Figurine “Tatar Dance”

Technique: Porcelain, polychrome painting.
Size: Height 23 cm.

USSR, Dulyovo Porcelain Factory, c. 1956. After a model of 1951. Sculptor: Asta Davydovna Brzhezitskaya (1912 – 2004). Porcelain, polychrome overglaze painting, gilding. Height: 23 cm. Mark: printed “DZ Dulyovo ...s – 56 g” (illegible), in red “OTK29”, impressed in the paste “1”. Good condition. Chip to the fingers of the left hand, technical defects of the glaze, manufacturing crack on a curl, paint loss on the hair. A similar sculpture is published in the catalogue “Museum of Dulyovo Porcelain. Vol. 1. Sculptures” / M. A. Safonova. Moscow: 2019. P. 50 (see photo). Asta (Avgusta) Davydovna Brzhezitskaya (1912 – 2004) – Soviet sculptor, master of porcelain sculpture. She created more than five hundred works in various ceramic materials. Among them are original genre compositions and sculptural portraits. She also created sculpture for the Dulyovo Porcelain Factory. Among her works are porcelain sculptures on literary and fairy-tale subjects and on the themes of theatre, circus art, music and animals. She also reproduced in porcelain scenes of everyday life (genre scenes), capturing the fashion and the manner of interaction of her contemporaries. From 1935 she studied at the MKhPU named after M. I. Kalinin (as an auditing student, in the class of the ceramic sculptor B. N. Lange), and from 1937 in the faculty of monumental sculpture of the MGKhI named after V. I. Surikov, from which she graduated in 1944 (sculpture class of Professor A. T. Matveev; during the war years she was in evacuation in Krasnoyarsk); her diploma work was a sculptural portrait of Admiral F. F. Ushakov (executed at the Dulyovo factory). From 1938, during her practical training at the Dulyovo factory, she studied painting on porcelain under F. F. Maslov. From 1945, for more than 50 years, she worked as a sculptor at the Dulyovo Porcelain Factory. In 1950 she took part in the decoration of the “Taganskaya” station of the Moscow Metro (reliefs, majolica). Member of the Krasnoyarsk branch of the Union of Soviet Artists (from the 1940s). Works by A. D. Brzhezitskaya are held in the State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), the State Russian Museum (St. Petersburg), the Kuskovo Museum of Ceramics and Estate, the All-Russian Museum of Decorative, Applied and Folk Art (Moscow), Moscow theatres, art and literary museums in Russia and Latvia, and also in private collections in Russia and the USA