Antique Russian Swingers

Russian Intimate Fairy Tales from Palekh - a Russian folk handicraft of miniature painting.

Your babushka’s collection of traditional folk art never looked like this - with exaggerated appendages, heaving bosoms and humping horses to the fore.

But the traditional laquer-work wooden boxes of Palekh have been transformed for a saucy exhibition of erotic folk-tales, set up by conceptual artist Rostislav Lebedev.

Once the artists of Palekh - a village in Ivanovo region - were a saintly bunch, known for their icons. More recently they switched to hugely popular, utterly innocent portrayals of Russian folklore miniatures on boxes found next to the matryoshki at every souvenir stall in town.

So when Lebedev, known for his love of erotica, dreamed up his plan he was taking a risk. In a recent interview to The New Times magazine, Lebedev said that he was a little worried about offering the job to Palekh artists who could have dismissed it as “pornography,” but they turned out to be enthusiastic about it.

“[Russian early 20th century artist] Kustodiev painted women with white skin, big busts and asses,” Lebedev said. “And I posed myself a question of what a Russian beauty should look like now. So, I combined a landscape from a [Palekh] wooden box and an image from a women’s magazine, and it turned out to be funny.”

Too much of a good thing?

The artist himself made sketches, which were then turned into multicolored miniatures on wooden boxes.

The fairy tales, on which the images on display are based, come from a collection compiled by ethnographer Alexander Afanasyev a century and a half ago, which had a hard time being published. The collection was banned first by Tsarist censors, then by Communist ones, and appeared in full for the first time only a few years ago.

The fruits of this unlikely marriage between traditional folklore artists and themes from unconventional Russian fairy tales were a collection of funny, explicit miniatures, which some people might label as “pornography” right away, while others would definitely enjoy.

For entire generations of Russians, the fact that “erotic” fairy tales ever existed in this country came as a surprise and the exhibition, aimed at displaying the view of sexuality that existed in Russia centuries ago, certainly plugs a gap in their education.

However, it is possible to see more behind the explicit images on display than just an artistic provocation.

“‘Intimate Fairy Tales’ contains a clear political message, returning spontaneous revolutionary attitudes to non-dogmatic folklore art”, art critic Alexander Yevangeli wrote in an article on the exhibition, which was published on the gallery’s web site.
“Grass-roots people’s culture, preserved by Afanasyev in those fairy tales, was hypocritically ignored by all the authorities, because it addressed the reality of human desire. By using erotic themes in traditional folklore plus Palekh aesthetics, Lebedev is dissecting the hypocrisy of contemporary dogmas on political, religious and aesthetic levels.”

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