ks3 textiles homework

Teaching resources

Find a selection of Teaching Resources to help students learn more about working in the fashion and textile industry

Fashion Revolution

Educational resources for all ages from Fashion Revolution to help young people learn more about how clothes are made

BBC Bitesize

Design and manufacture covering Design development, Factors influencing design, Materials and manufacturing, Factors influencing manufacture, Manufacturing processes, Materials and Prototypes

Discover Creative Careers

Lesson plan: Introducing the creative industries including textiles

WATCH: Our Textile World

Discover the world of British textiles and the wide-ranging roles available in the industry from aeroplanes to headphones in this film from Super Slow Way

Secondary textile technology resources (some are available for free and most sold commercially)

Northern Ireland Curriculum

This Thematic Unit is for teachers of Key Stage 2 children for Textiles

Search 'textiles' to find everything from Simple Sewing Stitches display posters through to a wedding dress design template

Teach children how to shape and join textiles to make attractive products with these DT lesson planning packs for KS1 and KS2. Choose and use materials according to their functional properties and aes

Stem Learning

Working with Textiles at Key Stages One and Two: This collection includes seven trial units of work developed by the Nuffield Foundation to support their Primary Solutions resource.

Why Textiles Lessons Need To Be Brought Into The 21st Century

If you think there's no place for needlework in a 21st-century curriculum, you're seriously underestimating the importance of textiles, argues argues Heidi Ambrose-Brown in this piece

Copley Academy

The KS3 Textiles curriculum is designed to offer access to a range of textiles skills and projects such as: Monster Cushions, Fabulous Fish and Bugs and Butterflies, as well as inspirational ideas

Find out more

UKFT AT SKILLS ENGLAND

The Art Teacher

Art Lesson Ideas, Plans, Free Resources, Project Plans, and Schemes of Work. An 'outstanding' art teacher in Greater Manchester. Teaching KS3 and KS4 art and design.

Category: KS3 Art & Design Activities

Ks3 mini art & photography project.

This Art & Photography project is fairly simple scheme of work and quick to teach, with effective photographic final pieces for students. It doesn’t require any complex understanding of photographic techniques (yay) and it was designed as a taster of GCSE Photography for my Year 9 (KS3) classes. Students created some brilliant, woven photograph pieces […]

KS3 Art Textiles Project – Sweet Stitches

This simple textiles art scheme of work is ideal for teaching at KS3 as it is really short but engages students by giving them lots of choice in their work. Students love the bright colours, the different shaped stitches and, of course… the sweet, sugary subject! Get art lesson resources emailed straight to you: I […]

KS3 Clay Project – Coil Bowls

This is a super simple but REALLY effective clay project that my students love. I teach this clay coil bowl project to my Year 8 students and their results are lovely – and can take their plates home with them when they’re finished. The project is inspired by the coiling techniques and shapes used in […]

KS3 Art Project: Painting Patterns

After teaching a dry media pattern design project previously, I altered this pattern design scheme of work to focus more on colour theory and develop students’ painting skills. This is the first year I have taught the project this way, and I am so chuffed with the results! Get this full pattern painting project on […]

KS3 Easy 3D Pop Art Sculpture Project

I designed this 3D Pop Art project as a fun way to end the summer term with my students. It is inspired by different Pop Art ideas and I combined a few elements of art (including colour theory) to create this full scheme of work. I taught it with Year 7 (11-12yrs) for around 6 […]

KS3 Easy Clay Project: Textured Vessels

This simple clay art project is one of my favourites to teach towards the end of the year; it is engaging and dead easy to teach, with really effective outcomes for students! It’s also great for them to be able to take some 3D ceramic artwork home with them at the end of the year. […]

KS3 Oil Pastel Cubism Art Project

I’m really excited to share this easy oil pastel art project because I have only just finished teaching it and the students have created some really wonderful work – I love their final pieces! (Although I do feel like I’m getting a bit obsessed with teaching Cubist inspired art lessons 😂 ) I was struggling […]

KS3 Art Project – 3D Design and Build

This 3D art project is great because it engages boys, uses minimal materials (mainly just paper and card), introduces new equipment and materials AND it can be really easily adapted. I teach this Design and Build architecture project every year because it is so much fun (and not just for the students 😂 ). Once […]

KS3 Art – Cubism Home Learning Project

It sounds bad to say but “I’m making this project up as I go along” 😂  as in, it’s not finished yet! I’m creating the home learning Cubism Scheme of Work for my KS3 (Year 9) classes and I am going to add lessons weekly depending on how my students respond to it and how […]

KS3 Art – Op Art Home Learning Project

I have made this home learning KS3 Op Art project for our Year 7 students to work on during lockdown, but it could easily be used for Year 8 or Year 9 (or maybe even art cover lessons?). I have been teaching these Op Art lessons online via Google Classroom. I have designed this Op […]

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Free Fashion & Textiles Teaching Resources

Free fashion & textiles teaching resources to use in the classroom and on your next school trip., looking for all our teaching resources.

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National Curriculum

The Ecclesbourne School follows the Key Stage 3  National Curriculum three year program.

Design and technology is an inspiring, rigorous and practical subject. Using creativity and imagination, pupils design and make products that solve real and relevant problems within a variety of contexts, considering their own and others’ needs, wants and values. They acquire a broad range of subject knowledge and draw on disciplines such as mathematics, science, engineering, computing and art. Pupils learn how to take risks, becoming resourceful, innovative, enterprising and capable citizens. Through the evaluation of past and present design and technology, they develop a critical understanding of its impact on daily life and the wider world. High-quality design and technology education makes an essential contribution to the creativity, culture, wealth and well-being of the nation.

The national curriculum for design and technology aims to ensure that all pupils:

• develop the creative, technical and practical expertise needed to perform everyday tasks confidently and to participate successfully in an increasingly technological world
• build and apply a repertoire of knowledge, understanding and skills in order to design and make high-quality prototypes and products for a wide range of users · critique, evaluate and test their ideas and products and the work of others.

Curriculum Intent

By the end of each key stage, pupils are expected to know, apply and understand the matters, skills and processes specified in the relevant programme of study.

Through a variety of creative and practical activities, pupils should be taught the knowledge, understanding and skills needed to engage in an iterative process of designing and making. They should work in a range of domestic and local contexts [for example, the home, health, leisure and culture], and industrial contexts [for example, engineering, manufacturing, construction, food, energy, agriculture (including horticulture) and fashion].

• use research and exploration, such as the study of different cultures, to identify and understand user needs.
• identify and solve their own design problems and understand how to reformulate problems given to them.
•  develop specifications to inform the design of innovative, functional, appealing products that respond to needs in a variety of situations.
• use a variety of approaches [for example, biomimicry and user-centred design], to generate creative ideas and avoid stereotypical responses.
• develop and communicate design ideas using annotated sketches, detailed plans, 3-D and mathematical modelling, oral and digital presentations and computer-based tools.
• select from and use specialist tools, techniques, processes, equipment and machinery precisely, including computer-aided manufacture.
• select from and use a wider, more complex range of materials, components and ingredients, taking into account their properties.
• analyse the work of past and present professionals and others to develop and broaden their understanding.
• investigate new and emerging technologies.
• test, evaluate and refine their ideas and products against a specification, taking into account the views of intended users and other interested groups.
• understand developments in design and technology, its impact on individuals, society and the environment, and the responsibilities of designers, engineers and technologists.

Technical knowledge

• understand and use the properties of materials and the performance of structural elements to achieve functioning solutions.

We have mapped our curriculum content against the National Curriculum and have chosen a variety of units to ensure full coverage in line with the national requirements. We also strongly believe that we should develop student’s creativity, life skills, adaptability, ICT and project management skills, problem-solving capability, data handling skills, written and oral communication, decision-making skills, commercial awareness, and the ability to set goals and manage their own workload. These are the transferrable skills that employers value.

