Fired Earth: The Making of Soviet Ceramic Art

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Material, not technique

Ceramics are the most widespread and universal synthetic material across humanity's history. Under the Soviet Union, artists widely applied decorative ceramics in architecture, including through ceramic inserts, panels, volumetric sculptures and compositions, lattice-partitions, finishing materials from ceramics, and utilitarian ceramics. The nature of ceramic objects allowed for large-scale, textural, and color qualities that provided a rich palette and an irreplaceable coloristic and plastic element in architecture. They are a stable and durable material that protects facades – and itself – from exposure to climate. Their flexibility allowed to play with the shapes, fill facades and interiors alike, and provide a unique play of light. Most traditional techniques of decorative arts therefore had an equal method in ceramics. For instance, ceramics were used for sgraffito works, where the artists would scratch through a coat of colored engobe over the clay body to reveal the body beneath, done before firing.

Mass industrial production and the creation of individual works stand at the core of the material's evolution in Soviet times, complementing and enriching one another. The decorative arts industry concentrated on the production of mass-consumption objects, such as tiles for walls or floors and tableware, while authored works are mostly connected with decorative ceramics.

Ceramics is a material, not a technique, which is why it does not sit neatly in any classification built around technique. It cuts across three main categories that are normally kept separate: mosaics, reliefs, and sgraffito. A mosaic is defined by assembly: the image is made by setting many small pieces together. Those pieces can be smalt, which is opaque colored glass, or fired clay tile. Ceramic tile was the cheaper and simpler of the two. For this reason, it became the principal material for Soviet mosaic, which means a large share of what is catalogued as mosaic is made of ceramics, and not smalt or glass. A relief is defined by modelling: the image is made by working the surface in three dimensions. Chamotte was the standard body for this, and a modelled chamotte panel is a relief made of ceramic, though it could also be plaster, concrete, metal, and even wood. Sgraffito is defined by scraping back: in architecture, several layers of colored plaster are applied to a wall and the upper coats scratched away to reveal the layers beneath.

The six ceramic bodies

The appearance of ceramic objects depends on the composition of the clay, the firing regime, and the applied glazes. The techniques of painting objects are equally diverse: pouring, airbrush coating, brush painting, from a slip-trailer, filling of a recessed design, sgraffito, and others. Generally, the nature and technology to process ceramics is the same, though each ceramic variety — terracotta, chamotte, faience, porcelain, majolica, and stoneware — has its own particularities:

Terracotta: objects of clay, fired and not treated with salts or glazes. The natural color of the clay creates its beauty. Artists of all epochs used this simple but expressive technique. Soviet masters applied it to create entire panels, reliefs, and decorative sculptures.

Chamotte: ground-up sherds or ground-fired refractory clay are added to the clay mix, providing a grainy texture. Soviet-era artists used chamotte for decorative vases, sculpture, and reliefs: R. Simonyan's vases at the Yerevan Institute of Soil Science, finished with copper and uranium oxides; P. Hanzha's figures "Song" at the Hotel Ukraina in Moscow; and ceramic compositions in the interior of the Arbat café, Minsk, by A. Kishchenko, T. Kirshina, and V. Mitichkin.

Faience: in Russian usage, фаянс, a white-firing earthenware. It is porous and opaque, absorbing water. It therefore needs a glaze to be serviceable, which is why it belongs indoors – in contrast to terracotta and chamotte. The standard interior facing tile at 15×15 cm was faience, decorated by hand painting, printing or screen printing. From the late 1970s, artists began using it for panels as well, such as in the Kharkiv metro station “Studentka” and “Peremoga”

Porcelain: made from a body of kaolin combined with feldspar and quartz, fired high enough to vitrify. Thin porcelain is translucent, and it takes a colorless glaze with overglaze and underglaze painting in durable colors. It was the dominant Soviet ceramic used until the mid-1950s - overwhelmingly for tableware and small sculpture. 10% of the world’s white kaolin deposits are in Ukraine, though its architectural use is rare. Allegedly, the Shchepkin Theater in Sumy has a porcelain panel.

