“The goal was no less than the transformation of life.”

Before her untimely death from scarlet fever in 1924, Lyubov Popova—like contemporaries Kasimir Malevich, Alexandr Rodchenko, El Lissitzky and others—had come to synthesize art, industry and sociopolitics, and dovetail creative disciplines, media and progressive art movements, from futurism to futuro-cubism, and suprematism to constructivism.

This winter, to mark the centennial of the Russian Revolution, New York’s Museum of Modern Art has mounted A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde. The exhibition includes prints by Popova among 260 artworks made between 1912 and 1935 by the likes of Alexandra Exter, Natalia Goncharova, Olga Rozanova, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Dziga Vertov. Moving from non-objective paintings, drawings and prints, into poetry, theater sets, ...