Curriculum Implementation

Extra Curricular Activities

• Textiles clubs for KS3
• Extra support lessons for KS4&5
• Subscriptions to Vogue magazine and Selvedge in the library
• www.technologystudent.com
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• AQA Fashion & Textiles A level text book
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Tate Papers ISSN 1753-9854

Liubov Popova: From Painting to Textile Design

Christina Lodder

In 1923 the painter Liubov Popova began creating designs for fabric to be manufactured by the First State Textile Printing Works in Moscow. This paper looks at the development of her involvement with constructivism while also examining the relationship between her textile prints and the abstract language of her earlier paintings.

Liubov Popova’s engagement with design in general and textile design in particular should not be seen as the result of a sudden decision, made as an impulsive response to a call for artists from the First State Textile Printing Factory in 1923. 1 On the contrary, it should be seen as the culmination of extensive thought and activity, including the artist’s decision to adopt the constructivists’ position in 1921, and her subsequent determination to use her artistic skills, not to create works of art as such, but to participate in the construction of the new Communist environment by using those skills to design new everyday objects for mass production. 2 In this essay I shall look at the circumstances surrounding Popova’s involvement with constructivism and her approach to fabric design. I shall also explore the ways in which her designs reflected and, indeed, sometimes continued the concerns that had been fundamental to her activity as a painter.

Popova did not join the Working Group of Constructivists when it was set up in Moscow in March 1921, but by the end of the year, her statements make it clear that she had embraced the constructivist ethos. Towards the end of 1921 she wrote: ‘Our new aim is the organisation of the material environment, i.e. of contemporary industrial production, and all active artistic creativity must be directed towards this.’ 3 She elaborated these ideas further in a text dated 21 December 1921:

The era that humanity has entered is an era of industrial development and therefore the organisation of artistic elements must be applied to the design of the material elements of everyday life, i.e. to industry or to so-called production. The new industrial production, in which artistic creativity must participate, will differ radically from the traditional aesthetic approach to the object, in that primarily attention will be focused not on the artistic decoration of the object (applied art), but on the artistic organisation of the object in accordance with the principles of creating the most utilitarian object … If any of the different types of fine art (i.e., easel painting, drawing, engraving, sculpture, etc.) can still retain some purpose, they will do so only 1. while they remain as the laboratory phase in our search for essential new forms 2. insofar as they serve as supportive projects and schemes for constructions and utilitarian and industrially manufactured objects that have yet to be realised. 4

These ideas are essentially identical to those expressed in the programme of the Working Group of Constructivists, which had been written by the theorist Aleksei Gan and to which the artists of the group such as Aleksandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, agreed. What Popova omitted from her text is the word constructivism. Apart from that, her final paragraph makes it clear that, like the constructivists, she was eager to use her artistic skills in the design of useful objects for mass production.

This did not represent a sudden change of heart on Popova’s part. Although she had not joined the Working Group of Constructivists, she had exhibited with Rodchenko and Stepanova in September 1921 at the 5 x 5 = 25 exhibition. 5 In this show she exhibited paintings that she called ‘spatial force constructions’ and wrote in the catalogue that the paintings exhibited ‘are to be regarded only as series of preparatory experiments towards concrete material constructions.’ 6 Moreover, in spring 1921, she had worked with the architect Aleksandr Vesnin and the avant-garde theatrical director Vsevolod Meierkhold on the sets for a ‘theatrical military parade’, which was called ‘The End of Capital’ and was to take place in Moscow that summer to celebrate the meeting of the Congress of the Third Communist International. It was conceived as a mass theatrical event, employing a cast of thousands, but it was unfortunately cancelled. 7 Nevertheless, it had given her valuable experience of working in three dimensions.

At the time of her statement in December 1921, Popova was working with Meierkhold in his theatrical studio. Subsequently, she designed the set and costumes for his production of The Magnanimous Cuckold , which opened in April 1922. Here she produced a constructivist set in which the mill of the drama was transformed into an acting machine and the costumes into working overalls. The following year she produced the designs for The Earth in Turmoil . Throughout this period, Popova was teaching the discipline of colour on the Basic Course at the Moscow Vkhutemas (Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops – Vysshie khudozhestvenno-tekhnicheskie masterskie). 8 This provided students with a vital artistic foundation for working on designs for industry and evolving prototypes for future mass production. In 1922 Popova argued that there should be a production workshop at the school, specifically devoted to creating concrete links with industry. 9 Unfortunately, this was extremely difficult to achieve, not least because Soviet factories were in disarray and mass production was at an extremely low ebb. As Lef (Left Front of the Arts) observed, ‘Unfortunately, our industry is still far from being ready to welcome the input of our creative power. For the time being young artist-producers must try their strength wherever they can.’ 10

The textile industry offered one such rare opportunity. It had been ‘one of the most developed and important industries of pre-revolutionary Russia’; in 1913 there had been 873 factories, employing over half a million workers. 11 During the Civil War (1918–20), productivity had been severely reduced (almost reaching zero in 1919), and this had caused an acute shortage of cloth. 12 By 1923 the industry was beginning to recover, but the disruption of links with Paris, the source of most patterns in the pre-revolutionary era, meant that artists were vitally needed. 13 In June 1923, Aleksandr Arkhangelskii, who had just  become the director of the First State Textile Printing Works in Moscow (formerly the factory of Emile Zindel)  published, along with Professor Petr Viktorov of the Vkhutemas, an open letter in Pravda  inviting artists to work in his factory. 14

Such an invitation was particularly opportune for the constructivists, and may not have been entirely unexpected. Earlier, in March 1923, the critic and theoretician Boris Arvatov had given a paper at the Moscow Inkhuk (Institute of Artistic Culture – Institut khudozhestvennoi kul’tury) discussing conditions in the textile industry. He had stressed the desperate need for good designs in revitalising this aspect of textile manufacture and had gone so far as to suggest that artists should be actively encouraged to participate in the work of the factories. 15 This may have paved the way for Popova and Stepanova’s decision to accept the invitation of the First Textile Printing Works, but ultimately the invite represented an all-too-rare, concrete opportunity to become involved with a genuine industrial enterprise and real mass production. 

Yet the two women were clearly aware of the problems that would be encountered in an industry where the role of the artist was firmly established and the nature of the task was essentially one of embellishment and decoration, amounting effectively to applied art. In order to counteract this pitfall and to clarify their own position, the two women submitted a memo to the factory management, which expressed their desire to be involved in all the organisational and technical aspects of the entire manufacturing and marketing processes. They said they wanted:  

1. to participate in the work of the production organs, to work closely with or to direct the artistic side of things, with the right to vote on production plans and models, design acquisitions, and recruiting colleagues for artistic work. 2. to participate in the chemistry laboratory as observers of the colouration process … 3. to produce designs for block-printed fabrics, at our request or suggestion. 4. to establish contact with the sewing workshops, fashion houses, and journals. 5. to undertake agitational work for the factory through the press and magazine advertisements. At the same time we may also contribute designs for store windows. 16

There is no evidence whatsoever that these requests were treated at all seriously by the factory management.

