'Vera Mukhina: Dialogues, Facets,' an exhibition currently on show at the All-Russian Museum of Decorative and Applied Arts in Moscow, brings together glass, porcelain, and costumes to reveal this monumental Soviet sculptor in an unexpectedly fragile and luminous light.

A useful key to this exhibition can be found in a passage from ‘What Is to Be Done?’ by the nineteenth-century Russian writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky. In the novel, he describes a future communist paradise which, in the spirit of Enlightenment utopias, takes the form of a crystal palace supported by luminous columns—a symbol of transparency and a radiant urban vision of liberated humanity.

The central figure of the exhibition, the Soviet monumental sculptor Vera Mukhina (1889–1953), gave striking material form to this dream. While working at the Leningrad Artistic Glass Factory, she introduced glass into the design of Leningrad's Avtovo metro station, opened in 1955. To this day, the station's gleaming translucent columns continue to astonish visitors. Created using the slumping technique, in which sheets of glass are shaped through heat, they transform the platform into an underground palace for the workers of Leningrad, carrying them collectively through the city after their shifts. In doing so, they embody the Soviet ideal of transport as a form of social, ideological, and communal connection.

These luminous columns evoke the paradise imagined by Chernyshevsky and serve as a powerful metaphor for the exhibition itself. They point towards a communist future while projecting an image of the Soviet person—an image that is at once transparent, fragile, and ghostly.

The exhibition's principal works are made of glass and porcelain, while a selection of costumes introduces associations with theatre, performance, and fashion. Together, these ephemeral objects cast new light on Vera Mukhina, the celebrated "Amazon" of Soviet monumental sculpture, whose most famous work, ‘Worker and Kolkhoz Woman’ (1937), became one of the defining symbols of Soviet Socialist Realism and the artistic ambitions of the Soviet state.

Thanks to curator Kirill Gavrilin and architect Yulia Napolova, the exhibition is stylish and visually engaging, with objects displayed in elegant cases and set against mirrored surfaces. Threading through the exhibition is an exploration of Vera Mukhina's relationship to the dominant international style of the 1920s and 1930s, Art Deco. It is a rich and thought-provoking theme that reveals unexpected complexities within her work.

One gallery in the exhibition's enfilade is devoted to a reduced version of Mukhina's celebrated ‘Worker and Kolkhoz Woman’. Created for Boris Iofan's (1891–1976) Soviet Pavilion at the 1937 Paris World's Fair, the sculpture has become one of the most universally recognised symbols of Socialist Realism. In the figures of the worker and the kolkhoz woman one finds, entirely in keeping with the doctrine of Socialist Realism, a vision of "reality in its revolutionary development", combined with the creative use of the traditions of world realist art. The composition itself draws upon the famous fifth-century BC Greek sculptural group of the tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton.

Yet the work is far from straightforwardly classical. The sharply profiled, geometric forms of the plinth evoke the Architectons of Suprematism, while the neoclassical treatment of the figures is tempered by a distinctly modern sensibility. The use of repoussé sheet steel, together with the expressive quality of the visible welding seams, lends the sculpture an almost Cubist dynamism. The result is a work that reconciles seemingly opposing tendencies: technological innovation and classical tradition, avant-garde experimentation and ideological conservatism.

This fusion of apparently incompatible elements lies at the heart of the sculpture's enduring fascination and goes a long way towards explaining the artistic power of what remains one of the defining masterpieces of Socialist Realism.

In my view, the notions of the “oxymoron” and the “showcase” are the two keys to understanding both Art Deco and Vera Mukhina's work as it is presented in this exhibition at the Museum of Decorative and Applied Arts. Mukhina fits remarkably well within the paradigm of the style, which thrived on the reconciliation of apparent opposites.

The exhibition opens with the Parisian and Venetian experiences that shaped the young artist in the early 1910s. Her understanding of the new formal language of Cubism and Futurism—developed through her friendship with Lyubov Popova (1889–1924) and through her studies under the Cubist masters Henri Le Fauconnier (1881–1946) and Jean Metzinger (1883–1956)—was combined with a profound interest in archaic cultures, medieval sculpture, and the art of the ancient East. In 1914, Mukhina visited the Venice Biennale and became fascinated by the glassmaking workshops of nearby Murano, an experience that would resonate throughout her career.

