Soviet icons of the Nizhny Novgorod Southwest region. Genesis and local traditions

The paper deals with the genesis and local traditions of handmade icons of the Soviet era in the Southwest of the Nizhny Novgorod region. It is based on the material from the expeditions carried in 2021. The Kulebak-Gremyachevsky tradition is characterized by Soviet icons decorated with silver foil with an abundance of small elements: foil and paper flowers, clusters of paraffin berries. Those are typical features of the so-called ‘rustic’ style. The main technique of applying an ornament to foil (honeycomb-shaped, finelyrounded, vegetable) is an imprint on a metal matrix base. The Arzamas tradition is characterized by a strict, laconic ‘urban’ style: there are no flowers and berries, the ornament on silver foil was minted. In another type of ‘urban’ icon, foil was not used; instead the masters made a wooden frame and covered it with bronze (‘golden’) paint. For Diveevskaya and Tashino-Ponetaevskaya traditions, a brighter design is characteristic: the frames and small elements were made of foil of different colors, and geometric and floral ornaments were drawn with a stylus. Frequently recurring images are grapes and multipath ‘stars’ resembling large elements of Mordovian embroidery. The Ardatov tradition was a contact zone of the western, northern and eastern styles of the Soviet icon. The author traces the revealed visual and technical features in the descriptions of the pre-revolutionary (before 1917) Russian craft of creating the foil (folezhnye, podfolezhki) icons and the cheap (raskhozhaya) icons made by icon masters in the Vyaznikovsky district of the Vladimir province (villages Mstyora, Kholuy, Palekh) in the 19th century – early 20th centuries.

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