Dabrowski M. Liubov Popova. — New York, 1991

Constructivist 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.

 

Magdalena Dabrowski is Associate Curator in the Department of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art and the author of Contrasts of Form: Geometric Abstract Art 1910–1980 (1985) and The Drawings of Philip Gusfon (1988).

 

This book has been published on the occasion of the exhibition "Liubov Popova," the first retrospective in the West of this very important but not sufficiently recognized member of the Russian avant-garde of the early twentieth century.

 

It is hoped that both the book and the exhibition will foster wider appreciation of Popova's work and of her spirit of innovation.

 

The exhibition has been organized in collaboration with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. We warmly thank the directors of these institutions, Earl A. Powell, III, in Los Angeles and Siegfried Gohr in Cologne, and our colleagues on their staffs for their active participation in this effort.

 

The presentation of this exhibition has in large part been made possible through the cooperation of the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; Dimitri Sarabianov, Professor of Art History, Moscow University; the State Russian Museum, Leningrad; and the George Costakis Collection (Art Co. Ltd.). Thanks to their interest and assistance, Popova's works, which have been dispersed since her death in 1924 among Soviet and Western collections, could be brought together here and introduced to a larger public in the West. For the participation of the State Tretyakov Gallery, I want to express our special gratitude to Yuri Korolyov, General Director, and Lydia Iovleva, Deputy Director. For essential loans from the State Russian Museum, we are most grateful to Vladimir Gusev, Director, and Eugenia Petrova, Deputy Director. And for the tremendous generosity of the George Costakis Collection a special debt of gratitude is owed Aliki Costakis.

 

Generous support for the exhibition has been provided by grants from The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art, The Howard Gilman Foundation, Tambrands Inc., the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts. We deeply appreciate their assistance and encouragement.

 

This publication has been graciously supported by The Tobin Foundation and The Howard Gilman Foundation. I want to express my very warm gratitude to Robert L. B. Tobin and to Howard Gilman for their interest in this project and for their help in its realization.

 

This undertaking could not have been accomplished without the exemplary dedication and scholarship of Magdalena Dabrowski, director of the exhibition and author of the main text of this publication. Both the book and exhibition reflect her thorough knowledge of the art of this period, her perceptive eye for its outstanding qualities, and her enthusiastic commitment to communicate her own admiration for these works to a broader public.

 

Finally, we extend our deep gratitude to all the lenders whose gracious cooperation and involvement hove made this exhibition and publication possible.