STEPANOVA Varvara Fedorovna

October 29, 1894 (Kovno, today Kaunas, Lithuania) — May 20, 1958 (Moscow)

Painter, graphic artist, scene-designer, master of applied arts

Varvara Stepanova studied at Kazan Art School where she met Aleksander Rodchenko, who later became one of the most prominent Russian artists and photographers. In 1912 she moved to Moscow and studied under the artists Konstantin Yuon, Ilya Mashkov and Mikhail Leblan. In 1913 she married Rodchenko.

Stepanova’s work was instrumental in shaping the main principles of Soviet design. She was the only Russian avant-garde artist of the first decade of the century to study decorative and applied arts. In 1913 and 1914 she took classes at the Stroganov School of Industrial Art. She also gave private lessons. In 1914 she started to participate in exhibitions. In the 1910s she wrote poems and made handwritten books, which she adorned with colour paper and drawings (usually lines). She also created illustrations for Futurist books by other authors. Since 1918 she worked with the Department of Fine Arts of the National commissariat of education (Narkompros). In 1920 she was appointed academic secretary of the Institute of Art Culture (Inkhuk).

Stepanova’s art was largely influenced by the work of Aleksander Rodchenko and Vladimir Tatlin. In 1919 she started working on an important series called Figures. One of the major sources of inspiration for those series was Rodchenko’s Constructivist aesthetic. That same year she took part in the 10th State Exhibition Non-Objective Painting and Suprematism in Moscow. In 1925 she showed her works at the 5 х 5 = 25 Constructivist exhibition. In 1922 she participated in the First Russian Art Exhibition at the Van Diemen gallery in Berlin, and in 1925 she exhibited her art at the International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts in Paris.

In the early 1920s Stepanova abandoned easel painting to dedicate herself more to industrial art, stage design and poster design. In 1922 she created scene and costume designs for Tarelkin’s Death, a play by the Russian writer Aleksander Sukhovo-Kobylin staged at the Meyerhold theatre in Moscow. Those designs won her huge success. Unlike the stage and costume designs of the group Mir Iskusstva (“World of Art”), famous for their lavish decoration and abundance of details, Stepanova’s works were minimalist in style and lacked “ornamental” and “esthetic” elements.

In 1924 and 1925 Stepanova was professor at the textile department of the Higher State Artistic and Technical Workshops (VKhUTEMAS). She designed casual clothing and sportswear. She tried to design garments that were at the same time practical and expressive, combining economical use of material with bright colour contrasts. In those years she, Rodchenko and Popova also worked for the First State Cotton-Printing Factory in Moscow.

Since the middle of the 1920s she worked in the fields of print and poster design. She created photomontages and covers for such magazines as Sovetskoe Kino (“Soviet Cinema”), Radioslushatel (“Radio Listener”), Krasnoe Studenchestvo (“Red Studenthood”), Za Rubezhom (“Abroad”), Kniga i Revolutsiya (“The Book and The Revolution”) and many others. From 1923 to 1928 she helped create the avant-garde magazines  LEF (acronym for “Levyi Front”, or “The Left Front [of the Arts]”) and Novyi LEF (“The New LEF”).

Since 1935 she and Rodchenko worked on photo albums and magazines for the publishing house Izogiz (“Fine Arts”). Most notable works of that period include Ten Years of Uzbekistan, First Cavalry, The Red Army and USSR Under Construction.

In the late 1930s Stepanova returned to painting. After the outbreak of World War II she was evacuated to Perm, where she lived until 1943. She created posters for the Windows of TASS (the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union) and dressed exhibitions for the State Literary Museum (GLM). In the postwar years she continued working as a graphic designer.

Works by Varvara Stepanova can be seen in major museums all over the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. The Pushkin State  Museum of Fine Arts’ Department of Private Collections boasts one of the largest collections of her works.