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Lot Essay
At the apex of Liubov Popova’s brief yet extraordinary career, the Painterly Architectonics of 1918 crystallised her radical redefinition of painting as a dynamic structure of colour, line and form. In the present work, planes of emerald green, deep indigo, luminous blue and chalky white converge upon the commanding black form at the centre of the composition. Nothing is static: forms advance and recede, overlap and intersect, their competing trajectories held in finely calibrated tension. Colour, line and texture, animated by reflected light and heightened through the deliberate use of varnish, become active agents of construction, generating the very space of the composition.
It is this principle of construction that lies at the core of Popova’s Painterly Architectonics. The term invokes architecture not as a subject to be represented, but as an organising principle: the painting becomes an autonomous structure in which each element derives its force from its relationship to the whole. As Popova herself explained, ‘Pictorial space is constructed through the stage-like interrelationship of planes; line is introduced independently of volume, in its pure form, as a graphic delineation; colour assumes a textural function, and it is through the intensity of colour that space is constructed.’ In the present work, this architectonic logic is made palpable as planes acquire weight, direction and resistance, pressing against, penetrating and counterbalancing one another. The painting does not imitate architecture; rather, it translates its principles of construction and interdependence into non-objective form, achieving harmony through the dynamic equilibrium of opposing forces.
Comparison with Popova’s Painterly Architectonics of 1917 in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, reveals how dramatically she advanced this principle within a single year. In the earlier composition, individual coloured planes retain a greater degree of autonomy, their contours remaining readily discernible as they overlap, advance and recede. By 1918, as the present painting demonstrates, the forms have become inseparably interlocked: planes intersect, cut into and appear to penetrate one another, while the commanding black element becomes indivisible from the surrounding blues, greens and whites. No neutral ground remains against which individual forms can be isolated; the entire surface has become an integrated field of interacting forces.
Popova arrived at this radical conception through a broad and remarkably cosmopolitan formation. Raised in a prosperous merchant family with a strong tradition of artistic patronage, she studied in Moscow under Stanislav Zhukovsky and subsequently Konstantin Yuon and Ivan Dudin, while encountering the pioneering work of Picasso, Braque, Matisse and other leading modernists in Sergei Shchukin’s celebrated collection. Her horizons were further expanded by travels across Russia and Europe: in Italy, she encountered the masters of the Renaissance and, later, the innovations of Futurism, while her study of Russian icons and architecture, together with her deep appreciation for the work of Mikhail Vrubel, introduced her to profoundly different conceptions of colour, perspective and pictorial form.
Her engagement with the European avant-garde intensified in the autumn of 1912, when she travelled to Paris and enrolled at the Académie de La Palette in Montparnasse, studying under Henri Le Fauconnier and Jean Metzinger. Her choice of teachers was unlikely to have been incidental: both had already exhibited in Moscow at the landmark Jack of Diamonds exhibition of 1910-11, while their reputations were gaining ground within progressive artistic circles. Together with Albert Gleizes, Metzinger had published Du ‘Cubisme’ in 1912, the first major theoretical exposition of Cubism. Translated into Russian by Mikhail Matiushin the following year, the text became an important conduit for Cubist theory in Russia, contributing to the ferment of experimentation then transforming its artistic landscape.
Returning to Moscow in the summer of 1913, Popova entered directly into this rapidly evolving milieu, joining Vladimir Tatlin’s co-operative studio The Tower, colloquially known as Morgunovka after its co-founder, the artist Aleksei Morgunov. Over the following years, she absorbed and transformed the structural lessons of Cubism, the dynamism of Futurism and the increasingly radical experiments of Tatlin and Malevich. By 1916, she had arrived at her own distinctive conception of non-objective painting, fusing the flatness and linearity of Old Russian icon painting with the lessons she had absorbed from Cubo-Futurism and the radical formal language of Suprematism. From this synthesis emerged her Painterly Architectonics.
Yet Popova’s conception remained fundamentally distinct from Malevich’s. Where Malevich liberated geometric forms into the potentially limitless space of Suprematism, Popova compressed hers into compositions of density, materiality and force, binding colour, plane and texture into tightly interdependent structures. The dialogue between non-objective form and architecture would later find three-dimensional expression in Malevich’s Architectons of the 1920s: autonomous, non-utilitarian structures that translated Suprematism into physical space. In Popova’s Painterly Architectonics, by contrast, the architectonic principle remains concentrated within the pictorial field. Neither Cubist fragmentation nor Suprematist suspension, these works constituted a language entirely her own and one of her most original contributions to twentieth-century non-objective art.
