MA Week 35 - Artist Research : Revisiting the Constructivist works of Liubov Popova

In my tutorial the other week, I was reflecting that the pylon abstracts, particularly the red one, had Constructivist influences. I’d been interested in and influenced by Liubov Popova during my Access studies. Sharon suggested that I revisit my Access research into Popova to see what further I could now learn from her work. Ever the dutiful student, I’ve done as she said.

Painterly Architectonic, Liubov Popova [public domain] via Wikimedia Commons

Firstly I opened my Access contextual journal and was surprised to see one of the images of Popova’s work that I’d included. I remembered Painterly Architectonic (1917), which I’d loved as soon as I saw it, with its bold colours and mainly linear geometric shapes. But I hadn’t remembered Spatial Force Construction (1921). The curves and differing weights of lines within that piece were not dissimilar to those in my little abstract. Again and again I discover how I am carrying images and influences subliminally, and how I’m reworking them into my own work without realising.



Spatial Force Construction, Liubov Popova (State Museum of Contemporary Art of Thessaloniki)
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

My next thought was how Popova had repurposed her work when the Bolshevik regime required painting to become a medium for promoting communal aspirations (Tupitsyn, p.13). Similarly, I’d repurposed the colours of my urban wanderings to try to start creating a visual language of my lived experience. I chose a couple of library books to view some of her works again and to read a little more about her. It was then that I started to realise how she had also developed a visual language to describe what was happening in her context. This possibly relates to her life history, as Bathmaker would put it; her story in the context of her social situation. However, there are wider ramifications in Popova’s case. Constructivist artists believed they had a fundamental role in delivering the new Socialist reality (Lodder, p47). There was a push to create a more universal, impersonal visual language (Tupitsyn, , p.13).

Nevertheless, Popova had her own style and made strong use of the line, the colour and the volumetric (Lodder, p45). Lodder quotes Popova (p255): “A Cubist period (the problem of form) was followed by a Futurist period (the problem of movement and colour) and the principle of abstracting the parts of an object was followed logically and inevitably by the abstraction of the object itself”. This describes a very analytical approach to the development of a visual language which ultimately reveals itself as Suprematism. A scientific approach, almost? Could or should I take a more scientific approach to my own work? It may help with time and project management and also make me focus more on continuing to develop my own visual language.

Popova is further quoted (Tupitsyn, p160) as commenting on her drawings in 1921: “In Russia, as a result of the social and political conditions that we are experiencing, organisation has become the objective of a new synthesis”. Again, an acknowledgement of the social context and of development of a visual language. A further interesting twist is that she evidently started to develop the Painterly Architectonics after seeing Islamic architecture on a trip to Samarkand (Dabrowski, p17) – so, in response to the built environment. As I’ve mentioned many times in this blog, my own work takes the built environment as its starting point in many cases. Dabrowski’s comment was a surprise as I’d imagined these works would take industry as their starting point. However, I think that’s an example of me as the viewer putting my own interpretation on another person’s work.

Another surprise to me was Popova’s choice of colours. I always think of her (and more generally, Constructivist) work as mainly featuring red, black and white. But many of her earlier works feature blues, oranges, browns and yellows. However, each one has a limited palette (possibly an influence of cubism?). I wonder it that had also stuck somewhere in my memory.

The shapes of Popova’s curves and lines appear to me to describe not only the Futurist obsession with speed and motion, but also the turmoil of the aftermath of the October Revolution. I know very little about it, and have just quickly read the BBC Bitesize about it. The situation described touches a chord with the present day, post-Brexit vote. Our country is in turmoil. How are we, as artists, dealing with this? Only Bob & Roberta Smith springs to mind.

Something also very striking was the balance that Popova achieved in her abstracts; According to Dabrowski, (p11), she always remained rooted in painting. I’d grappled with the balance of a work when doing my pylon abstracts, particularly the red one. The result wasn’t bad, but it could be improved. Sitting at home leafing through the library books, soaking in her work, I realised I was receiving a lesson in balancing the abstract work.

Viewing her works again two or three years after first seeing them, I could perceive and understand her development of a visual language in a way that I hadn’t hitherto. My own journey to understand, experiment with and refine the marks I’m making starts to make more sense to me via reflecting on what Popova did. I really wish I had hours more to pore over both the texts and the images within the books and reflect on them.