Cubo-Futurism

In the 1900s and early 1910s, Russian artists were rapidly assimilating the French, Italian and Spanish variations of Cubism and Futurism. These movements took root in phenomena of an entirely different type.

Kazimir Malevich quite correctly noted that Futurism never took root in Russia. The only examples of Futurism in Russian art were single and unique (Goncharova's Cyclist and Factories). Cubism, on the other hand, transformed by the Russian artists into Cubo-Futurism, fell on fertile ground in Russia.

Examples of Russian Cubo-Futurism are Lyubov Popova's Man-Space-Air and Nadezhda Udaltsova's Kitchen.

The destruction of the conventional form of an object by the Cubo-Futurists and their departure from two-dimensional pictorial space into another dimension were steps along the road to artistic freedom. Yet soon even these means of expression proved to be inadequate. Kandinsky, Larionov and Malevich sought a way out of Cubism and Cubo-Futurism, a search which led them to abstraction.