Painted in 1918, in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the present Painterly Architectonic belongs to one of the most transformative moments in Popova’s career and in the wider history of modernism. As the established political and social order was swept away, the prospect of constructing a new society appeared to demand an equally fundamental reconstruction of art. For Popova and her contemporaries, painting became a laboratory in which new relationships of form, space and construction could be tested - principles that might ultimately extend beyond the canvas into the material world.
For Popova, that transition came with extraordinary speed. Her increasingly linear Space-Force Constructions became her final series of easel paintings and, in 1921, she joined Aleksandr Rodchenko, Alexandra Exter, Varvara Stepanova and Aleksandr Vesnin in the seminal 5 × 5 = 25 exhibition, conceived as a final presentation of easel painting before her decisive turn towards the ‘organisation of the material environment’. Thereafter, theatre, typography, textiles and clothing became the principal arenas of her practice, carrying the experimental principles forged in painting into the sphere of everyday life.
This extraordinary trajectory was brought to an abrupt end in May 1924 when, at just thirty-five, Popova contracted scarlet fever from her young son, whom she survived by only two days. In preparation for a posthumous exhibition, her brother Pavel Popov and two close friends: Aleksandr Vesnin, painter, stage designer and influential Constructivist architect, and Ivan Aksenov, poet, critic and historian of literature and art, undertook the task of documenting her artistic legacy. The present painting may correspond to no. 121 in their unpublished inventory of the works remaining in Popova’s possession, recorded as Painterly Architectonic, 1918, ‘green with blue’, among forty-four works listed under the title Painterly Architectonic. With a single apparent exception dating from 1915, these span the remarkably concentrated period from 1916 to 1918, charting one of the most intense and consequential phases of Popova’s mature artistic development.
Within a year of her death, Popova’s posthumous exhibition was mounted at the Museum of Painterly Culture in Moscow, then housed at Vkhutemas (the Higher Art and Technical Studios), where she herself had taught from 1920 to 1923. Originally scheduled to open on 21 December 1924, though likely delayed until February 1925, it brought together nearly one hundred works. Its accompanying catalogue featured a strikingly bold cover designed by Aleksandr Rodchenko, Popova’s close friend and artistic ally, with whom she shared a belief in art’s capacity to transform the material environment and everyday life. The catalogue lists the Painterly Architectonics by date alone, precluding a definitive association of the present composition with an individual catalogue number. Its inclusion in the exhibition is, however, firmly established by an archival installation photograph, in which it can be seen at the far right of the upper row.
Reviewing the exhibition in 1925, Aksenov observed that, despite the successive transformations of Popova’s artistic language, the underlying principle governing her compositions had remained remarkably consistent from the outset of her career. He recalled that in her later years Popova increasingly spoke of the ‘mathematical character of her constructions’, relying less on the eye and instead employing mechanical methods to divide lines and planes: ‘at their points of intersection, the lines of the graphic construction divide one another into segments in the ratio of 1:2; the angles formed by two lines intersecting a third, when oriented in the same direction, preserve the same ratio’ (I. Aksenov, ‘Posmertnaia vystavka L. S. Popovoi’, Zhizn’ iskusstva, 1925, no. 5, p. 5). Aksenov’s account provides a contemporary key to the present work, whose intersecting lines and sharply articulated planes are bound by carefully calibrated angles and proportions into a taut compositional structure.
The present Painterly Architectonic was subsequently included in the ground-breaking 1991-92 retrospective Liubov Popova, organised by Magdalena Dabrowski at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, situating the work within the broader reassessment of Popova’s achievement at the close of the twentieth century. The first major exhibition devoted to Popova outside Russia, it marked a watershed in the reception of an artist whose contribution to twentieth-century modernism had long remained less familiar in the West than that of Malevich, Tatlin and Rodchenko. Bringing together over a hundred paintings, works on paper and designs, the exhibition later travelled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, introducing the full breadth of Popova’s work to a wider international audience.
In preparation for the exhibition, museum’s conservator Eugenia Ordonez undertook a technical examination of selected paintings and works on paper, including the present Painterly Architectonic, providing exceptional insight into Popova’s materials and working methods. Executed on a thin brown grass-fibre board, most likely prepared by the artist herself and coated with a lead-white ground, the composition was first established through a spare black linear underdrawing, elements of which remain deliberately visible. Remarkably little alteration was made to this underlying structure, suggesting that Popova determined the essential architecture of the composition from the outset. She instead developed the painting through colour and matter, building successive layers of oil paint of differing opacity and texture. In the blue passages, coarse, heavily worked upper layers lie over smoother blue-grey underpaint, while calcite, chemically identified in the present painting, was added as an extender, lending the pigment greater body and heightened tactile presence.
