Tango with Cows

Abstract

Emerging Infectious Diseases • www.cdc.gov/eid • Vol. 15, No. 3, March 2009 513 F animals engaged in a sophisticated dance is how poet Vasily Kamensky represented the incongruous entanglement between Russia’s rural past and sweeping modernism. In his daring book Tango with Cows, he abandoned syntax for a spatial arrangement of words on old wallpaper to explore visual poetry. Political oppression, industrial development, and rapid urbanization between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 shook the foundation of society and promoted experimentation in literature, music, and art. Part of sprouting radical movements known as Russian avantgarde, Liubov Popova made her mark as a leading artist of the 20th century. Popova was born near Moscow into an affl uent family approving of her talent. She traveled widely, within Russia for the architecture and hagiography and abroad to Italy and France. She studied Cubism at the Academie de la Palette under Henri Le Fauconnier and Jean Metzinger. While she admired Giotto and other masters of the Renaissance, her work moved steadily away from naturalism toward a personal style drawn from the fl at linearity of Russian icons, the principles of Cubism, and revolutionary ideas. “Representation of reality―without artistic deformation and transformation―cannot be the subject of painting,” she wrote. In its origins with Picasso and Braque, Cubism was a formal style applied to traditional subjects to depict space and volume through multiple viewpoints and shifting planes. With time, others saw in its geometric precision the potential to capture modern life and its increasing reliance on machines. In Italy, a group called the Futurists used it to express in art what Albert Einstein defi ned in 1905 in his theory of relativity, a new sense of time, space, and energy. “We wish to exalt aggressive movement,” read the Futurist manifesto, “feverish insomnia, running, the perilous leap, the cuff, and the blow.” From her travels, Popova brought home these infl uences, which she integrated with folk and decorative elements in shaping the development of combined Cubism and Futurism in Russia. Liubov Popova (1889–1924) The Traveler (1915). Oil on canvas (142.2 cm × 105.4 cm) Courtesy of Norton Simon Art Foundation, Pasadena, CA, USA