This combination of avant-garde innovation and historical reference lies at the heart of Art Deco. New technologies and experimental formal methods were fused with retrospectivism, neoclassicism, and a fascination with the ancient world. The style drew its energy from the coexistence of polar opposites: the archaic and the modern, progress and conservatism, technological optimism and nostalgia for lost civilisations. It is this fundamentally oxymoronic quality that defines Art Deco.

A separate gallery is devoted to Art Deco itself, with particular emphasis on the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts held in Paris in 1925. There, Mukhina collaborated with the fashion designer Nadezhda Lamanova (1861–1941) on a collection of women's clothing that won the Grand Prix for its “national distinctiveness combined with a contemporary fashion sensibility.” The transformable costumes displayed here similarly unite Constructivist design principles with neo-Russian decorative traditions rooted in folk culture.

Following her experiences in Paris, Mukhina absorbed the Art Deco aesthetic in many of its forms. The 1925 exhibition that gave the movement its name showcased architecture, furniture, graphic design, sculpture, and fashion united by a common visual language. In 1928, Mukhina returned to Paris on a commission from the People's Commissariat of Enlightenment to study contemporary glassmaking. The exhibition includes works by René Lalique (1860–1945), whose influence on Mukhina appears unmistakable. It is particularly evident when comparing the head of the ‘Kolkhoz Woman’ with Lalique's automobile mascot ‘Victory (Spirit of the Wind)’, created in 1928 and also featured in the exhibition.

The hard yet delicate elegance of Lalique's mascot captures the essence of Art Deco: a world of faceted forms, sharp contours, and dazzling, almost mirage-like effects. Nearby, an archival photograph of Lalique's celebrated ‘Fountain of Perfumes’ reinforces this connection. Mukhina herself frequently compared sculpture to flowing water, and the fountain's cascading geometric forms suggest a visual language that would later find monumental expression in another masterpiece of totalitarian Art Deco: Boris Iofan's Palace of the Soviets. The glass columns of the Avtovo metro station likewise recall the interiors of another icon of the style, the transatlantic liner ‘Normandie’, launched in 1932. Its sumptuous glass interiors, fountains, and illuminated columns established the standard for late Art Deco at its most theatrical and spectacular.

The second key concept of the exhibition is the "showcase". Nowhere is this more apparent than in the long gallery lined with vitrines filled with fragile glass and porcelain objects, where Soviet works stand alongside creations by contemporary artists. Display itself was one of Art Deco's most powerful expressive devices. The style celebrated the luxurious life lived within a perfectly engineered and technologically sophisticated environment. Its compressed volumes, streamlined silhouettes, and sharply defined edges inherited much from the formal vocabulary of Constructivism. Yet its underlying ethos was fundamentally different, serving to legitimise a conservative and consumer-oriented vision of modernity.

In the Art Deco imagination, the world becomes a collection of precious objects to be carefully packaged, displayed, and admired. This logic produced jewelled brooches inspired by colonial fantasies, the streamlined glamour of automobiles and ocean liners, and the gleaming glass façades of modern skyscrapers. Every display case was required to be both fashionable and contemporary while simultaneously conveying the prestige and historical

The products of Soviet factories such as Krasny Gigant in Nikolsk and the Leningrad Artistic Glass Factory functioned both as records of industrial achievement under Mukhina's direction and as showcases of an idealised Soviet way of life. The exhibition is thoughtfully framed by works from contemporary artists, including Andrei Krivolapov (b. 1976), Alexandra Yarmolnik (b. 1983), and Alexei Dyakov (b. 1976). Their fusion of medieval archaism with contemporary approaches to form and technique suggests that the spirit of Art Deco remains very much alive. It survives, perhaps, in its most ethereal guise: the ghostly, transparent medium of glass itself.