ART REVIEW : Popova Exhibition Confirms Russian’s Avant-Garde Stature

To understand the extraordinary significance of the work of Russian artist Liubov Popova (1889-1924), a rather intrepid leap is required. The reason is that her most startlingly original contribution came only after she repudiated easel painting.

Although she painted almost all her tragically brief life, often in bold and dramatically convincing ways, Popova’s fundamental achievement will be found in the designs for textiles, typography, theater sets and costumes dating from her last four years. This is not a field in which we are used to identifying the highest artistic merit, an arena where painting typically counts for more than “mere” utilitarian design ever could.

Nor is this how Museum of Modern Art curator Magdalena Dabrowski, organizer of the otherwise indispensable Popova retrospective opening Sunday at the Los ngeles County Museum of Art, would assess the Russian’s import. Yet that is precisely how the exhibition, which admirably lays out her trajectory in a clear and straight for ward way, conveys Popova’s remarkable development as an artist.

Popova’s art has been little known in the West. Since LACMA’s groundbreaking 1980 show, “The Avant-Garde in Russia: 1910-1930,” interest has accelerated. The 55 paintings and 67 works on paper in the present exhibition make up the first substantive presentation of her art outside the Soviet Union. They confirm Popova’s stature as an artist who, among the Russian avant-garde, ranks with Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko and Vladimir Tatlin.

Popova died of scarlet fever at the age of 35. Along with other artists associated with the revolutionary government’s Institute of Artistic Culture, she had formally rejected easel painting less than three years before, in late 1921. Perhaps the most compelling revelation of the retrospective is the pivotal role played by her last series of abstract paintings in the subsequent triumph of her textile and theater designs.

These “Space-Force Constructions,” as Popova called them, constituted her most radical and original work to date. Typically painted on raw plywood, they are composed of open networks of crisscrossing straight lines, their intersections shaded in feathery brush strokes. (Imagine snow gently piled in the mullions of a window pane, and you’ll have some idea of the abstract design.)

Aiming to create lines of force across the surface of the panel, to generate ambiguous qualities of shifting space and to banish any distinction between figure and ground, the seven “Space-Force Constructions” at LACMA are markedly different from anything else being painted in the period, and from anything Popova herself had done before.

This is important because the retrospective is a chronicle of Popova’s accelerating assimilation of avant-garde styles, pioneered by others, in the seven years following her 1913 foray into the new Cubist idiom. She was a remarkably astute sponge, quickly soaking up and bending to her own will the most pertinent aspects of French Cubism, Italian Futurism and her Russian colleagues’ Suprematist and Constructivist abstraction.

The speed with which she recognized and embraced avant-garde developments can be seen in the four canvasses that introduce the show. In just five years’ time, a staid if accomplished realist “Still Life,” begun when she was 19, gives way to the highly sophisticated organization of “Composition With Figures,” melding new Cubist and Futurist precedents. Picasso, Braque, Metzinger, Boccioni, Tatlin, Malevich--during the 1910s Popova took what she needed from them all, and more.

What this suggests, and what her paintings confirm, is that the language of art, rather than of nature, was the touchstone for Popova’s work. Certainly, her early ink and pencil studies of tree branches resemble the general structure employed in her late “Space-Force Constructions.” But it is to other art that she most often turned for inspiration.

She also repeatedly reworked motifs from her own paintings. Three similar pictures of a seated nude were painted not just from a live model, but from close observation of each other. A prominent detail of “Lady With a Guitar” (1915) turns up later that year as the focus of a painted wall-relief, which simultaneously recalls some ribbon-like forms in the still life “Objects From the Dyer’s Shop” from the year before. Even the stylized pose of a foot in a 1921 theatrical costume design is nearly identical to that of the early seated nude.

The show’s catalogue is very good at tracing the twists and turns in Popova’s shifting stylistic journey. (Be aware that the color in the copious reproductions is awful; it’s far too blue.) Yet formal analysis alone is insufficient for this art, and the curator offers no discussion whatever of the paintings’ subject matter.

A picture such as “Objects From the Dyer’s Shop” is curiously revealing for its subject, not just for its Cubo-Futurist style. In vivid colors spanning the spectrum, Popova lays out on a table the jacket of a uniform, a plumed hat, white gloves and a shirt.

The material transformation of these objects through saturation with color--the dyer’s trade--is something she would have known from childhood. (Popova was the daughter of a prosperous textile merchant, who also happened to be a patron of the theater.) One can only wonder at the possible implications, just at the bloody launch of World War I, of her choice of a military uniform as the pictorial object of transformation.

Style, subject and material here begin to be seen as all-of-a-piece, rather than as independent entities simply working in concert with one another as in a traditional composition. As Popova was to write at the time of her 1921 repudiation of easel painting, “transformation for the sake of painterly or sculptural construction is a revelation of our artistic revolution.” Popova’s clear and steady accumulation of radical artistic ideas eventually brought her to a purely abstract phase, indebted to (if quite different from) Malevich’s Suprematism, until finally she reached the “Space-Force Constructions.” Here, at the moment of her first wholly original effort, she stumbles for the first time. The paintings, which mean to unify pure and rational elements of surface, material, color, space and movement, are simply not convincing.

Painting was not easily repudiated, but when she finally did it, Popova’s work took off. Textile and theater design, which had been a vocabulary familiar from her earliest years, became the real-life arena for the interaction of all those elements that frankly could not transcend the stubborn illusionism of painting.

Therein lies the surprise disclosure of the exhibition: Liubov Popova was to find her authentic voice not through the supposed success of her painting, but through its ultimate failure.

In the current, belated effort to resuscitate her reputation in the modern avant-garde, a critical (if unsurprising) deformation is taking place. The artist is being made into a conventional hero, and the orthodox tale of heroic modern art is a story told principally through painting. Dare it be suggested that Liubov Popova’s momentous achievement in design is unconsciously regarded as lesser because, traditionally, costumes and textiles are seen as merely “women’s work”?

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000, Sunday through Aug. 18.

POPOVA EXPERIMENTS

Other groundbreaking works by the revolutionary Russian artist are also on exhibit. F13