Study for a Portrait 1915

Lyubov Popova made this 'Study for a Portrait' using oils on canvas and a limited palette of greens, yellows, browns and blues. It’s a geometrical head-scratcher of planes and angles. I can almost imagine the artist building up the image, tentatively at first. The painting feels like a construction, as if Popova is trying to find form amidst the fracturing of cubism. Maybe she was looking at Picasso, maybe she was just thinking through the problem herself. The way she adds those blue letters, it's almost like graffiti tagging the picture plane. She allows us to see the portrait’s underlying architecture. The paint looks smooth, precise. I wonder if she was thinking about the way we see and understand each other – how a portrait can be more than just a likeness, how it can also be about the structures that make up our perception. It's amazing to see the conversation between artists happening across time and space, feeding into each other's ideas, and always pushing painting forward.