Mikhail M. Adamovich
Saucer (part of a tea service)
circa 1922
Distinctly contrasting Adamovich’s usual decorative style (figuratively emulating a colourfully unrepressed and revolutionary Russia), this floral design stems from a pattern sketched by Adamovich, but unlikely ever executed formally by his own hand. Found on the saucer’s reverse is the inscription, lettered in Cyrillic, Po riz Adamovicha, meaning ‘based on drawing by Adamovich’ - a fact which supports the likely idea that the artist did not personally paint this saucer, or indeed the entire collection of similarly-patterned tea cups and saucers which the Kuskovo State Museum of Ceramics came to acquire in 1988 from Adamovich’s grandchildren. However, the initial fact remains: that despite the uncanny exuberance and leafy lust for life that this illustration impresses on the viewer (in comparison to Adamovich’s more figurative and ‘controlled’ idiosyncratic œuvre), and despite the unknown hand which transferred the artist’s primary sketch onto the ceramic, there prevails a sourceless originality of energetic indifference that acts to undermine any question of whom, what, why, when or where - thus stripping away the inevitable haze and clutter of over-analysis, and letting the saucer present itself in its own light.
