╘ Black Lacquers Co- operative, 1999

MSTERA.

Geographical Situation. Known as Bogoyavlenskaya Sloboda before 1917, the village now takes its name from the little Msterka (Mstiorka) River, which flows through it, merging with the Kliyazma. It is in Vladimir Region, but not far from the border with Ivanovo Region, south of Palekh and Kholui, in breathtakingly beautiful countryside - the one that forms the backdrop to its paintings.

Techniques and Style. As one of the tempera villages, the preparation of the paint is similar to the Palekh method, though in the case of Mstera the artist would sometimes grind his own pigments out of colored pebbles he would find in Msterka. Their miniatures are characteristically done in pale tones, usually on an ivory background. Colours are commonly more muted those of the other villages with figures, sometimes elongated, against backgrounds of light blue or other pastel shades, with landscapes predominating, the trees showing a tendency towards Stroganoff style. The overall effect is that of a "Persian tapestry". Faces are usually "cartoonish", lacking the realism of Palekh or Kholui. The use of gold is traditionally avoided, except in borders, which are often intricate. Bylini (epic stories) and skazki (fairy-tales) dominate the subject matter of Mstera, though it has produced many classic boxes of political topics and village scenes in the Soviet times.

History. We hear of Mstera in the Seventeenth Century as a mercantile village with a flourishing trades in fish and salt, as well as being a market gardening center. However, a lack of arable land forced it to adapt to art and craft production for its survival, notably icon painting, but also the famed White Satin Stitch and Vladimir Colour Stitch embroideries. By the late Nineteenth Century a staggering proportion of the population was engaged in iconography and related trades.

After the success of Palekh Mstera was the next tempera village to learn to transfer its art on to Lukutinsky. Initially, though, a cooperative - called The Association of Former Icon Painters - was set up, but the work they did was mostly decorating wooden kitchen articles and nested dolls. A second cooperative was formed in 1923, but with little progress on the first.

However, under the impact of the Palekh experience, two craftsmen went to Fedoskino in the late 1920s to learn papier-mБchИ manufacture, while two more went to the site of Golikov's original idea, the Moscow Museum of Handicrafts, to study the technique. In 1931 seven artists organized the Proletarian Art Artel, which had grown to fifty-five in number by 1933. Following a suggestion by Anatoly Bakushinsky, an art critic who had also helped Palekh, the budding studio expanded on the border decorations which had been the characteristic feature of Mstera icon painting, and was to characterize its new medium also. At first the Mstera artists were dogged by an inability to break free from the strictures of iconography, a situation from which they were extricated by the "troika" of three painters: N.P. Klykov, A.F. Kotiagin and A.I. Briagin.

After the Perestroika era, Mstera was the most well known place among the four villages for the plenty cheap copies and even imitations of the other schools, which ruined the prices for the Mstera painters▓ boxes, but for sure there were and specially are nowadays dozens of creative and talented masters. Old Mstera boxes before ▒50s are extremely rare.