Lyubov Sergeyevna Popova was a Russian artist, designer, teacher, and art theorist. She was a follower of different art movements, including Cubism, Suprematism, Constructivism, and Avant-garde. She was an active Communist in the 1917 Russian Revolution and the years that followed.
Background
Popova was born in Ivanovskoye District, Moscow, Russian Federation, on April 24, 1889, into an affluent family of Moscow factory owners. She was the daughter of Sergei Maximovich Popov, an extremely successful textile merchant and eager patron of the arts, and Lyubov Vasilievna Zubova, who was from a highly cultured family. Lyubov Popova had three siblings, two brothers, Sergei and Pavel, and a sister, Olga. Pavel Popov became a philosopher.
Education
Lyubov Popova had a strong interest in art since her early childhood. Raised in this creative environment, she pursued drawing and sketching and had a particular fondness for the Italian Renaissance. At the age of eleven, she began formal art lessons at home. Then she enrolled in Yaltinskaia's Women's Gymnasium, and later in Arseneva's Gymnasium in Moscow.
Unlike many of her contemporaries, who had peasant origins, Popova's well-off background allowed her to travel a lot to expand her artistic education. In 1909 she went to Northern Russia and Kiev to view murals and mosaics in churches and monasteries. The bright colours of Russian icon painting strongly inspired her.
By the age of 18, Popova was studying at the Moscow art studio of the Polish-Russian landscape painter Stanislav Zhukovsky, who also counted the young artist and poet Vladimir Mayakovsky amongst his students. In 1908 she attended the private studios of Konstantin Yuon and Ivan Dudin.
Lyubov Popova's art education thrived further in 1912 when she travelled to Paris with fellow painter Nadezhda Udaltsova to study at the private art school, the Académie de la Palette. From 1912 to 1913 she was also a student in the studios of the Cubist painters Henri Le Fauconnier and Jean Metzinger. She studied the figure as depicted in the artworks of Fernand Leger and the dynamic sculptures of the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni.
When she returned to Moscow, she continued to study the French avant-garde by visiting the collection of Sergei Shchukin. A prosperous businessman and ardent art collector, Shchukin regularly opened his home for public viewings, introducing Russian society to the works of such artists as Picasso, Gauguin, and Matisse.
Popova worked with Vladimir Tatlin in his studio, The Tower, in 1913. She was enormously impressed by Tatlin's three-dimensional works. Soon she started to experiment with collage and produced increasingly non-figurative painted reliefs using such materials as cardboard alongside thickly applied paint. She began to exhibit her works along with her contemporaries, including artists Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova, who also tried to find new ways of combining traditional Russian motifs with modern art. In 1914 she made her trips to France and Italy at the development of Cubism and Futurism.
From 1914 to 1915 her Moscow home became a real meeting-place for artists and writers. Lyubov Popova took part in many exhibitions before and after the Russian Revolution of 1917, for instance, the Jack of Diamonds (1914, 1916), Tramway V: First Futurist Exhibition of Paintings and 0.10: The Last Futurist Exhibition (1915), The Fifth State Exhibition: From Impressionism to Non-Objective Art (1918), and The Tenth State Exhibition: Non-Objective Creativity and Suprematism (1919).
In 1916 she joined the Supremus group with Kazimir Malevich, the founder of Suprematism, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Olga Rozanova, Ivan Puni, Nina Genke, Aleksandra Ekster, Ivan Kliun, Ksenia Boguslavskaya and others who at this time worked in Verbovka Village Folk Centre. Since displaying his painting Black Square at the 0.10: The Last Futurist Exhibition in 1915, Kazimir Malevich promoted a move into purely abstract art as a celebration of a world without capitalist signs and values.
However, there was a strain between those who, like Malevich, saw art as a spiritual quest, and others who responded to the need for the painter to create an absolutely new physical world. Lyubov Popova supported both of these ideals but eventually associated herself completely with the aims of the Revolution working in poster, book design, fabric and theatre design, as well as teaching.