Although the precise date that Popova and Stepanova started working at the factory is not known, it was probably in the autumn of 1923. 17 The idea that the artists had become involved with the printing works before this may have been based on the large number of designs that Popova produced. She was incredibly prolific. A contemporary cartoon by Stepanova illustrates this impressive productivity by showing Popova taking a whole wheelbarrow full of designs to the factory, while Stepanova modestly takes a few in her handbag. 18

Despite this, all was not well. In January 1924, Stepanova reported to Inkhuk about work at the factory, criticising various aspects of the current structure of the textile industry:

1. the isolation of the drawing department from the production and marketing organs of the factory. 2. the work of the artistic atelier is divorced from the production [process]. 3. the dominance of consumer taste [and] fashion. 19

Apart from stressing the need to eradicate traditional approaches to textile design and the desire to promote ‘geometricised form’, 20 Stepanova also outlined a precise constructivist strategy for reforming the current shortcomings of the industry:

1. to fight against handicraft in the work of the artist. To strive towards organically fusing the artist with [actual] production. To eliminate the old attitude towards the consumer. 2. to establish links with fashion journals, with fashion houses and tailors. 3. to raise consumer taste. To bring the consumer into the active fight for rational cloth and clothing. 21

The tasks confronting them therefore were:

the eradication of the firmly embedded ideal regarding the high artistic value of the hand drawn design as the imitation … of painting; the fight against naturalistic design in favour of the geometricisation of form, and propagandising the industrial tasks of the constructivists. 22

This was, of course, a tall order and required, on an organisational level, a substantial commitment and an enormous amount of co-operation from the factory, which was not forthcoming.

The two constructivists were far more successful in ‘geometricising form’ and in this way propagandising the new aesthetic. 23 Of course, for Popova, this new aesthetic had been primarily articulated in painting although her theatrical experiments, such as her work on The Magnanimous Cuckold in 1922, had extended her explorations into three dimensions. In designing textiles, she was back to working in two dimensions and on a much smaller scale. Earlier, in 1917, she had acquired some experience of working at this scale with cloth and texture when she had made embroidery designs for a group of peasant embroiderers in the Ukrainian village of Verbovka. 24 Those designs are related to her then current artistic concerns and tend to be collage compositions, consisting of overlapping geometric elements. In 1923, she clearly had to rethink this approach somewhat when designing textiles for mass production, not least because the design had to be capable of being repeated ad infinitum in order to produce a bale of cloth, but also in the intervening five years, her own vocabulary of abstraction and her experiments with non-objective form had developed enormously.

Fig.1 Liubov Popova Space Force Construction 1920–1 Oil with wood dust on plywood 1123 x 1120–50 mm State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, George Costakis Collection

Fig.2 Liubov Popova Textile Design c.1924 Pencil and ink on paper 234 x 191 mm Private collection

Not surprisingly, perhaps, Popova’s abstract paintings and her textile designs share several features in common, to the extent that one can truly consider the paintings as representing the ‘laboratory phase’ to which she referred in her statement of 21 December 1921. Indeed, the fabric designs tend to reveal the same kind of aesthetic concerns that motivated the paintings (figs.1, 2). Both media demonstrate Popova’s interests in exploring the potential of geometric form, exploiting the possibilities of a limited range of colours, investigating permutations of a specific form or combination of forms, working in series, examining the line and its optical possibilities, using repetition of forms to create rhythm and dynamism, extending the visual potential of the ground, experimenting with the grid as an artistic configuration, and looking at ways of creating sensations of dynamism by intersecting or dislocating forms.

Simple geometric forms provide the basic language of Popova’s paintings and textile designs. In the paintings, such forms ultimately derived from the planar organisation of cubism or the vocabulary of suprematism. While this pictorial experimentation undoubtedly provided the aesthetic basis for the use of geometric form in the fabric designs, the use of such forms also acquired additional significance from the ideological thinking of the period. Geometry was associated with the machine, and the machine, in turn, reflected the essential character of the industrialised working class, the new masters of the Soviet state. Geometric form also eradicated the sense of individual touch and associations with individual intuition and emotion in favour of a more mechanised and impersonal sense of shape and a more industrial sensibility. It could, therefore, be seen to express a more collective ethos. The exigencies of mass production and the need for a repeat in the printing process also encouraged Popova to use a far more regular and more defined geometry in the designs than in the paintings – usually the circle, the triangle and the rectangle, either alone or in combination (figs.3–6). Yet whether in the paintings or in the designs, Popova approached geometric form through its relationship to the picture plane (or ground in the textiles) and through the dynamism and contrast that is set up by the interrelationships between similar or dissimilar forms.

Fig.3 Liubov Popova Fabric Designs Watercolour on paper, mounted on paper 355 x 379 mm Collection of T. & E. Tatsinian

Fig.4 Liubov Popova Textile Design 1923–4 Reproduced in Lef, no.2, 1924

Fig.5 Liubov Popova Sample of Printed Fabric State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow

Fig.6 Liubov Popova Textile Design 1923–4 Ink and gouache on paper Reproduced on the cover of Lef, no.2, 1924

Both the paintings and textiles also tended to be based on exploring limited colour ranges. This is generally far more evident in the textiles than in the paintings, but it is particularly apparent in her non-figurative paintings of 1920–1, where Popova tended to employ no more than three colours, using this restricted palette to explore other pictorial concerns such as texture, or dynamism through intersecting forms (figs.1,7). Her textile designs are frequently bichromatic. Indeed, she often used only one colour in conjunction with black and white – white usually being the colour of the unprinted fabric. This approach demonstrated an interest in the relationships between printed and non-printed surfaces in the resulting swathe of cloth. At the same time, by limiting the number of colours used in the designs, Popova also conformed to the constructivists’ concern with economy, not only as an aesthetic concept but also as an industrial and financial criterion, simplifying the printing process and therefore reducing production costs.

Fig.7 Liubov Popova Painterly Architectonic 1918 Oil on canvas 1050 x 800 mm Slobodskoe Regional Historical Museum and Exhibition Centre

Both the paintings and textiles reveal Popova’s commitment to analysing the nature of form and doing this intensively through exploring permutations of a single idea and pursuing such explorations in a series of works, whether canvases, gouaches, drawings or fabric designs. Ever since she had started experimenting with cubism in 1914–15, Popova had worked in series, analysing her approach and producing variations of a single image. 25 She emphasised that she was exploring ‘the organisation of elements … as self-contained structures’ and investigating ‘the significance of each element – line, plane, volume, colour.’ 26

Fig.8 Liubov Popova Space Force Construction 1921 Oil, with wood dust on plywood 710 x 639 mm State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, The George Costakis Collection

Fig.9 Liubov Popova Sample of Printed Fabric State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow

When Popova started experimenting with non-objective, abstract or objectless painting in 1916, her exploration of specific pictorial elements became even more intensive. Her first experiments with the new idiom resembled abstract collages with shapes in different colours layered against each other. 27 Subsequently, the compositions in her paintings became far more dynamic, based on interpenetrating planes, with shading and highlighting used to intensify sensations of movement. 28 By 1921 she was producing works in which the line and plane were treated autonomously as distinct artistic and plastic elements (fig.8). This rigorous investigation of a single pictorial component is particularly evident in the series of space-force compositions, which she painted in 1921. In some of these, the lines, in different colours, zigzag irregularly across the picture plane, setting up rhythms and destroying the stasis of the ground.

It is precisely this rigour of exploration of a specific form or combination of forms that can be found in the fabric designs. Although the fundamental components of each design were simple (circles, squares, quadrilaterals, or sections of these), the resulting patterns were often very complex, built up of repetitions, developments, and permutations of the simplest and most easily reproducible shapes. This practice is typical of many of the designs. For instance, one of her most complex designs (fig.2) was based on repeating at different scales and at different thicknesses circular and straight lines. At the same time, Popova created a series of designs based upon permutations of a single motif such as circles, or quadrilaterals (figs.3, 9).

