did not refuse.

And yet, assessing the period of the forties - fifties from the standpoint of today, we can say that jewelry was created mainly according to old patterns. Brooches, bracelets, rings were nothing new in form. Indifference to the artistic possibilities of the material led to imitation, imitation. Almost forgotten about natural stone. In the course was stamped glass, synthetic corundum.

Similar phenomena were observed almost everywhere, so that the Sverdlovsk Jewelry and Cutting Factory was no exception in this sense. New trends became noticeable only after 1955, when the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted a resolution "On the elimination of excesses in design and construction." It set the task for the artists: to find modern forms of residential and public buildings, to use modern materials, technological advances, to free themselves from eclecticism and imitation of the styles of previous centuries.

No wonder they say that architecture defines the face of an era. Changing itself, it involves many types of fine arts in perestroika, but most of all - arts and crafts.

At the beginning of the sixties, aesthetic criteria in all genres of arts and crafts changed fundamentally. The time is coming for its independent artistic significance, the recognition of the power of its influence on a person, on the organization of the objective environment. At zonal, republican, all-Union exhibitions, entire sections are devoted to arts and crafts. There are also special exhibitions that attract a huge number of spectators. So, in 1961, the exhibition "Art for Life" was held in Moscow, where a wide variety of products were presented, many of which were recommended for production.

The Sverdlovsk jewelry and cutting factory was also involved in the orbit of artistic life. The first professional artists (N.A. Statsenkova, B.A. Gladkov) began to work here, and a strong creative group of fashion designers was formed. Young craftsmen were determined to create jewelry, to push out the old, boring, obsolete. And most importantly - to revive the beauty of the natural Ural gem in the products.

The main searches and experiments on the development of new models of jewelry with natural stone inlays are associated with the organization at the factory in 1963 of a specialized creative group, which included artists, fashion designers, technologists, engravers, toolmakers, and raters.
With the emergence of this group, the assortment of mass products made of gold and silver with semi-precious and semi-precious stones is being updated, products with diamonds are being developed and mastered, stylistic features of the Ural jewelry art and its direction are being formed.
New tectonics of objects, new forms and materials demanded more advanced technology. And the beginning of the seventies was a period of great technical innovation.

In a short time, additional factory buildings are being built. A precision centrifugal casting shop was put into operation, oxidation-free annealing, spot welding and soldering of products in the Solo conveyor furnace, ultrasonic washing, anodizing of gold castings, chrome plating and rhodium plating of products, electro-stamping were launched. A site for the manufacture of enamels and applying them to products, a laboratory for growing emerald crystals appears. A powerful technical base strengthened the position of art, contributed to its rapid development, its achievements.

Now one can talk about the Ural jewelry art not only in the impartial tone of the annals, which accurately record facts and events. It is also interesting to present it in the analysis of the main trends in artistic development, in their crossing and interweaving. Since the sixties, the creative activity of artists has become more diverse. Already not one or two, as it was in the period of formation, but a whole group of masters made up the team that took on all the hardships of the first searches and discoveries.

The transition from old forms of products to new, modern ones began with the development and understanding of the decorative and figurative expressiveness of the material itself. They tried stone and metal, studied technology, revealed their inclinations to one or another method of processing.

And the more persistent searches were, the more keenly interest was shown in the traditions of art of past centuries.
It was during these years that many artists turned to the history of applied art in the Urals, to the traditions of folk art. The testaments of those who conjured over an iron casting, over blued steel, over a warm stump of linden, over a malachite vein, over a semi-precious edge came to life. The secret of folk craftsmen in handling the material was rediscovered. After all, they did not just use, say, wood, metal, stone, but they had their own idea of ​​the poetry of any of them. And the form that the artist created corresponded to this idea. The product was born according to the laws of the beauty of the material, the master's confidence lived in it that any material should be allowed to "speak" for itself. Unique humor, amazing fantasy determined what artists most often communicated with, turning to folk traditions.

The original concept of shaping jewelry was formed from a trusting, Ural-style original attitude towards colored stone. If it were possible to collect products for the last 15-20 years, then amazingly beautiful ornamental stones would be revealed to the eye: jaspers of all colors and shades, patterned malachites, agates, as coldish with blue as thin spring ice floes, warm, ocher carnelian, turquoise, shimmering amethyst and chalcedony brushes, lapis lazuli, jade. And in the way some special signs are carefully preserved - outgrowths, roughness, veins, bright or blurry color spots - one can feel fascination, frank admiration for the uniqueness of this or that stone.

