Christie's London sold a 1918 painting by Liubov Popova for $10.1 million on October 14, more than quadrupling the artist's standing auction record. The work, Painterly Architectonic, traded hands at over four times its low estimate, according to HENI's market report. The sale added $6.59 million to the previous record, a leap of roughly 175 percent in a single result.

The pencil-and-oil-on-board painting dates from the peak of Popova's constructivist phase. Born in 1889, Popova moved from cubo-futurist figuration toward geometric abstraction in the years after the Russian Revolution, producing a series of Painterly Architectonic works that translated Suprematist geometry into a more painterly, structured idiom. The 1918 canvas has changed hands four times before this sale — a steady, well-documented market history that made the scale of the jump all the more striking to observers.

Her previous benchmark had stood for nearly two decades. Still Life with Tray, an undated work, fetched $3.52 million at Sotheby's London in November 2007. That record itself had tripled the mark set in 1990, when a cubist cityscape sold for $1.76 million in New York, and it was nearly fourteen times the $732,200 paid for another Painterly Architectonic in 1989.

The result lands in a London October season that has seen several early-20th-century names re-priced. Popova, who died of scarlet fever in 1924 at just 35, remains one of the most historically significant figures of the Russian avant-garde — and one of the hardest to acquire, since her small surviving output rarely surfaces. This sale resets the ceiling for her work by a wide margin, and signals that institutional-grade Russian modernism is firmly back in the crosshairs of international bidders.