Majolica: fired ceramics are covered with muted colored enamels, used for decorative vases and dishes especially, though examples of use in monumental art exist, including the panels at Khreshchatyk metro station and the underpass of Kyiv’s Maidan square.

Stoneware: a dense, high-fired body that vitrifies in the kiln and absorbs very little water. Harder and less porous than earthenware, and unlike porcelain it stays opaque. It appears infrequently in Soviet monumental art.

Surfaces: glazes, enamels, and salts

The color comes from metal oxides, but how it behaves depends on what carries it and how the kiln is run. Oxides can be brushed on undiluted as salts, which soak into the surface and give soft, diffuse color, or mixed into engobe, glaze or enamel, which sit on top of the body as skin, glass or opaque glass in turn. The kiln continues the effects: an oxidizing fire gives predictable color, while a reducing fire starves the kiln of oxygen, pulls it out of the oxides instead, and lets colors run into one another. On the third floor of the Republican House of Cinema in Kyiv, the same façade tile appears both ways on one wall, the salt-coated pieces firing to a matte velvet black and the glazed ones staying glossy.

Color glazing provided the largest color variety and tonal richness. The variety of tones is limited only by the firing temperature, since at high temperature many oxides burn out. Textural qualities further distinguish glazes. The use of glazing depended on the size of the artwork and the distance needed for perception: distances vary greatly from the perception inside a room, a hotel lobby, or a ceramic relief on the building façade. Glazing color and textural contrasts reinforced the architectural-scale perception through flat relief, contour incision, and contrast between matte and glossy glaze.

Enamels largely give the same effect as painting with glazes. However, they are opaque, allowing for brighter and lighter tones on ceramics. On white enamel, artists have long painted with a limited color palette of five colors: blue — cobalt oxide, green — copper, yellow — antimony, violet-brown — manganese, and a separate green second tone — chromium. In Soviet ceramics, “structural” (textured), “bloated” (blistered surfaces), and “gathered” (the enamel pulls into islands during firing, leaving bare patches) enamels were widely applied, as well as enamels with an interference surface and fluorescent ones. These enamels can have a mirror-glossy or matte surface. With the help of such enamels, artists achieved the impression of distinctive semi-reliefs. Sometimes reduction-fire enamel included metal oxides such as copper or silver, providing iridescent golden or silvery shimmers.

From clay to fired module

The body came first. For monumental work, this usually meant chamotte, made by firing refractory clay at up to 1500°C, until it lost all its water, then grinding it and adding it back into a plastic clay mix. Grog reduces the shrinkage of the clay as it dries and fires, which is what makes large, thick-walled pieces possible at all.

Scale forced modularity. A panel of several meters could not be fired in one piece, because the kiln chamber sets a hard ceiling on dimensions and because a single slab that size shrinks unevenly as it dries. Panels were therefore modelled at full size, cut into sections, dried slowly, and fired separately, with the joints absorbed into the composition rather than concealed. Slow preliminary drying was obligatory: it is what stops cracks opening during the firing.

Decoration followed the first firing. Glazes, engobes and metal salts were applied, then the piece was fired a second time. On a grogged, textured surface the behavior of the glaze changes: it will not hold a precise contour and spreads across the relief instead. Reduction firing let colors run into one another across a range of shades. Painting with salts produced a recognizable softness of color.

Handmade and industrial: two production routes

Two production routes ran in parallel. In the first, the work was modelled and fired by hand for one building, with the artist involved from sketch to installation. In the second, industrially produced tile was supplied in standard formats and the artist composed with it, either by painting on it or by assembling it. The Pobeda works at Kolpino near Leningrad and a factory at Kizil Kiya in Batken, Kyrgyzstan, which supplied Osh and beyond, were among the plants firing tile for monumental art at industrial scale, at much lower cost than smalt.

