Amazons of the Avant-Garde

The poet Benedikt Livshits called them the "Amazons of the avant-garde." It was meant as a tribute to a fact that art history was slow to credit: in Russia, women were not on the margins of modernism. They were at its center.

Olga Rozanova

Rozanova fused Cubo-Futurism with a fierce colorism all her own, and in her last years moved toward a radical abstraction she called tsvetopis — "color-writing." Her death in 1918, at thirty-two, cut short one of the most original sensibilities of the period. Works bearing her signature carry that signature charge of color and structure.

Alexandra Exter

Exter was the great cosmopolitan — moving between Kyiv, Moscow, and Paris, carrying ideas in both directions. Her Cubo-Futurist cityscapes and her revolutionary stage and costume designs made her a bridge between Russian and European modernism.

A working movement, not a circle of muses

• Liubov Popova — painterly architectonics, then textile and stage design.
• Varvara Stepanova — Constructivist graphics, typography, and cloth.
• Nadezhda Udaltsova — rigorous Cubist construction.

Two of the works in this collection are attributed, on the evidence of their signatures and handling, to Rozanova and to Exter. Whatever the final verdict of provenance research, the attributions are a reminder that the story of this art cannot be told without its women.