The examination also revealed a decisive revision: the commanding central black form was originally blue, demonstrating that while the underlying structure was established early, its chromatic relationships continued to evolve. A brown glaze over passages of emerald green further modulates their intensity and spatial depth, while exceptionally preserved, apparently original varnish was selectively applied to areas of the black form, creating contrasts of matt and gloss that reinforce the superimposition of the planes. Colour, texture, glaze and reflected light thus become active structural elements: construction is not merely the governing idea of the painting, but embedded in the very process by which it came into being.
The orientation of the present composition remains an open question. Although the direction of Popova’s inscriptions on the reverse suggests that it may have been intended to be viewed the opposite way, the earliest surviving visual evidence supports the orientation adopted in the present catalogue: both Rodchenko’s 1924 photograph of Popova’s studio and the installation view of her posthumous exhibition show the work in this position. When exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1991, however, it was shown the opposite way, in accordance with the inscriptions on the reverse. In the absence of definitive evidence of Popova’s intention, both readings remain possible; the present catalogue follows the orientation consistently documented in the earliest photographic records.
Beyond providing evidence for its early orientation, Rodchenko’s 1924 photograph offers a remarkable visual encapsulation of Popova’s artistic evolution. The present Painterly Architectonic, visible in the upper left, appears alongside her model for Vsevolod Meyerhold’s production of Fernand Crommelynck’s Le Cocu magnifique in the foreground: the autonomous painting of 1918 juxtaposed with the radical theatrical design through which, only a few years later, her ideas had entered three-dimensional space. Few images capture so succinctly the velocity and ambition of Popova’s development.
Seen against this extraordinarily compressed trajectory, the Painterly Architectonics of 1918 emerge among the defining achievements of Popova’s mature career, marking both her decisive embrace of non-objective art and the fullest painterly resolution of her investigations into the architecture of colour, plane, texture and space. Created at the threshold of her move beyond the canvas, they occupy a critical juncture between the revolutionary possibilities of painting and the expanded conception of artistic practice that would define her final years. With most works from this group now preserved in museum collections, the present painting offers a rare encounter with one of the most radical and consequential moments in the development of twentieth-century abstraction.
It is this principle of construction that lies at the core of Popova’s Painterly Architectonics. The term invokes architecture not as a subject to be represented, but as an organising principle: the painting becomes an autonomous structure in which each element derives its force from its relationship to the whole. As Popova herself explained, ‘Pictorial space is constructed through the stage-like interrelationship of planes; line is introduced independently of volume, in its pure form, as a graphic delineation; colour assumes a textural function, and it is through the intensity of colour that space is constructed.’ In the present work, this architectonic logic is made palpable as planes acquire weight, direction and resistance, pressing against, penetrating and counterbalancing one another. The painting does not imitate architecture; rather, it translates its principles of construction and interdependence into non-objective form, achieving harmony through the dynamic equilibrium of opposing forces.
Comparison with Popova’s Painterly Architectonics of 1917 in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, reveals how dramatically she advanced this principle within a single year. In the earlier composition, individual coloured planes retain a greater degree of autonomy, their contours remaining readily discernible as they overlap, advance and recede. By 1918, as the present painting demonstrates, the forms have become inseparably interlocked: planes intersect, cut into and appear to penetrate one another, while the commanding black element becomes indivisible from the surrounding blues, greens and whites. No neutral ground remains against which individual forms can be isolated; the entire surface has become an integrated field of interacting forces.
Popova arrived at this radical conception through a broad and remarkably cosmopolitan formation. Raised in a prosperous merchant family with a strong tradition of artistic patronage, she studied in Moscow under Stanislav Zhukovsky and subsequently Konstantin Yuon and Ivan Dudin, while encountering the pioneering work of Picasso, Braque, Matisse and other leading modernists in Sergei Shchukin’s celebrated collection. Her horizons were further expanded by travels across Russia and Europe: in Italy, she encountered the masters of the Renaissance and, later, the innovations of Futurism, while her study of Russian icons and architecture, together with her deep appreciation for the work of Mikhail Vrubel, introduced her to profoundly different conceptions of colour, perspective and pictorial form.
