She didn't have the luxury of a long life, but in other regards Popova benefited from her family's wealth and influence, which put her in the right place and time for her gifts to flower. Though she came from a bourgeois background, she embraced the proletarian revolution when it occurred (and died before the party turned its back on revolutionary principles and enforced a standard realism on working artists.) The images below are only some of the paintings. They're presented in reverse order, beginning with the Space Force Constructions from 1921, a hundred years ago. The following few years (her last) were well spent designing patterns for fabrics, costumes and sets for theater productions, layouts for books and executing other utilitarian projects. She also wrote a few manifestos. The earlier paintings , those she made while a member of Malevich's Suprematist group, already betray her interest in presenting their ideal forms in actual space. She began making the Cubist paintings in France under the tutelage of Metzinger and Le Fauconnier in 1912. She was most deeply inspired by traditional Russian icons, whose spirit can be felt in all her great work, without it ever being explicit in its derivation. She worked alongside women and men in forming the first great artist collectives, which became the models for those of my own youth, seventy years later.