In 1916 Popova started to paint entirely abstract Suprematist artworks, however, the title "Painterly Architectonics" (which she gave to many of her works) proves that even as a Suprematist, Lyubov Popova was more interested in painting as a projection of material reality than as the personal expression of a metaphysical reality.
The events of October 1917 had thorough and long-lasting aftermaths throughout the world. Lyubov Popova, like many of the Russian avant-garde, identified with the aims of the Revolution and was excited by the new possibilities and the role art would take in future society. Popova became politically active through her art, creating posters and book designs for the cause.
During the Civil War, which occurred between 1917 and 1920, she worked in the Fine Art Department of the People's Commissariat for Enlightenment and served as a teacher at the Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops (Vkhutemas), later known as Vkhutein.
The Revolution changed the way Popova saw her art. Following 1917, there was a tension between the Suprematists, who saw art as anti-material and spiritual, and the Constructivists, who saw it as serving the Revolution in a practical way. The artist continued creating abstract paintings and later she joined Aleksander Rodchenko's Constructivist circle, which abandoned easel painting at their 1921 exhibition 5 x 5.
She worked in a broad range of mediums and disciplines throughout her career, with the aim of contributing to the making of the new society. Popova produced new typography and book covers, created designs for theatre sets and costumes, and designed fabric and printed textiles for the First State Textile Printing Works in Moscow. She also continued to teach art theory at Vkhutemas and contribute designs for dresses to LEF, the journal of the Left Front of the Arts.
Production Clothing for Actor no.5' in Fernand Crommelynck's play 'The magnanimous Cuckold'
painting
Portrait of the Artist's Sister
Spatial Force Construction
Air Man Space
The Traveler
Space Force Construction
Space Force Construction
The Jug on the Table
Lineare Composition
Space Force Construction
Painterly Architectonic
Untitled
Still Life with Instruments
Portrait
Untitled Compositions
Painterly Architectonic
Space Force Construction
The Pianist
Cubist landscape city
Portrait of a Philosopher
Building the Revolution. Soviet Art and Architecture
Violin
Relief
Architectonic Painting
Painterly-Architectonic
Dramatic Architecture
Architectonics in Painting
Still life with tray
Still Life with Guitar
Architectonics in Painting
Painterly Architectonic
With full force
Sketch for portrait
Composition with Figures
Magazine cover design for Questions of Stenography
Space Force Construction
Views
Quotations:
"The role of the 'representational arts' - painting, sculpture, and even architecture... has ended, as it is no longer necessary for the consciousness of our age, and everything art has to offer can simply be classified as a throwback."
"No artistic success has given me such satisfaction as the sight of a peasant or a worker buying a length of material designed by me."
"The past is for history. The present and the future are for organizing life, for organizing what is both creative will and creative exigency."
"We are breaking with the past because we cannot accept its hypotheses. We ourselves are creating our own hypotheses anew and only upon them, as in our inventions, can we build our new life and new world-view."
"Revolution in art has always predicted the breaking of the old public consciousness and the appearance of a new order in life."
"An analysis of the conception of the subject as distinguished from its representational significance lies at the basis of our approach toward reality."
"In the absolute freedom of non-objectivity and under the precise dictation of its consciousness (which helps the expediency and necessity of the new artistic organization to manifest themselves), [the artist] is now constructing [his] own art, with total conviction."
Membership
Lyubov Popova joined the Suprematist group in 1916, founded by Kazimir Malevich. In 1917 Popova entered the Left-Wing Federation of the Moscow Artists' Union and later also became a member of the Institute of Artistic Culture (Inkhuk), which was run by Wassily Kandinsky.
Suprematist group
,
Russian Federation
1916
Moscow Artists' Union
,
Russian Federation
1917
Connections
Lyubov Popova married the art historian Boris von Eding in 1918. The couple gave birth to one child. Von Eding died of typhoid fever in 1919. Popova was also seriously ill but recovered. In 1924 her son died of scarlet fever.
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