Her engagement with the European avant-garde intensified in the autumn of 1912, when she travelled to Paris and enrolled at the Académie de La Palette in Montparnasse, studying under Henri Le Fauconnier and Jean Metzinger. Her choice of teachers was unlikely to have been incidental: both had already exhibited in Moscow at the landmark Jack of Diamonds exhibition of 1910-11, while their reputations were gaining ground within progressive artistic circles. Together with Albert Gleizes, Metzinger had published Du ‘Cubisme’ in 1912, the first major theoretical exposition of Cubism. Translated into Russian by Mikhail Matiushin the following year, the text became an important conduit for Cubist theory in Russia, contributing to the ferment of experimentation then transforming its artistic landscape.
Returning to Moscow in the summer of 1913, Popova entered directly into this rapidly evolving milieu, joining Vladimir Tatlin’s co-operative studio The Tower, colloquially known as Morgunovka after its co-founder, the artist Aleksei Morgunov. Over the following years, she absorbed and transformed the structural lessons of Cubism, the dynamism of Futurism and the increasingly radical experiments of Tatlin and Malevich. By 1916, she had arrived at her own distinctive conception of non-objective painting, fusing the flatness and linearity of Old Russian icon painting with the lessons she had absorbed from Cubo-Futurism and the radical formal language of Suprematism. From this synthesis emerged her Painterly Architectonics.
Yet Popova’s conception remained fundamentally distinct from Malevich’s. Where Malevich liberated geometric forms into the potentially limitless space of Suprematism, Popova compressed hers into compositions of density, materiality and force, binding colour, plane and texture into tightly interdependent structures. The dialogue between non-objective form and architecture would later find three-dimensional expression in Malevich’s Architectons of the 1920s: autonomous, non-utilitarian structures that translated Suprematism into physical space. In Popova’s Painterly Architectonics, by contrast, the architectonic principle remains concentrated within the pictorial field. Neither Cubist fragmentation nor Suprematist suspension, these works constituted a language entirely her own and one of her most original contributions to twentieth-century non-objective art.
Painted in 1918, in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the present Painterly Architectonic belongs to one of the most transformative moments in Popova’s career and in the wider history of modernism. As the established political and social order was swept away, the prospect of constructing a new society appeared to demand an equally fundamental reconstruction of art. For Popova and her contemporaries, painting became a laboratory in which new relationships of form, space and construction could be tested - principles that might ultimately extend beyond the canvas into the material world.
For Popova, that transition came with extraordinary speed. Her increasingly linear Space-Force Constructions became her final series of easel paintings and, in 1921, she joined Aleksandr Rodchenko, Alexandra Exter, Varvara Stepanova and Aleksandr Vesnin in the seminal 5 × 5 = 25 exhibition, conceived as a final presentation of easel painting before her decisive turn towards the ‘organisation of the material environment’. Thereafter, theatre, typography, textiles and clothing became the principal arenas of her practice, carrying the experimental principles forged in painting into the sphere of everyday life.
This extraordinary trajectory was brought to an abrupt end in May 1924 when, at just thirty-five, Popova contracted scarlet fever from her young son, whom she survived by only two days. In preparation for a posthumous exhibition, her brother Pavel Popov and two close friends: Aleksandr Vesnin, painter, stage designer and influential Constructivist architect, and Ivan Aksenov, poet, critic and historian of literature and art, undertook the task of documenting her artistic legacy. The present painting may correspond to no. 121 in their unpublished inventory of the works remaining in Popova’s possession, recorded as Painterly Architectonic, 1918, ‘green with blue’, among forty-four works listed under the title Painterly Architectonic. With a single apparent exception dating from 1915, these span the remarkably concentrated period from 1916 to 1918, charting one of the most intense and consequential phases of Popova’s mature artistic development.
Within a year of her death, Popova’s posthumous exhibition was mounted at the Museum of Painterly Culture in Moscow, then housed at Vkhutemas (the Higher Art and Technical Studios), where she herself had taught from 1920 to 1923. Originally scheduled to open on 21 December 1924, though likely delayed until February 1925, it brought together nearly one hundred works. Its accompanying catalogue featured a strikingly bold cover designed by Aleksandr Rodchenko, Popova’s close friend and artistic ally, with whom she shared a belief in art’s capacity to transform the material environment and everyday life. The catalogue lists the Painterly Architectonics by date alone, precluding a definitive association of the present composition with an individual catalogue number. Its inclusion in the exhibition is, however, firmly established by an archival installation photograph, in which it can be seen at the far right of the upper row.
