Think of them as the museum equivalent of “The Nutcracker,”Ã? a holiday attraction meant to please children and adults, novices and specialists.
The first thing you notice about the 60 Russian lacquer boxes is their size and their color. These tiny containers, which are just a few inches in dimension, seem incongruously small for a land as large as Russia, which spans 11 time zones. And the bright colors — rich reds, greens and golds — seem out of place for a country often associated with drabness and wintery white or gray.
But there they are, sitting in the small second-floor Mayer Gallery of the University of Wisconsin’s Chazen Museum of Art, 800 University Ave., through Jan. 14.