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Liubov Popova: Art Into Life
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18625 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1991 |
1,499 Words |
| Author
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Jason Edward Kaufman
Jason Edward Kaufman is an art historian and critic based in
New York. |
Though Liubov Popova died at thirty-five after a brief twelve-year career, the artist remains the most prominent Soviet woman of the early Modern avant-garde. With the recent resurgence of interest in the art of that period, examples of her work have trickled into surveys in the West. But only now is the little-known Russian Constructivist the subject of a full-scale show.
This retrospective, organized by Magdalena Dabrowski, associate curator in the Department of Drawings of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in collaboration with the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art and the Ludwig Museum of Cologne, assembles fifty-five paintings and reliefs and sixty works on paper, with a selection of designs for theater sets and costumes, textiles, books, and graphics largely from Soviet collections. The illustrated catalog is the second English-language monograph on the artist published in the last year.
Liubov Sergeevna Popova (1889-1924) was born near Moscow to a wealthy czarist Russian family. She traveled extensively through Russia, France, and Italy before the First World War, then participated in the cultural and artistic upheaval taking place in Russia. After the October revolution, she became deeply involved in the Constructivist effort to unite art and life in the service of the new social order.
The show is presented as a play in three acts: Act I opens with Cezannesque landscapes, figures, and still-lifes, then fractures into Cubism and Cubo-Futurism (1913-15); Act II consists of non-objective geometric abstraction and quasi-Suprematist Constructivism (1916-19) that shifts into Orphic swirls and Rayonist dynamism (1920-21); Act III culminates with designs for theater, textiles, and other applied arts of utility (1922-24).
This series of abrupt transitions demonstrates a pictorial evolution driven by theoretical considerations crucial to understanding the work. Popova described her purposeful development as follows:
The Cubist period (the problem of form) is followed by the Futurist period (the problem of motion and color); the principle of the abstraction of the parts of an object is followed with logical inevitability by the abstraction of the object itself. This is the road to nonobjectiveness. The representational problem is followed by the problem of the construction of color and line (Post-Cubism) and of color (Suprematism).
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