Russian painter and designer, born near Moscow. She was one of the leading figures of Russian avant-garde art in its most exciting period, but she died tragically young of scarlet fever. After studying painting in Moscow, 1907–8, she travelled extensively (she came from a wealthy bourgeois family) and in 1912–13 worked in Paris, frequenting the studios of two *Cubist artists—*Le Fauconnier and *Metzinger. When the First World War broke out she returned from Italy to Moscow, where she worked with *Tatlin and contributed to major avant-garde exhibitions. From Cubism she developed to complete abstraction in a series of pictures she called Painterly Architectonics (1916–20). They owe something to both Tatlin and *Malevich, but have a distinctive voice, especially in her rich colouring.
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Camilla Gray (The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863–1922, 1962) writes that ‘after Tatlin and Malevich, Popova was the outstanding painter of the post-1914 abstract schools in Russia…[Her paintings] are often executed on a rough board, and the angular forms—in strong blues, greens and reds—are brushed in on this crude, raw surface, leaving the impression of lightning-swift movement, a darting, breathless meeting of forces, a kiss-imprint, as it were, of the driving energy around us.’ Popova also worked as a designer of costumes and sets for the stage and of textiles (‘everyday clothes for women in which subtle geometric patterns were placed against a plain background’, Anna Moszynska, Abstract Art, 1990). Her best-known stage designs are her *Constructivist sets for Vsevolod Meyerhold's production of Fernand Crommelynck's The Magnanimous Cuckold (1922) at the Actors' Theatre in Moscow.
Text source: A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art (Oxford University Press)
