Olga Vladimirovna Rozanova Watercolor on Paper

Rozanova was born on June 22, 1886, in the small town of Melenki near Vladimir, Russia. After finishing at the Vladimir Women’s Gymnasium in 1904, she studied painting in Moscow. Dissatisfied with the “wretched system of instruction” at the state-run Stroganov Academy of Arts and Industry, she transferred to Konstantin Yuon’s private school, where she met Liubov Popova, Nadezhda Udal’tsova, and Aleksei Kruchenykh, who would go on to be leading figures in Russian Futurism.

Although best known for her purely abstract work, she was inspired by diverse art movements of her day, including Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, and Cubism; her own visual language was also influenced by Russian icon