Reviewing the exhibition in 1925, Aksenov observed that, despite the successive transformations of Popova’s artistic language, the underlying principle governing her compositions had remained remarkably consistent from the outset of her career. He recalled that in her later years Popova increasingly spoke of the ‘mathematical character of her constructions’, relying less on the eye and instead employing mechanical methods to divide lines and planes: ‘at their points of intersection, the lines of the graphic construction divide one another into segments in the ratio of 1:2; the angles formed by two lines intersecting a third, when oriented in the same direction, preserve the same ratio’ (I. Aksenov, ‘Posmertnaia vystavka L. S. Popovoi’, Zhizn’ iskusstva, 1925, no. 5, p. 5). Aksenov’s account provides a contemporary key to the present work, whose intersecting lines and sharply articulated planes are bound by carefully calibrated angles and proportions into a taut compositional structure.
The present Painterly Architectonic was subsequently included in the ground-breaking 1991-92 retrospective Liubov Popova, organised by Magdalena Dabrowski at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, situating the work within the broader reassessment of Popova’s achievement at the close of the twentieth century. The first major exhibition devoted to Popova outside Russia, it marked a watershed in the reception of an artist whose contribution to twentieth-century modernism had long remained less familiar in the West than that of Malevich, Tatlin and Rodchenko. Bringing together over a hundred paintings, works on paper and designs, the exhibition later travelled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, introducing the full breadth of Popova’s work to a wider international audience.
In preparation for the exhibition, museum’s conservator Eugenia Ordonez undertook a technical examination of selected paintings and works on paper, including the present Painterly Architectonic, providing exceptional insight into Popova’s materials and working methods. Executed on a thin brown grass-fibre board, most likely prepared by the artist herself and coated with a lead-white ground, the composition was first established through a spare black linear underdrawing, elements of which remain deliberately visible. Remarkably little alteration was made to this underlying structure, suggesting that Popova determined the essential architecture of the composition from the outset. She instead developed the painting through colour and matter, building successive layers of oil paint of differing opacity and texture. In the blue passages, coarse, heavily worked upper layers lie over smoother blue-grey underpaint, while calcite, chemically identified in the present painting, was added as an extender, lending the pigment greater body and heightened tactile presence.
The examination also revealed a decisive revision: the commanding central black form was originally blue, demonstrating that while the underlying structure was established early, its chromatic relationships continued to evolve. A brown glaze over passages of emerald green further modulates their intensity and spatial depth, while exceptionally preserved, apparently original varnish was selectively applied to areas of the black form, creating contrasts of matt and gloss that reinforce the superimposition of the planes. Colour, texture, glaze and reflected light thus become active structural elements: construction is not merely the governing idea of the painting, but embedded in the very process by which it came into being.
The orientation of the present composition remains an open question. Although the direction of Popova’s inscriptions on the reverse suggests that it may have been intended to be viewed the opposite way, the earliest surviving visual evidence supports the orientation adopted in the present catalogue: both Rodchenko’s 1924 photograph of Popova’s studio and the installation view of her posthumous exhibition show the work in this position. When exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1991, however, it was shown the opposite way, in accordance with the inscriptions on the reverse. In the absence of definitive evidence of Popova’s intention, both readings remain possible; the present catalogue follows the orientation consistently documented in the earliest photographic records.
Beyond providing evidence for its early orientation, Rodchenko’s 1924 photograph offers a remarkable visual encapsulation of Popova’s artistic evolution. The present Painterly Architectonic, visible in the upper left, appears alongside her model for Vsevolod Meyerhold’s production of Fernand Crommelynck’s Le Cocu magnifique in the foreground: the autonomous painting of 1918 juxtaposed with the radical theatrical design through which, only a few years later, her ideas had entered three-dimensional space. Few images capture so succinctly the velocity and ambition of Popova’s development.
Seen against this extraordinarily compressed trajectory, the Painterly Architectonics of 1918 emerge among the defining achievements of Popova’s mature career, marking both her decisive embrace of non-objective art and the fullest painterly resolution of her investigations into the architecture of colour, plane, texture and space. Created at the threshold of her move beyond the canvas, they occupy a critical juncture between the revolutionary possibilities of painting and the expanded conception of artistic practice that would define her final years. With most works from this group now preserved in museum collections, the present painting offers a rare encounter with one of the most radical and consequential moments in the development of twentieth-century abstraction.