Both the paintings and the textile designs demonstrate a strong engagement with the nature of the line. In certain of Popova’s paintings from 1921, there is a strong structural emphasis on the line, and this use of the line as a primary organisational element is also evident in the fabric designs (figs.8, 5, 9). In some designs, different thicknesses of lines have been used to orchestrate the surface and convey a sense of rhythm and energy (fig.2). In this instance, a series of thin horizontal lines is broken by the introduction of a thick line, which dislocates the linear rhythm and alters the viewer’s visual perception of the pattern. In other designs, regular lines of different colour produce a simple stripe effect. 29

In Popova’s paintings, the lines often form a kind of irregular grid pattern (fig.8). To some extent, this corresponds to the argument put forward by the art historian Rosalind Krauss that the grid epitomised the self-reflexivity in modernist painting, emphasising the weave of the canvas and the break with naturalism. 30 In Popova’s paintings, the underlying emotional charge and dynamic sensation derive from the irregularities and breaks that are introduced into the grid. In the textiles, this grid is regularised and conforms much more to Krauss’s model, although sometimes turned throuh forty-five degrees (fig.3). Nevertheless, both the paintings and the textile designs possess sensations of layering and lattice work, which suggest conflicting forces at work and often introduce tension and convey qualities of motion.

Of course, in the fabrics, the grid reflects the structure of the cloth produced by the warp and weft of the weaving process, so that the printed grid pattern actually gives graphic presence to the internal structure of the fabric. Yet within this general format, Popova produced a large number of variations. There are quite simple open grids, comprising a single grid, printed in a single colour. She produced more dynamic configurations by introducing another colour and superimposing one grid over another. In one pattern, for instance, a complex dynamic sensation is produced by superimposing identical grids, but of slightly different sizes, in different colours and at different angles, so that a blue grid is printed over a red grid, with the blue grid printed at an angle of forty-five degrees to the warp and weft of the fabric. In this instance, the grids are closely related to each other. The space between the lines forming the red grid is identical to that between the lines of the blue grid, but the inner line of the blue grid begins at an identical space from the outer line of the red grid. This introduces an element of mathematical precision into the design and into the repeat. 31 While the red grid echoes the web and weft of the woven fabric, the blue grid destroys this reference and adds dynamism to the whole as well as giving a sense of depth to the design. Of course, the grid pattern also has strong affinities with traditional checked fabrics, which also exploited the weaving process to introduce pattern and variety. Popova frequently produced small designs like this for shirts and blouses, while the more flamboyant patterns were clearly destined for larger items of clothing such as dresses.

In both her paintings and the textile prints, Popova demonstrated a great concern for the ground, emphasising its role, investigating its connection with the painted or printed design, and exploring its potential to become an active component in the overall artistic structure. In the paintings on wood (figs.1, 8), the plywood was often not sized, but left as a natural colour, so that it acted less as a passive background to the composition and more of a positive textured element in the pictorial construction. In the fabric designs, too, the ground is left unprinted, remaining the colour of the cloth, usually white, and as such, it often plays an active organisational role, serving as one of the positive colour components of the configuration. Often there is only one or, at the most, two other colours used in the printing process with the white ground. For instance, in this example (fig.6) the actual ground is white, but the resulting white circle against the red looks as if it has been printed onto the fabric, rather than the other way round. This adds a sense of optical ambiguity as well as optical dynamism into the design, as the circles seem to vibrate slightly, almost like an op-art composition. Such effects were clearly intentional.

In some paintings and designs, Popova introduced a shift in the pattern, a sdvig – a shift or dislocation (figs.1, 2). For many avant-garde writers and painters, this type of disruption was a crucial element of modernist painting, representing objective deformation, which was essential to the emergence of abstract or objectless creation. 32 This device is sometimes difficult to isolate and identify in Popova’s paintings, although it underlies the structure of some of the paintings on plywood (fig.1), where the continuity of different elements or configurations have been subject to a dramatic break or shift. Dislocation or sdvig is also used as a dominant organisational device in certain of the textile designs. In this particular design (fig.2) the sdvig or break in the pattern is crucial to creating visual vitality and dynamism, by disrupting the predictability and flow of the design, and adding a crucial and extra asymmetrical quality into it. The two separate halves of the circles are not identical, neither is the rhythm of the lines.

As this design demonstrates, the sdvig was merely one way in which Popova introduced dynamism into her paintings and designs. Asymmetry, irregularity, diagonal arrangements and repetitions were also used to perform this role. In this same design (fig.2), an asymmetrical composition comprising yellow, pink and black circles (of varying thickness) is set against a pattern of vertical black lines of various widths. The contrasting rhythms of these repeated circular and linear elements and the drama of the interplay between them are intensified, and the whole is endowed with an even greater sensation of movement by the diagonal break in the pattern. 

In the paintings, Popova frequently used white to intensify spatial ambiguity, whether it is in connection with a planar composition or a more linear one. She also used white to stress the intersection of forms, indicate volume or to suggest dynamism. This practice of using white also translated into the fabrics. These qualities have already been discussed in relation to the diamond and circle pattern, where the white circles appear to be printed against the blue and these circles in turn appear to be printed on a black and white diamond fabric. In other instances, too (figs.9, 3), Popova has utilised optics and optical sensations to create a vibrant design that appears to be constantly shifting. In the bottom-left and middle right-hand drawings (fig.3), the white describes a positive form, so that the design sometimes seems to appear to be a white figure printed on black, and at others a black figure on white.

Fig.10 Liubov Popova Textile Design 1923–4 Gouache on paper 115 x 92 mm Private collection

Responding to the circumstances of the New Economic Policy, the emergence of a new entrepreneurial class and a new consumer in Soviet Russia, Popova also produced designs using symbolic form, such as the five-pointed star of the Red Army (which she delineated in red within a black circle) 33 or the hammer and sickle, the insignia of the new state, symbolising the unity of worker and peasant (fig.10). Using such images reinforced the Communist message, while also meeting consumer demand for more figurative motifs. Yet Popova drastically reduced the descriptive quality of these objects, simplifying them and stressing their underlying geometry. Hence, in her hammer and sickle design, the sickle is rendered in red as merely a portion of a circular line attached to a small, thicker line, while the hammer is drawn as a blue line topped by a blue quadrilateral. In this way, these essentially figurative elements have been geometricised, which is particularly evident if this design is seen within the context of the more descriptive renditions of tractors, planes and red stars that were prevalent in textile designs of the 1920s. 34

In 1924, the writer and theoretician Osip Brik eloquently summarised the ideas and objectives of the whole of the constructivist engagement with textile design. In his article, which appeared the avant-garde journal Lef (Left Front of the Arts), he wrote:

A cotton print is as much a product of artistic culture as a painting, and there is no basis for drawing a dividing line between them. Moreover … the conviction is growing that painting is dying, that it is inseparably linked with the forms of the capitalist system and its cultural ideology, and that textile design has become the focus of creative concern – that the textile print and work on the textile print is the height of artistic work. 35

Not surprisingly, therefore, Popova’s colleagues at Lef , notably Rodchenko and Stepanova, included numerous fabric designs in her posthumous exhibition of December 1924. 36 These designs did not outnumber or supplant the paintings, but complemented them. The presence of a few select designs indicated the way in which the strong visual explorations of her paintings had been translated into the small-scale format of textile designs to produce fabrics that were used (and could be used further) by ordinary Soviet women for their everyday clothing.

Fig.11 Anonymous Photograph of a Procession in Nizhny Novgorod 1899

The great variety of Popova’s designs and the scale of the different motifs used are evidence of the fact that she wanted to create fabrics to suit Soviet women from all walks of life, residing ‘both in the countryside and in the worker districts.’ 37 Clearly, in creating her textiles, Popova was strongly influenced by the urban and technological emphasis of constructivism and the abstract or objectless language of her own paintings. Yet she was also concerned to anticipate ‘the personal taste of the peasant woman in Tula’. 38 In fact, geometric ornament had always been one component among many others of peasant dress (fig.11). 39 In this sense, one could argue that in applying the lessons and concerns of her painting to fabric design, Popova was not just embracing a constructivist ethos, she was also revitalising a Russian peasant tradition.

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Introduction

The capital and largest city of Russia , Moscow has always played a central role in the country’s history. In the Middle Ages it was the capital of the powerful principality of Muscovy. For much of the 20th century it was the capital of the Soviet Union , representing the authority of that superpower’s communist government. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Moscow became the political center of newly independent Russia as well as its industrial, educational, and cultural capital.