Oksana Hrudzynska said she cut graph paper into squares, drew an ornament on each by pen, assembled them into "little carpets", then had to lay each fired ceramic carpet out in the workshop yard and number it, because tile sizes and colors would change so much in firing that pieces had to be sorted to avoid a patchy result. Hrudzynska worked from 1947 in the Experimental Workshop of Artistic Ceramics at the Institute of Architecture of the Academy of Construction and Architecture of the Ukrainian SSR, which Fedorova headed for forty years.

Getting it on the wall

Assembling decorative panels, whether ceramic or smalt, was like assembling a puzzle or completing a “painting by numbers” work. The artist produced the sketch; the setters then broke tiles into small pieces, choosing each for shape and size so that it matched the drawing and gave the intended play of light and shade. Each piece was unique and random. This randomness contrasts with the Florentine approach, which uses shaped pieces of stone or glass cut to fit a design, rather than irregular fragments. A monumental panel could take thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of individual pieces. Tiles were fixed to a paper backing in large modules before installation, which simplified mounting. Finished sections were finally fixed to the wall.

A 1987 Soviet building standard set the rules for facing work, and it divided the job by size. Small units, under 20 by 20 cm and no thicker than 10 mm, were simply bedded in mortar. Anything larger and thicker had to be anchored to the wall behind, with the cavity then filled with mortar. The tolerances were tight for a material that changes in the kiln: ceramic cladding could run no more than 2 mm out of vertical per meter outdoors, and 1.5 mm indoors. Fired tile comes out at slightly different sizes and colors each time, which is why Hrudzynska had to sort every piece before it went on the wall. The size limits of firing in kilns are evident across Soviet monumental work, which is split into smaller panels, see for instance the botanical garden relief in Chisinau, Moldova, or the massive  “Kolkheti (კოლხეთი)” relief by Bernand Nebieridze in Kutaisi, Georgia – the largest in the USSR.

A case study on Soviet ceramics and synthesis

The Arbat café stands in Vostok-1, a residential district built in the 1970s at Minsk's eastern gateway on the Moscow highway. The monthly periodical Decorative Arts of the USSR features an article on the mosaics and ceramics in late Soviet mass-housing architecture. The district was designed by a team of architects led by G. Sysoev. Its decorative programme was given to the monumental artist Alexander Kishchenko, who is best known for the vast mosaics on the end walls of the district's sixteen-storey towers. At ground level Kishchenko turned to ceramics. He clad the low annexes in white-enamelled chamotte blocks shaped as prisms with a flame-like cut. The artist continued this motif indoors. The café's vestibule is a sculpted ceramic "carpet" of fourteen high-relief tiles, made in 1979 by T. Kirshina and V. Mitichkin under Kishchenko's direction. Each tile is built around a hemispherical bowl, glazed yellow inside and turned toward the viewer, holding a white relief scene from the life of old Moscow, in keeping with the café's name: a cobbler at work, balalaika players, a tea party, a bear show, a bride abduction. Recessed black and dark-red joints between the tiles give the wall an illusion of receding depth.

The vestibule shows how handmade ceramics could be fitted precisely to the module of prefabricated architecture. The 60 cm bowls match the diameter of the vestibule's supporting column. The smaller round elements echo the ceiling lights. The curving rhythm of the reliefs answers the curved opposite wall and the spiral staircase. The grid of coloured joints restates the logic of panel construction in a refined, decorative form. Within this strict framework the modelling is loose and exuberant. The plump, "doughy" figures swell out of their bowls and break the flat front plane. Contemporary critics traced this quality to Belarusian folk pottery, such as twin pots, clay jugs and chest-shaped vessels. This shows the case for ceramics in Soviet modernism: a warm, tactile, folk-rooted material that, when matched closely to the building's geometry, could soften the anonymity of standardised panel architecture without disrupting it.