The Open University
Yorkshire Region

Cultural Studies Research Forum
Reports and Abstracts 1995 -2000

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The Russian artist/designer Vera Ermolaeva

Sara Dodd

The paper outlined research commissioned on Vera Yermolaeva (Ermolaeva), about whom little has been written in English, especially when compared with her contemporaries. The work involved translation of texts and placing her in the cultural context of Post-Revolutionary Russian art and politics. Issues were raised such as the position of the woman artist/revolutionary worker in a predominantly male world, the balancing of modernism against ideological concerns, and the legacy of Pan-Slavism as opposed to Europeanisation.

Though often labelled 'a pupil of Malevich', Yermolaeva's innovations in artistic theory and illustration were independently influential in their circle, with her contribution to the founding of Unovis, a significant artistic group, her article on 'St. Petersburg shop signs', her work at the city museum there, her directorship of the art school at Vitebsk, her publishing house and her running of the colour laboratory at the State Institute of Artistic Culture ('Ginkhuk'). The subsequent absorption of what was known as 'laboratory work' in the art schools into the modernist canon, ignoring ideological contexts, was challenged. Finally, the innovative use of the handcraft tradition, the 'lubok' (woodcut) and the painted shop sign, which she pioneered in her work, was discussed. Yermolaeva's involvement in both craft and industrial techniques was illustrated, and the compromises necessitated by the propagandist demands of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AkhRR) were indicated. Her final move away from avant-gardism into a more acceptable idiom, and her eventual decline, both artistically and physically, after the Stalinist purges was described.