Order the catalogue			The youngest of the Amazons, Stepanova represented a second generation of the avant-garde, one that manifested a strong sympathy with the behests of the 1917 October Revolution, and it is in the context of agit-art, production art, and Constructivsm that we now remember Stepanova. The primary demand of the October Revolution–that art be utilitarian and accessible–appealed to Stepanova (and to her husband, Alexander Rodchenko), and she implemented her response in terms of designs for the stage, clothing, and publications. Never a champion of abstraction, Stepanova also brought a new figuration to painting demonstrated by her renderings of individuals and groups such as Five Figures on a White Background, 1920, in which she seemed to be reconstructing the human form according to a code of mechanical engineering. Here are shades of the robot, immortal, cool, and efficient, that will function perfectly in the new proletarian state. Like Exter and Popova, Stepanova proclaimed her commitment to the demand that art adjust to the new industrial order at the historic 5 x 5 = 25 exhibition in Moscow in 1921, immediately thereafter directing her attention to Constructivist stage and clothing design, including her famoussportodezhda, or sports outfit, of 1923.
			Among the works in this section are examples of Stepanova's visual or graphic poetry, combinations of word and image that reflect her drive to invent a new language. Informed by the zaum or transrational language of Russian Futurist poet Alexei Kruchenykh, Stepanova sought to establish an organic connection between the shape and sound of her neologisms and their spectral accompaniment, attaining a species of concrete poetry half a century before the fact.
			Top: Figure (Peasant), 1921. Oil on canvas, 125 x 71.5 cm. Private collection.	Bottom: Works by Stepanova in the studio she shared with Alexander Rodchenko, Moscow, 1921.