Moscow is situated in far western Russia on the banks of the Moskva (Moscow) River, a tributary of the Oka. The center of the city is the Kremlin , located on a high bank of the river. The Kremlin began as a fort first built by Prince Yuri Dolgoruky in the 12th century. It was protected originally by a wooden fence and later by brick walls. During the following centuries churches, palaces, and government buildings were built within the walls. Today the Kremlin walls enclose the largest concentration of historic buildings in Russia.

Next to the Kremlin is Red Square. It was originally a marketplace at a time when a trade and artisans’ settlement had developed outside the Kremlin walls. It became the major center for political and social events and today is used for big parades and public celebrations and demonstrations. At the southern end of the square is the 16th-century Cathedral of St. Basil, and at the northern end is the 19th-century State Historical Museum. The Lenin Mausoleum is on the west side, and the massive department store GUM is on the east.

With the Kremlin and Red Square as the original core area, the city grew outward in a series of rings, marked by defensive walls. The brick walls of the Kremlin date from the late 15th century. In the 16th century additional walls of stone and earth were built around the city. In the 19th century these walls were pulled down and replaced with wide circular boulevards known as the Boulevard and Garden rings. Beyond these boulevards the city has expanded in all directions, with roads radiating out from the central rings like the spokes of a wheel.

Central Moscow—the area within the Garden Ring—functions like a typical downtown. In this area are concentrated most of the government offices, most of the hotels and larger stores, and the main theaters, museums, and art galleries. In the 1990s the resident population of the inner city declined as many large apartment buildings were transformed into offices. The residential neighborhoods that remain within the Garden Ring consist mostly of luxury apartments for the wealthy.

The architecture of central Moscow features buildings representing every period of the city’s development from the 15th century to the present day. Examples of 17th-century church architecture include the Church of All Saints of Kulishki, built in the 1670s and ’80s, and the Church of the Nativity of Putniki (1649–52). Other notable buildings include the elegant Pashkov House (1785–86), now part of the Russian State Library; the Manezh (Riding School; 1817), which is now used as an exhibition hall; and the Bolshoi Theater (1821–24), rebuilt in 1856 after a fire. Soviet-era additions to central Moscow include several elaborate “wedding-cake” (tiered) skyscrapers as well as concrete-and-glass high rises. The Gazprom and Lukoil office buildings, built in the 1990s, are among the more notable examples of later architecture.

The main street in the city center is Tverskaya Prospekt (formerly Gorky Prospekt), which leads northwest from Red Square. It is lined with large stores, hotels, theaters, and restaurants. Some of the notable buildings are the National Hotel, the Central Telegraph Office, and the Mayor’s Office.

The Moskva River follows a circuitous course through the city. It forms a large loop southwest of the city center and then flows northward again to pass the Kremlin walls. To the east of the Kremlin the Yauza River joins the Moskva. The high south bank of the southwestern loop of the Moskva forms the Vorobyëvy Hills (or Lenin Hills), which reach 655 feet (200 meters). Many foreign embassies and the Moscow State University complex, dominated by an ornate Stalin-era building, stand on the Vorobyëvy Hills. Across the river is the sports complex known as Luzhniki Park. Just upstream, on the south bank of the river, is Gorky Park. The city’s largest park, it has an amusement park in addition to gardens and woodlands.

On the outskirts of the city a large number of residential and other building construction projects were undertaken after World War II. Major new housing areas arose between the Garden Ring and the Moscow Ring Road, which circles the city some 10 miles (16 kilometers) from the center. The northern suburbs contain the large Sokolniki Park, a botanical garden, and the All-Russian Exhibition Center. The latter—still commonly known by its Soviet-era name, the Exhibition of Economic Achievements—was opened in 1939 to showcase the economic and scientific accomplishments of the Soviet Union. Today the exhibits are interspersed with amusement park rides, markets, and other attractions. Nearby is the 1,758-foot (536-meter) Television Tower, the tallest structure in Russia.

People and Culture

The great majority of the people of Moscow, called Muscovites, are ethnic Russians. The largest minority groups are Ukrainians, Belarusians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, and Tatars. During the Soviet era, migration contributed to a rapid rise in Moscow’s population. Beginning in 1932 the government restricted migration by requiring people to have a special permit to live in the city. Today, people still need to register their place of residence with the government.

It is rare for people in Moscow to have a single-family home. Most Muscovites live in apartments, which can be in old houses that have been subdivided, in Soviet-era apartment blocks, or in new buildings. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, registered Moscow residents were given the government-owned homes in which they lived. After that, however, housing prices rose so steeply that, in the early 21st century, only a small percentage of Muscovites could afford to buy an apartment in the city. In fact, due largely to the housing market, Moscow became one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in.

Moscow contains dozens of theaters and concert halls. One of the best known is the Bolshoi Theater, which is home to Russia’s leading theater company for ballet and opera. Organized in the 1770s, the company also performs at the State Kremlin Palace and tours extensively throughout the world. Other renowned theaters include the Maly Theater, the Moscow Art Theater, and the Obraztsov Puppet Theater. Musical performances are held in the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall and at the Moscow P.I. Tchaikovsky Conservatory.

Several of Moscow’s many art galleries and museums have an international reputation. Among the most famous are the Tretyakov Gallery, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Oriental Arts, and the Literature Museum. Historical institutions include the Armory Museum, the State Historical Museum, the Central Lenin Museum, and State Central Museum of Contemporary History of Russia.

Moscow is a major educational center, with dozens of universities and specialized institutions of higher education. The largest and most prestigious is Moscow State University, founded in 1755. The Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian State Library, one of the world’s largest libraries, are also located in the city.

The leading sports complex in Moscow is Luzhniki Park, in the Vorobyëvy Hills. It was one of the main arenas for the 1980 Olympic Games. Dynamo Stadium on Leningrad Prospekt is the home ground for one of Moscow’s several football (soccer) teams. Most districts of the city have their own sports halls, swimming pools, and ice rinks.

The economy of Moscow, like that of Russia as a whole, was transformed after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. During the Soviet era the city’s economy was dominated by the manufacturing and engineering sectors. In the 1990s, as the formerly government-controlled economy shifted to one based on private ownership, these sectors declined dramatically and were largely replaced by service industries. The number of people employed in manufacturing in Moscow decreased by half from the late 1980s into the ’90s.

Nevertheless, Moscow remains the largest industrial center in Russia. Engineering and metalworking still rank among the city’s most important industries, designing and manufacturing such products as machine tools, ball bearings, automobiles, precision instruments, and electronics. Aerospace design and manufacture is one of the most important engineering sectors in some of Moscow’s surrounding towns. Oil refining, chemicals, food processing, and construction are also valuable industries.

Moscow’s wide-ranging service sector includes such industries as finance, retail trade, education, and research. As Russia’s economy was privatized, Moscow developed into a financial center, with dozens of banks and several securities exchanges. Most foreign investment in the Russian economy passes through the city’s financial institutions. The opening up of Russian society also spurred Moscow’s emergence as a major tourist destination.

Moscow is the hub of Russia’s transportation network. Rail lines radiate out in all directions, connecting the capital with other Russian cities as well as Central Asia and eastern and central Europe. These railways carry much of the country’s freight and are also vital to passengers commuting between Moscow and its suburbs. The Moscow Little Ring Railway and the Greater Moscow Ring Railway link the radial lines. For travel within the city, which is typically congested with traffic, public transportation is critical. The centerpiece of the mass-transit system is the Metropolitan (Metro) subway, whose lines copy the city’s radial street pattern.

A major river port, Moscow is connected to the Volga River to the north by a canal built in the 1930s. By means of this canal, shipping from Moscow can reach the Black, Baltic, and Caspian seas.

