Lubok

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"The Mice are burying the Cat", a 1760s lubok print. It has been commonly thought this plot is a caricature of Peter the Great's burial, authored by his opponents. The caption above the cat reads: "The Cat of Kazan, the Mind of Astrakhan, the Wisdom of Siberia" (a parody of the title of Russian Czars). It has been claimed by modern researchers that this is simply a representation of carnivalesque inversion, "turning the world upside down".

In Russian, Lubok (Cyrillic: Лубок) means a variety of Russian popular prints in woodcut, characterized by simple graphics and narratives derived from literature, religious stories and popular tales. Lubki prints were used as decoration in houses and inns and might be regarded as a predecessor of the modern comic strip.

[edit] Background

Russian lubok became a popular genre of art during the last half of the seventeenth century ^[1]. Russian lubok was primarily influenced by the "woodcuts and engravings done in Germany, Italy, and France during the early part of the fifteenth century" ^[2]. Its popularity in Russia was a result of how inexpensive and fairly simple it was to duplicate a print using this new technique ^[3]. The lubok was typically sold at bazaars and other marketplaces to the lower and middle class citizens. This type of art was very popular with these two social classes because the lubok provided them with an inexpensive opportunity to display artwork in their houses ^[4].

The original lubok was a type of print that was created by using a wood board as the printing mold ^[5]. A few years later, however, the wood prints were replaced with copper engraving techniques, which enabled the prints to be more detailed and complex ^[6]. After pressing the images onto fabric, the picture would be colored with a diluted tempera paint ^[7]. While the prints themselves were typically very simplistic and unadorned, the final product, with the tempera paint added, was suprisingly bright with vivid colors and lines ^[8].

In addition to the images, these folk prints would also include a short story or lesson that correlated to the picture being presented. Folklorist Alexander Boguslawski claims that the lubok style "is a combination of Russian icon and manuscript painting traditions with the ideas and topics of western European woodcuts" ^[9]. Typically, the lubok's artist would include minimal text on the canvas that was suplimentary to the larger illustration that would cover the majority of the engraving.

[edit] Lubok Genres

Folklorist Dmitrii Rovinskii is known for his work with categorizing lubok. His system is very detailed and extensive, and his main categories are as follows: "icons and Gospel illustrations; the virtues and evils of women; teaching, alphabets, and numbers; calendars and almanacs; light reading; novels, folktales, and hero legends; stories of the Passion of Christ, the Last Judgement, and sufferings of the martyrs; popular recreation including Maslenitsa festivities, puppet comedies, drunkenness, music, dancing, and theatricals; jokes and satires related to Ivan the Terrible and Peter I; satires adopted from foreign sources; folk prayers; and government sposored pictorial information sheets, including proclamations and news items" ^[10]. Please note that many lubki can be classified according to more than just one of these categories.

[edit] References

[edit] External link

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Lubok

• National Library of Russia - Lubok prints
• Alexander Boguslawski, Russian Lubok
• Gallery of modern tongue-in-cheek Lubok