Enthusiasm, selfless faith in the power of the gem largely determined the style and creative method of the Ural jewelers. For for them, the gem became an active and, perhaps, the most important shaping factor, it suggested the idea, the solution of the frame, its decorative finish.

Of course, over time and as experience came, thoughts grew bolder, the outlined principle of creating things noticeably developed, deepened, and enriched. After all, no matter how good a natural stone is, but relying only on it means knowingly limiting oneself, impoverishing oneself. Yes, and it was not always possible to find such an interesting one, it was not always possible to completely obey him. Much remained "unspoken". Therefore, at the beginning of the seventies, some of the most, perhaps, sensitive to the requirements of art, increasingly began to turn to metal, to search for a three-dimensional, plastic solution for a piece of jewelry. This does not mean at all that interest in the gem has faded or at least diminished. It's just that the relationship between stone and metal (hence, inserts and frames) has become more equal, more diverse. One sees not a stone in a product, but the product itself as a whole, the beauty of which is comprehended through plasticity, through rhythms, proportions, spatial constructions organized in metal, through color and texture combinations.

The attitude of the Ural jewelers to traditions is devoid of straightforwardness. The existing iconography of things, compositional solutions are not borrowed, but some deep, fundamental creative connections are found. Thus, ancient Russian art - architecture, painting, jewelry work - attracts Ural artists with its purity of style and pronounced national character. In addition, the laconicism and emotional richness of forms, the monolithic strength of the whole and the remarkable expressiveness of the details of this art are in tune with modern aesthetic aspirations. This is how the style and handwriting of the Ural artists are gradually formed. Their works are distinguished by classical simplicity and clarity of form, closely linked to the direct purpose of the object, figurative emotionality, harmony of colors, richness of ornaments and, finally, good craftsmanship. Of course, these signs do not appear in the works openly. They vary depending on the individual inclinations of the author, sometimes they become almost inconspicuous, but the influence of the "school" is always captured, even in the most modern solution to the thing.
The range of selected traditions is expanding every year. In the works of recent years, reminiscences of Baroque and Art Nouveau decorations are noticeable. Interest in the already established traditions of Soviet jewelry art is becoming more and more acute, contact with the leading artists of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the Baltic states is becoming ever closer.

Uralians often visit the creative dacha in Palanga, work hand in hand with jewelers from Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine, Belarus, which greatly enriches their figurative and plastic language, diversifies decorative techniques.

From the very beginning, the Ural artists have been successfully working on the creation of unique works, and directly for the jewelry industry. This led to the emergence of two main currents - industrial and exhibition. In terms of their tasks and formal means of expression, they differ from each other in a number of specific features.

Industrial - ensures the creation of comfortable to wear, holistic in shape, aesthetically perfect products that meet high industrial and technical requirements. It combines a lot of jewelry, which differ in material (gold, silver), in assortment (earrings, brooches, pendants, etc.), in the number of circulations.

Let us dwell first of all on gold items, which occupy a significant place in factory production. They are produced in large and small series.

Manufacturability of large-scale products is one of the criteria for assessing quality not only from an economic, but also from an artistic point of view. Therefore, when creating samples for mass replication, it is necessary to take into account the technical capabilities of the enterprise, and the economic profitability of products, and the professional level of master performers, and consumer requests. One has to take into account the fact that the object form of mass jewelry is to some extent already set by a standard cut stone, standardized and unified details (ring shank, medallion lugs, earring locks, etc.).

But the work of the Ural jewelers has always been distinguished by a genuine interest in factory production, a desire to make technology an integral part of the “aesthetics” of a thing. As a result, products appeared, traced, thought out, themselves talking about the method of their birth - mechanical replication.

The massive assortment of gold items consists mainly of rings, earrings, pendants, cufflinks, designed for special occasions: elegant daytime jewelry, small evening jewelry and formal sets.

The image is created by means of composition on a plane by a combination of textured and polished surfaces, a clear silhouette and the rhythm of lines. Jewelry has a simple form, bribes with its completeness.

The “averageness” of the forms of a typical object is overcome by the variety of decoration, the color richness of the stone, its bright sound against the background of yellow gold. Gold things with enamel coating attract with juicy frank contrast.

In the mid-seventies, gold jewelry without inserts was created and mastered in production. The decorative expressiveness of these products is based on purely textured metal effects. The mirror surface of polishing and looseness of casting create a unique game. The shape is strictly geometric (circle, rectangle, rhombus). The ornament, if used, is especially finely drawn and modern in technique.