Moscow is served by two international airports: Sheremetyevo-2 to the north and Domodedovo to the south. Sheremetyevo-1 handles mostly domestic flights.

Archaeological evidence shows that a settlement existed on the site of present-day Moscow during the late Stone Age. The traditional date of the city’s founding, however, is 1147, when Prince Yuri Dolgoruky hosted a feast on the site. At the time, Moscow was a small settlement on the bank of the Moskva River. To protect the site, in 1156 Prince Dolgoruky built the original kremlin—a wooden fort atop earthen embankments.

Moscow developed into an important trading town. It was centrally located among the system of rivers that formed the trade routes across European Russia. Like most other Russian towns, Moscow was attacked on many occasions by the Mongols (Tatars), but it managed to survive. It was sheltered to a considerable extent by the surrounding forests and by the swamps of the Oka River to the east.

As Mongol power declined beginning in the 14th century, Moscow grew steadily in size and importance by absorbing surrounding principalities. It became the center of power of what was called the Grand Principality of Muscovy. Within the Kremlin, palaces for the prince and nobles, monasteries, and churches were erected. Outside the Kremlin walls, the trading and artisan quarter expanded. By the second half of the 15th century Moscow had become the undisputed center of a unified Russian state. Defensive brick walls more than a mile long were built around the enlarged Kremlin.

Despite its new fortifications, Moscow still faced attack. In 1571 the Crimean Tatars captured the town, burning everything but the Kremlin. New stone walls built between 1584 and 1591 helped Moscow turn back another attack by the Crimean Tatars in 1591. The next year an outer ring of earthen walls was built to protect the expanding city. In addition, such fortified monasteries as the Novodevichy and Donskoy were built to defend the city from the south.

These improvements in security allowed artisan activity to flourish. Different groups of tradespeople—for example, armor makers, blacksmiths, and weavers—occupied particular suburbs of Moscow. State workshops made weapons and gunpowder.

The development of Moscow was temporarily eclipsed by the founding of St. Petersburg in 1703 and its choice by Peter the Great in 1712 to be Russia’s capital city. Nobles, merchants, and artisans moved to St. Petersburg. However, Moscow soon began to recover from the loss of its role as capital. New industries, especially textiles, fueled economic growth. The city’s key role in Russia’s cultural life was enhanced by the founding of Moscow University (now Moscow State University), the country’s first, in 1755.

In 1812 Moscow was occupied by Napoleon ’s French troops. An accompanying fire leveled more than two thirds of the city’s buildings. Again, through a great rebuilding program, the city recovered rapidly. Moscow became the center of Russia’s railroads and developed heavy engineering and metalworking industries. The population reached nearly 1 million by 1897 and doubled to 2 million by 1915.

In 1918, following the Russian Revolution , Lenin moved the Soviet government to Moscow. The city thereby regained its status as capital. During the 1930s Joseph Stalin drew up a grandiose plan for the development of the city, but it was never completely fulfilled. The most successful venture was the Metro, begun in 1933.

Moscow suffered little damage in World War II despite the fact that German invaders reached the outskirts of the city. By 1939 the population had reached 4.5 million, and by 1959 it was about 6 million. To relieve overcrowding, much of the old housing around the historic core of the city was torn down and replaced by massive apartment blocks. A new development plan introduced in 1960 laid the groundwork for the city’s expansion in the coming decades. It required the careful designation of new residential areas, industrial zones, and green spaces and also annexed surrounding towns to the city.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Moscow was at the forefront of Russia’s historic changes. Private enterprise and foreign investment led to a proliferation of new businesses as well as a skyrocketing cost of living and an increase in criminal activity, including organized crime. The city also experienced several deadly attacks by rebels seeking independence for Chechnya or other republics in Russia’s Caucasus region, including a hostage crisis at a theater in 2002 and suicide bombings in the Metro in 2010. Population (2013 estimate), 11,843,643.

Additional Reading

Brooke, Caroline. Moscow: A Cultural History (Oxford Univ. Press, 2006). Graham, L.R. Moscow Stories (Indiana Univ. Press, 2006). Kelly, Laurence. A Traveller’s Companion to Moscow (Interlink, 2005). Rice, Christopher, and Rice, Melanie. Moscow (DK, 2007).

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Lyubov Popova

Russian Artist, Painter and Designer

Summary of Lyubov Popova

Lyubov Popova was a radical multimedia artist and designer, who was an active Communist in the 1917 Russian Revolution and the years that followed. She also worked at a time when there were extremely few women artists respected by art institutions or schools, or even in the revolution. Popova travelled Europe and brought a myriad of modern influences to Russian art, in particular Cubism and Futurism - movements focused on multiplicity in the service of showing several angles of an object simultaneously, and demonstrating movement. Later in her career, she moved to complete abstraction and simplified geometric forms alongside her Suprematist comrades, who wanted to make art in keeping with the industrial zeal of the revolution, and to move away from illusionism and elitism. At this time she also started to make textiles, theatre sets and design work, expanding the meaning and uses of art into broader society. Popova died young, but in her short life had a prolific and varied career and demonstrated that art could have an important part in revolutionary politics and post-capitalist ideas.

Accomplishments

• Lyubov Popova was extremely interested in dynamism, or, representing movement in art, a problem at the center of many artistic movements, and the focus of many individual artists' lives. At the start of her career, this took the form of Futurist-style paintings showing movement through visual repetitions. Later, she would design theatre sets that moved on huge cogs; paintings with warring colors that fought to escape the picture plane, and repetitive textiles suggesting optical illusions.
• Like her Suprematist comrades in the revolution, she believed that art should reflect the industrial, egalitarian future, and this meant making work that echoed the geometry and efficiency of machines, as well as moving into a pure abstraction unfettered by elitist ideas of skill, or "natural talent", common to ideas of artistic genius.
• She moved away from painting to follow her belief that a revolutionary art should be practical, accessible, and reproducible. She designed stage sets, publication covers, and textiles, and her work is instantly recognizable as emblematic of the (albeit brief) revolutionary hope and fervor of Russian art at the time.

Important Art by Lyubov Popova

Composition with Figures

Popova's early works can be seen as a conjunction of Cubism and Futurism; movements and ideas she collected on her travels. Here the two figures of the title are constructed in sharp lines, with curving circles at their joints. The bright colors of the figures make them stand out from the grey of the background, with the dark blue of the woman's fan taking center stage. Familiar still life objects are scattered throughout the painting, as common in the work of Cubist artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque: the guitar, the fruit bowl, and the jug. This work was painted shortly after Popova returned from studying in Paris under Henri Le Fauconnier and Jean Metzinger at the Académie de la Palette. Her frequent travel outside of Russia also introduced her to Italian Futurism, and together these styles heavily influence her work pre-Russian Revolution. Once back in Russia, Popova's own reinterpretation of these styles focused on the geometry of Cubism and the dynamic energy of Futurism. She was concerned with a new way of constructing a painting, rather than strict interpretation of a subject. The result is this fractured scene depicted through multiple angles, typical of Cubist and Futurist works of the period. Unlike many of her contemporaries who wanted to free Russian painting from Western influences, Popova was an intentional internationalist, and this painting demonstrates a rigorous engagement with Cubism - the fragmentation, and multiplication of objects and figures; and Futurism - a dynamic expression of movement, energy, and technology with strong colors and lines. In Composition with Figures , Popova depicts feminine, but androgynous subjects brazenly inhabiting, and using the objects in the traditional Cubist still life; a figure leans on the guitar we recognize from her famous male contemporaries, and a fan moves in a hand of a figure crouched over the ubiquitous apple bowl. The painting is important in the way it brings Cubist painting to life, and resituates possibilities for the meeting of figurative, still life, and abstract painting all within one picture plane.

