Exhibition “Painted popular prints and copper castings of the Old Believers” Ulpressa

April 26 at 13:00 at the Museum-Reserve “Motherland of V.I. Lenin”

the opening of the exhibition will take place “Drawn popular print and copper casting of the Old Believers”

The exhibition “Painted popular prints and copper castings of the Old Believers” is a new partnership project of the Museum-Reserve “Motherland of V.I. Lenin” and the State Historical Museum (Moscow).

The exhibition in Ulyanovsk will feature 56 hand-drawn popular prints of Old Believers from the 18th – 19th centuries. from the collection of the State Historical Museum, which has the most significant collection of this rare type of monument, numbering 150 sheets. This project is intended to give a complete understanding of the artistic features of hand-drawn popular prints and reflect the originality of this interesting type of folk art.

The painted popular print owes its appearance to the Old Believer Vygo-Leksinsky community, which arose in 1694 in the North of Russia near Lake Onega, where opponents of Patriarch Nikon’s church reform, persecuted for the “old faith,” fled and resettled. The enormous spiritual strength helped the Old Believers not only survive times of persecution, but also make a significant contribution to the economic and cultural life of Russia. This fully applies to the activities of the Vygo-Leksinsky hostel. It became the center of book writing, icon painting, copper foundry, and artistic processing of wood products. Wall pictures arose from the need for visual ways to convey information to like-minded people. They used the form of printed popular prints, which had long existed in Russian folk art, transformed it, interpreted it artistically, and filled it with new content.

The art of hand-drawn wall pictures spread from the North to the central regions of Russia, where their own schools of hand-drawn popular prints emerged – Guslitskaya, Moskovskaya. The exhibition involves the display of materials specifically on schools of hand-drawn pictures, which makes it possible to emphasize their artistic features.

A separate section of the exhibition will be a complex of copper-cast plastics from Old Believer workshops in Russia at the end of the 18th – 19th centuries. from the collection of the Museum-Reserve “Motherland of V.I. Lenin”. Icons, folding icons, and eight-pointed altar crosses, which became the most common objects of worship created by Old Believer foundry masters, became widespread in the Russian Empire. In the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries. copper-cast plastic was widely sold at the largest Russian fairs, since it was popular not only among Old Believers, but also among adherents of the official church.

The exhibition will be complemented by a documentary exposition dedicated to the history of the spread and existence of the Old Believers within the Simbirsk province.

We are waiting for you at:

Museum “Urban Planning and Architecture of Simbirsk-Ulyanovsk”,

Lev Tolstoy, 24, +7(8422) 42-04-63