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Artist or Maker: Liubov Popova (1889-1924)

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Description: Untitled
dated and numbered '1921-61.' (on the reverse)
gouache, brush and India ink on buff paper
13 7/8 x 10 5/8 in. (34.7 x 27.1 cm.)
Executed in 1921-1922

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Provenance: Galerie Jean Chauvelin, Paris.
Acquired from the above by the present owners in 1978.

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Exhibited: Miami, The Lowe Art Museum, The Russian Avant-Garde and American Abstract Artists, March - April 1983, no. 23.

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Notes: PROPERTY FROM THE SACKNER ARCHIVE, FLORIDA

With heavy black contours indebted to the avant-garde embrace of stylish simplicity and an elegant overlapping of pictorial planes, Popova's own declension of Cubo-Futurism is acknowledged in the present gouache. Dense perpendicular lines which float along intersecting axes recall the Painterly Architectonic Works executed by Popova between 1916 and 1918. In the early 1920s Popova added letters and cyphers to these compositions, expressing her fascination with the Western alphabet and Arabic numbers. Intersecting diagonals grant Untitled a profound dynamism, further strenghtened by a palette based on high-key primary colours. Although the canon underlying such construction is fundamentally related to Cubism with a clear Futurist inflection, Popova's expressive idiom conveys a unique expressive energy and pictorial bravura. Similar experiments, also dated 1921, can be found in the Costakis collection (see fig. 1, dated by Wesnin on the reverse '1921').

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