Oil on canvas - State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow

Painterly Architectonic

This is one of a series of paintings Popova made in 1916. The crowded canvas is taken up with a series of overlapping squares and rectangles and a white background. Using the bright colors of Russian icon art, Popova adds a painterly dimension with the visible brushstrokes and white edges in the foremost shapes. The canvas feels busy and crowded, as though the shapes are intersecting and jostling to be at the front of the painting. Painted in the year she joined Kazimir Malevich's Suprematist group, this work demonstrates how geometry and abstraction were becoming more significant in Popova's work. What differentiates her work from Malevich, however, is her preoccupation with energetic movement. This work demonstrates the artist's move into purely nonrepresentational art, but is a precursor to the eventual uniform, repetitive, and machine-like style her work would take after the Russian Revolution of 1917. The painterly edges and use of shading verify that the work was created by a human rather than a machine. In titling this series of paintings ' Painterly Architectonic Popova points to the most important and unique elements of this work - the painterly style, where thick paint is used and brushstrokes are visible, and the way she treats her painted lines, planes, and shapes as almost solid material objects. In this painting, she again combines influences to create an original and striking composition, here of vibrant objects crowding and pushing against the picture plane.

Oil on board - Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Untitled, from Six Prints

Using pure shapes and geometry, Popova illustrates physical and spatial dynamism. The angular forms of the triangle, rectangle, and semi-circle appear to continually rotate in space, giving the impression of energy and infinite movement. The colors in this work are derived from Popova's rediscovery of Russian folk art and icon painting, setting it apart from the abstract experiments happening concurrently in Western Europe at this time. The Suprematist group, now including Popova, exhibited in regular shows in St Petersburg and Moscow, published a journal, and taught in art schools. In the advent and aftermath of the Russian Revolution in 1917, artists were reconsidering the role of culture and how art could contribute to the building of a new post capitalist society. This work, from the Six Prints series, illustrates the anti-materialist philosophy advocated by the Suprematists, in which a relationship was made between the unimportance of material goods and objects and the uselessness of figurative or representational art. Developing on Popova's Cubo-Futurist style of the early 1910s mixed with Malevich's influence, the print demonstrates her distinctive artistic evolution, both in theory and practice. It marks a further movement towards completely non-representational art. While evidence of the artist's hand remains, there is a lessening of paint on the surface, and a more balanced and ordered composition, which mirrored the desire for an efficient, egalitarian, and equal industrial workforce post Revolution.

Linoleum cut with watercolor and gouache additions - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Set design for The Magnanimous Cuckold

Popova designed the revolutionary stage set for theatrical producer Vsevolod Meyerhold's first Constructivist performance, a production of The Magnanimous Cuckold . This play by Fernand Crommelynk is a farce that is also a cautionary tale about paranoia, censorship, and violence - all dangerous elements of what would become Stalin's official arts policy (many years later), under which Meyerhold would eventually lose his life, executed by firing squad in 1940. The wooden set design brought the sharp geometry of her earlier works on canvas into the three-dimensional realm. The simplicity and efficiency of construction and functionalism is seen in the triangles, rectangles, and crisscrosses of the set. The actors are also a key part of the design: invited to use the set as a living prop throughout the performance, they feature as walking sculptures and bring to life the dynamic movement always at the center of Popova's work. Popova's was one of the first theatre sets to include moving parts, with large wheels rotating behind a wooden framework. In keeping with Suprematist aims, the set moved away from illusionism towards pared back symbolism - something we see in theatre still today. The integration of actors and set was also a new innovation, which would be extremely important for future set design and stage direction worldwide. Following the Russian Revolution, Popova had moved from painting into production art, or 'applied arts'. Breaking with the Suprematists, she believed painting to be obsolete and that art "must be applied to the design of the material elements of everyday life, to industry or to so-called production". In the early 1920s, she collaborated widely with other Constructivists, including Varvara Stepanova, Alexander Vesnin, and Alexander Rodchenko, on a vast range of applied arts projects, including theatre set and costume design, textile designs and clothing, and book covers. Her contribution to theatre design shows her interpretation of how the popular arts could shape the building of a new post-revolutionary society.

Mixed media

Textile Design

In 1923 Popova began designing fabrics to be manufactured by the First State Textile Printing Works in Moscow after the enterprise published an open invitation to artists to work in their factory. Where she had previously represented industry and machines in her moving cogs and abstract forms, the Russian textile industry provided Popova with a perfect opportunity to make art that could be mass-produced in a genuine industrial enterprise. In this design, she represents the hammer and sickle insignia of the new Communist state in Russia, which symbolizes the unity of the peasant and industrial worker. Her interpretation of the hammer and sickle design is particular in its simplification of the instantly recognisable symbol, reducing it further to its geometric, non-representational elements. Already breaking away from the mould of the artist as separate and special genius with her theatre work, her foray into textile design was an important move to legitimise this kind of work as important and artistic, and to produce 'wearable art' for the general public.

Gouache on paper - Private Collection

Biography of Lyubov Popova

Lyubov Popova was born in Ivanovskoe, a district on the outskirts of Moscow, to an affluent family in 1889. Her father, Sergei Maximovich Popov, a successful textile merchant, and her mother, Lyubov Vasilievna Zubova, were both keen patrons of the arts and encouraged Popova's interest in art.

Raised in this creative environment, Popova pursued drawing and sketching, and had a particular fondness for the Italian Renaissance . At eleven years old her parents arranged formal art lessons for her at home, before enrolling her in the School of Painting and Drawing in Moscow. Here she learnt about light and color and became acquainted with recent developments in Western European art, including Impressionism . She went on to study at the Moscow art studio of the Polish-Russian landscape painter Stanislav Zhukovsky, who also counted the young artist and poet Vladimir Mayakovsky amongst his students.

Early Training and Work

Unlike contemporaries like Varvara Stepanova , who had peasant origins, Popova's prosperous background allowed her to travel widely to expand her artistic education. In 1909, she travelled to Northern Russia and Kyiv to view murals and mosaics in churches and monasteries. The bright colors of Russian icon painting inspired her; drawing similarities in the work of Giotto and other Renaissance painters she had enjoyed as a child.

Popova's art education flourished further in 1912 when she travelled to Paris with fellow painter Nadezhda Udaltsova to study at the private art school, the Académie de la Palette. Studying in the studios of the Cubist painters Henri Le Fauconnier and Jean Metzinger , she began to use the canvas to dissect objects and explore shape and structure. She studied the figure as depicted in the works of Fernand Leger and the dynamic sculptures of the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni .

Upon returning to Moscow, she continued learning about the French avant-garde by visiting the collection of Sergei Shchukin. A successful businessman and avid art collector, Shchukin regularly opened his home for public viewings, introducing Russian society to as the works of visionary artists such as Gauguin , Picasso , and Matisse .

Popova met Vladimir Tatlin whilst working in his studio, The Tower. Impressed by Tatlin's work in the three-dimensional, Popova experimented with collage and produced increasingly non-figurative painted reliefs using materials such as cardboard alongside thickly applied paint. She began to exhibit with her contemporaries; artists such as Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova , who were also finding new ways of combining traditional Russian motifs with modern art.

Mature Period

As Popova developed artistically, so did Moscow. By the mid-1910s it had become a creative hub where the Russian avant-garde gravitated. Popova participated in many exhibitions in the advent and aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917, such as the Jack of Diamonds (1914, 1916), Tramway V: First Futurist Exhibition of Paintings and 0.10: The Last Futurist Exhibition (1915), The Fifth State Exhibition: From Impressionism to Non-Objective Art (1918), and The Tenth State Exhibition: Non-Objective Creativity and Suprematism (1919).

Popova's move towards non-representational art became official when she joined the Suprematist group in 1916, alongside its founder Kazimir Malevich . Since displaying his work Black Square at the 0.10: The Last Futurist Exhibition (1915), Malevich promoted a move into purely abstract art as celebration of a world without capitalist signs and values. In his Suprematist Manifesto of 1916, he declared "Color and texture are of the greatest value in painterly creation - they are the essence of painting; but this essence has always been killed by the subject". Popova demonstrated these abstract values in a series of six paintings called Painterly Architectonics , which she displayed at the Jack of Diamonds (1916) exhibition in Moscow.

