╘ Black Lacquers Co-operative, Russia, 1999

KHOLUI.

Geographical Situation. Like Palekh, Kholui is in Ivanovo region, and is particularly beautifully situated. It stands on the Teza, a river overhung with willows which floods every April, and contains some fine old buildings which are celebrated on the box called "Kholui View". Just ten years ago this miniature Venice of the spring was day and night plied by loaded barges and swift launches along its romantic waterways. Every family possesses a dugout boat, which is used to go back and forth to work and to school. At present the number of artists is about half of any of the other villages.

Techniques and Style. This village was the last of the lacquer production centers to organize, and has a marked tendency to experiment. It is fair to say that it is coming into its own at the moment, after some turmoil in the 1980s, and at present produces the boxes the most commonly (mostly because of the lower prices) available in the West.

As with Palekh and Mstiora tempera is used in Kholui miniatures, with a preference for yellows, reds and browns. Strong contrasts of cold and warm hues lend vibrancy to these works, with both trees and water alive with movement. Backgrounds can be either colored, as with Mstiora, or black where deemed appropriate by the artists; they can even be green. This is the only village that produces red lacquer boxes on a regular basis. The human figures' proportions are less iconic and more realistic than in Palekh style. Generally, aluminum is widely but gold rarely used in that school.

History. The first mention of Kholui comes from the time of Ivan the Terrible in a deed dated 1546, when it belonged to the famous golden-domed monastery of the Trinity-Sergius at Zagorsk (now Sergeyev Posad), and to that of the Savior Yefim at Suzdal. By the turn of the Seventeenth Century it belonged to Dmitry Pozharski, granted him for services to his country by the Tsar of Muskovy. It appears in the Chronicles in 1613, when the artists of this merchantile village specialized in the "popular" icon, which did not adhere to the strict iconographic rules of the time, being simpler and more naturalistic than the traditional ones. It is thought that Kholui was the first of the villages to take up icon painting, as the peasants did not possess the arable land necessary for an alternative source of income.

In spite of pressure from the Church not surprisingly production increased, and in the Nineteenth Century the body of 300 artists grew to 700.

In 1919 a rather motley group of iconographers, makers of nested dolls, tray painters and decorators of kitchenware set up a trades union, but it was not until the Thirties that art lacquers were made.

In 1931 Kholui set up a rug-painting artel there, and the following year saw the first experiments with papier-mБchИ. In the summer of 1934 the artel was developed into the Independent Artists' Cooperative Society, which included gifted iconographers, such as S.A. Mokin, K.V. Kosterin, M.D. Dobrynin and V.D.Puzanov-Molev, who helped develop the epic-historical style of Kholui during the Forties. Though progress was slow, with rug- painting taking precedence for a time (it was finally abandoned in 1951), apprentices were taken on, and these produced great miniaturists in their own right: V.A. Belov, V.I. Fomin, N.I. Baburin, B.I.Kiselev, N.N. Denisov, A.M. Kosterin and A.A. Kamorin (who was the chief of the Kholui Art Works for many years).

With the many thanks to Maxim Lucy