Dabrowski Magdalena. Liubov Popova

New York : The Museum of Modern Art, 1991. — 136 p., ill. — ISBN: 0-87070-567-9, 0-87070-568-7, 0-8109-6090-7Constructivist artist Liubov Popova is recognized, along with Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, and Alexander Rodchenko, as one of the most important original artists of the Russian avant-garde and as one of the most vital and talented women artists of the twentieth century. Until recently, most of her work has been little known to the Western public. This handsomely illustrated volume presents a comprehensive selection of Liubov Popova's paintings, works on paper, and reliefs, as well as theater, textile, and book designs—many from important Soviet collections. Examples of all the artist's stylistic developments—from figuration through abstraction to utilitarian design—are represented in this retrospective of her brief but brilliant artistic life. Popova's career, cut short in 1924 by her death at the age of thirty-five, spans the years of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the immediate post-revolutionary period. Born in 1889, the daughter of a wealthy textile manufacturer and patron of music and the theater, Liubov Sergeevna Popova was able to travel extensively throughout Russia and visit France and Italy. There, as a young woman, she encountered the first flowering of Cubism and Futurism in the heady artistic atmosphere of prewar Europe. During the war years in Russia, she participated in the intense and lively avant-garde artistic activities of the time, in the development of new ideologies and non-objective styles, and in the controversies among the partisans of Russian traditional art and those of the new Western influence. Popova contributed throughout the revolutionary period to the formation of Constructivist theory and to Soviet utopian efforts to establish a scientific basis for the creation of art.This volume is published to accompany the first retrospective exhibition of Popova's work to be held in the United States. Its principal essay, by Magdalena Dabrowski, the director of the exhibition, analyzes Popova's formal and spatial innovations, highlighting the evolution of her style from an early pre-Cubist phase through the Cubo-Futurist years, the Suprematist and early Constructivist period of her Painterly Architectonics, and the later stages of Constructivism and production art. Also included in the book are a text on the artist's working methods and materials by Eugena Ordonez, Associate Conservator at The Museum of Modern Art; an essay by Irina Pronina, Senior Research Curator at the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; a detailed chronology of Popova's life; and a bibliography.Foreword. Richard E. OldenburgLiubov Popova: Artist-Constructor. Magdalena Dabrowski
Plates
Popova's Working Methods and Materials. Eugena Ordonez
Popova at the Tretyakov Gallery. Irina ProninaChronologyCatalogue of the ExhibitionLenders to the Exhibition
Trustees of The Museum of Modern Art
Photograph Credits