The photograph of the artist Liubov Popova (1889-1924) in the catalogue of the recent Museum of Modern Art exhibition reveals a young woman with a girlish face.[1]She has round, shiny eyes, and her long neck, is adorned with a string of dazzly pearls (or pseudo-pearls) that becomes a phosphores cent glow in this seventy-year-old photo graph. In another photograph, taken by Rodchenko in the year she died, her little smile shows us tiny crooked teeth. Her hair, ar ranged in two curvy wings, flies up on either side of her face like pigtails. Popova seems so very young: something about her face, her expression, suggests qualities of a child—naïveté, innocence, or just plain earliness. She looks like an incarnation of the child hood of modern art. Popova, a major con tributor to the painting legacy of the early-twentieth-century Russian Constructivist avant-garde, was little more than a name before this exhibition—the first of her work since 1921—and so, though her work is part of what made our own possible, we don’t even know it. In these photographs, she seems a bit like a figure from an allegory of the modern spirit, a figure Paul Klee might have dreamed up. The show at the Museum of Modern Art gave us back—gave us for the first time—a significant painter’s oeuvre. And the allegory turned out to be a tangled one about die youth of one’s ancestors, about doubling back in time to catch up with a revolutionary and still paradigmatic