Moscow continued to be the epicenter of cultural exchange following the Russian Revolution in 1917. Described by the American journalist John Reed as "ten days that shook the world", the events of October 1917 had profound and long-lasting repercussions throughout the world. Popova, like many of the Russian avant-garde, identified with the aims of the Revolution and was excited by the new possibilities and the role art would take in future society. She became politically active through her art, producing posters and book designs for the cause.

During the subsequent Civil War, which took place between 1917 and 1920, Popova joined the Left-Wing Federation of the Moscow Artists' Union and later became a member of the Institute of Artistic Culture (Inkhuk), run by Wassily Kandinsky . She worked in the Fine Art Department of the People's Commissariat for Enlightenment and taught at the State Free Art Schools, later known as the Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops (Vkhutemas).

The years following the Revolution were also significant for Popova on a personal level. In 1918, she married the art historian Boris von Eding. Given the closeness of the artistic community in Moscow, it was common for creatives to marry within the circle. Varvara Stepanova married fellow Constructivist Alexander Rodchenko , and the Suprematist Olga Rozanova , before her early death from diphtheria in 1918, married the poet Aleksei Kruchenykh. Disease was rife in the uncertain years following the Revolution. Von Eding died of typhoid fever in 1919, with the disease nearly taking Popova and their newborn son as well.

Late Period

The Revolution also changed the way Popova saw her art. Following 1917, there was a tension between the Suprematists, who saw art as anti-material and spiritual, and the Constructivists, who saw it as serving the Revolution in a practical way. She continued painting abstract work until joining Aleksander Rodchenko's Constructivist circle, which declared an abandonment of easel painting at their 1921 exhibition 5 x 5 .

The events of 1917 and the years that followed underpinned Popova's abandonment of her middle-class upbringing and travelling life in favor of serving the Revolution. As Rodchenko put it, she was "an artist from a wealthy background, regarded us with condescension and contempt, since she considered us unsuitable company...Later on, during the Revolution, she changed greatly and became a true comrade".

In the last few years of her life, Popova worked in a range of media with the aim of contributing to the making of the new society. She created designs for theatre sets and costumes, produced new typography and book covers, and designed fabric and printed textiles for the First State Textile Printing Works in Moscow. Throughout her artistic work, she also continued to teach art theory at Vkhutemas and contribute to LEF, the journal of the Left Front of the Arts. In 1924 Popova died of scarlet fever in Moscow, soon after her young son succumbed to the same disease. She was only 35 years old.

The Legacy of Lyubov Popova

Popova's intense but short career inspired many other Soviet artists of the era. She shaped the development of Russian Revolutionary art through her education, travels, and relationships with other artists and influencers. She is particularly renowned as one of the most influential female artists of the 20 th century and noted for her collaboration with other women artists including Nadezhda Udaltsova, Aleksandra Ekster, and Varvara Stepanova. Together they demonstrated the new role women could take as workers following the Revolution.

Shortly after her death, an exhibition of her work was shown at the Stroganov Institute in Moscow. In the catalogue, her contemporaries described her as an "Artist-Constructor," an enviable title, which indicated artists' collective hope post Revolution, which lasted until Stalin's suppression of the Russian avant-garde in the late 1920s.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Lyubov Popova

• Amazons of the Avant-Garde: Alexandra Exter, Natalia Goncharova, Lyubov Popova, Olga Rozanova, Varvara Stepanova and Nadezhda Udaltsova Our Pick By John E. Bowlt and Matthew Drutt
• Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism By Margarita Tupitsyn
• The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863 - 1922 By Camilla Gray
• Modern Classics 100 Artists' Manifestos: From The Futurists To The Stuckists (Penguin Modern Classics) Edited by Alex Danchev
• Remarkable Russian Women in Pictures, Prose and Poetry By Marcelline Hutton
• The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution By Maria Gough
• The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture Edited by Nicholas Rzhevsky
• Lyubov Popova: From Painting to Textile Design Our Pick By Christina Lodder / Tate Papers, No. 14 / Autumn, 2010
• Constructivist Fabrics and Dress Design By Natalia Adaskina / The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, Vol. 5, Russian/Soviet Theme Issue / Summer, 1987
• Constructivism and Russian Stage Design By John E. Bowlt / Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 1, No. 3 / Winter, 1977
• Rodchenko & Popova curator introduction

Related Artists

Related Movements & Topics

Content compiled and written by Alexandra Banister-Fletcher

Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors

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KS3 Animal Rights: Unit of 8 Lessons

Last updated

29 August 2024

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Resources included (8)

KS3 Animal Rights: Is Ignorance Bliss? Full Lesson

KS3 Animal Rights: Different attitudes to animal rights - Full Lesson

KS3 Animal Rights: What is the impact of using animals? Full Lesson

KS3 Animal Rights: Should factory farming be banned? Full Lesson

KS3 Animal Rights: Is a vegan lifestyle healthy? Full Lesson

KS3 Animal Rights: Should we eat meat? Full Lesson

KS3 Animal Rights: Are Animal Intelligent? Full Lesson

KS3 Animal Rights: Introduction to Animal Rights

Religion Studies / Philosophy and Ethics / PSHE

This 8-lesson unit, ‘Animal Rights’, is a brand new, relevant ethical exploration into the issue of animal rights in today’s world. Lessons are up-to-date, well-designed and engaging to keep in line with current thinking and relevant issues. Individual lessons are intended as a double (roughly one and a half hours per lesson) however, due to time restrictions and the embedded support in the corresponding lesson sheets, could also be taught in a minimal one hour per lesson.

Lessons Include:

• Introduction to animal rights
• Are animals intelligent?
• Should we eat meat?
• Is a vegan lifestyle healthy?
• Should factory farming be banned?
• What is the impact of using animals?
• What are the different attitudes to animal rights?
• Is ignorance bliss?

*Lesson resource sheets if using exercise books This scheme of learning has been devised explicitly to support all learners, interleave learning with previously-learned units and support cognition through interleaving techniques. Although part of a unit, lessons can also be taught as a stand-alone lessons, e.g. for revision. The corresponding lesson sheet(s) would also support a home-learned curriculum as the PowerPoints and sheets themselves include differentiation and scaffolding, where required.

The new scheme of work is specifically designed to promote the two skills desired for success at GCSE (and beyond):

• AO1 (Knowledge and Understanding)
• AO2 (Analysis and Evaluation)

The resources are specifically created to ensure students are aware of the skill they are demonstrating and how to improve further through modelling.

This new unit brings the relevance back to our topics, for example, through thought experiments and key debate topics. Students will experience greater engagement and enjoyment in a fair and balanced approach.

Lessons include:

• Homework Slide
• Unit Cover and lesson overview
• Starter activity, including interleaving
• Key words (literacy focus)
• Introduction of key information (AO1 - knowledge) and how this is used (AO1 - understanding)
• Introduction of a contentious issue or debate (AO2 - analysis) and finalised judgement (AO2 - evaluation)

The lesson resource sheets: These are designed so that even those who have limited curriculum time can explore the full unit without having to feel the time pressures on their classwork. The resources provide time-saving activities, whilst still being able to cover the breadth and depth of the course. In addition, students who may be limited by literacy issues, e.g. slower writing paces, are not disadvantaged or capped in their progress. Therefore, some classes could use a mixed approach - part resources, part exercise book - and all students will be able to progress through the same volume of content.

Please give feedback: I am always happy to respond to comments - whether positive or constructive - this will help to improve the quality of my resources in the future and, more importantly, the quality of pupils’ RE/RS education in general - which is what we’re all here for!

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