Amazon of avant-garde: Liubov Popova (1889-1924) - a famous Russian artist (part 1)

Liubov Sergeevna Popova (1889-1924) was born in village Ivanovo near Moscow in a merchant's family. Her father - Sergey Maksimovich Popov was not engaged in "business" any more and was a known patron of art, patronized music and theatre. This man represented a kind of an educated merchant like image of Savva Mamontov.

The first painting lesson received by Liubov Sergeevna Popova was one given by her father's friend - artist K.M.Orlova. Popova spent her young years in Yalta, where she learned in a grammar school. And only in 1906 she arrived in Moscow and received secondary education and started attending pedagogical courses.

However, Popova was a Russian woman that had been attached to art of painting since childhood. By the year 1908 she joined K.F.Juona's private art school where she got acquainted with many artists. "Tower" was the name of the first free collective studio created in Russian 1911 where L.Popova, N.Udal'tsova, K.Zdanovich, V.Bart, N.Goncharova and others worked those days.

The Old Russian art was very popular with young artists then. It seemed as though they rediscovered the national past. It should not be forgotten that the first scientific restorations of icons were maid at that time.

In 1909-1911 L.Popova visited Novgorod, Pskov, Rostov, Yaroslavl, Suzdal in order to study old Russian painting and architecture.

In 1910 she made a trip to Kiev, where she got one more impulse for creating because she happened to see monumental paintings by Vrubel in kirillovsky monastery. In the same year Popova visited Italy.

The final and very significant step of work by this hardworking Russian woman as far as comprehension of painting art was that she got acquainted with S.I. Stchukin's assembly in Moscow. S.I. Stchukin, an influential Russian artist, was fascinated by Anre Matiss at that moment. Matis's art became that key part which connected the past and the present, the West and the East in Popova's outlook on art. She was not able to estimate brave and innovative language of Matis's painting; on the other hand she felt its connection with art of middle Ages.

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