Word: popova
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...painted wood; the disembodied black and red squares of now cracking paint. French gallerygoers 100 years ago never felt like this about the art of the French Revolution. Jacques-Louis David looked old-fashioned by then, whereas Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, Liubov Popova and all their colleagues in the ism soup of the Russian artistic vanguard still look fresh and daring...
...LIUBOV POPOVA RETROSPECTIVE, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Though she died at 35 in 1924, Popova is considered one of the leading artists of the Russian avant-garde. She was a determined painter with a passionate sense of the edge where formal research bursts into sparks and arpeggios of lyric feeling. June 23 through...
Unlike Malevich, Liubov Popova died young -- scarlet fever got her in 1924, before Stalin's purges could. She was only 35. At least she was spared the miseries of censorship and persecution visited on other Russian avant-gardists by Stalin. Moreover, she died at a time when it was still possible for an idealistic, exuberantly gifted young artist like herself to believe in the promise of Leninism. Her last works, such as the 1923 collage stage design for a play about the revolution called Earth in Turmoil -- showing a helmeted aviator, prototype of the new Soviet Man, gazing...
...same, Popova's talents as a painter could hardly have grown as fast and as confidently as they did without the security of her liberal, upper- middle-class background, the way of life the revolution mercilessly crushed. She was the adored child of a rich Moscow textile merchant, whose money enabled her to go to Paris in 1913 and study under those secondary Cubists, Jean Metzinger and Henri le Fauconnier. Even her student work -- the big studio nudes in a Cubist idiom represented in the show -- has striking analytic toughness. Its painted planes, jutting and curling in imagined space, become...
...sculpture was basically too material an art for Popova. A gifted colorist, she wanted to explore what illusions of visual depth and energy a flat surface could contain. One sees this ambition unfolding phase by phase with a steadfast, though unprogrammed, logic. Malevich catalyzed her in 1915, but her series of "Painterly Architectonics" is by no means an imitation of the look of his Suprematism. They are equally inspired by the planes and colors of ancient Russian and Islamic architecture; she married an architectural historian and went as far afield as Samarkand. Occasionally her work strikes an apocalyptic, Kandinsky-like...