Abstract
This juxtaposition of autobiographical statements written in 1933 by Aleksandr Drevin and Nadezhda Udal'tsova, together with an introduction to their artistic careers and a select chronology designed to place them in the context of their times, is intended to show how early twentieth-century Russian art evolved in parallel to Western thought and artistic practice, taking into account contemporary developments in non-Euclidean geometry, physics, mathematics, the laws of perspective and the awareness of the impossibility of “realistically” representing spatial forms on a flat surface, which, at the time, were exercising many minds. The artists, though from very different backgrounds, were closely involved with one another, as husband and wife and as close colleagues in art. Their artistic course is traced through and beyond the experimental 1910s and 1920s.