Alexandra Exter
 Panorama de la côte, 1938
Père Castor albums; Author: Colmont Marie; Illustrator: Aleksandra Exster / Publisher: Paris: Flammarion

Alexandra Exter (Białystok, Poland, 1882 – Fontenay-aux-Roses, France, 1949) was a central figure in the reception and development of modern and avant-garde art in Russia in the early decades of the twentieth century. Like many of her compatriots, she was an outstanding designer of theatre sets and costumes and an outstanding illustrator of children’s books. After studying at the Kiyevskoye Khudozhestvennoye Uchilishche (Kiev Art School), she spent her artistic and professional life in Moscow, St Petersburg, Kiev and Paris; consequently, she was a link in the exchanges between the new languages of art, such as Cubism and Futurism, which were being formulated in the years before the First World War.

She first travelled to Paris in 1907 and immediately entered the circle that included the poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob and the artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, at a time when they were beginning to conceive their breakaway in terms of form and composition. In her work, she then began to incorporate the ideas of Cézanne and Cubism about the relationships between volume and surface, texture and form, rhythm and composition. Also important was the trace left in her work and in the definition of her style by the Simultaneism formulated by Robert and Sonia Delaunay in about 1912 and the principles of rhythm and movement defended by Futurism. In contrast to the Cubist loss of interest in colour, Exter reserved a dominant role for it in composition and even raised it to the category of “material”, following the precepts of Vladimir Tatlin. She also understood rhythm as an essential component of movement, an intrinsic characteristic of modern times, which a modern work of art should reproduce and evoke. When she returned to Moscow she was considered a pioneer in using the term “Cubo-Futurism” to refer to a specifically Russian iconoclastic language with which the traditional systems of representation could be renewed. Suprematism, which Kazimir Malevich presented in 1915, was one of the greatest examples of this experimentation with languages that tended towards abstraction, in which she, too, participated.

Exter helped to organise salons and group exhibitions such as Zveno (The Link, Kiev, 1908), Sovremennye techeniya v iskusstve (Contemporary Trends in Art, St Petersburg, 1908), Venok (The Garland, St Petersburg, 1908), the travelling “Izdebsky Salon” (1909–1911), Soyuz molodezhi (Union of Youth, St Petersburg, 1914) and the well-known 0,10. Poslednyaya futuristicheskaya vystavka kartin (0,10. The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings, St Petersburg, 1915) and 5 × 5 = 25 (Moscow, 1921). She also exhibited with the Section d’Or (Paris, 1912) and was in contact with Herwarth Walden and his gallery, Der Sturm, in Berlin. When the October 1917 revolution broke out she remained in Kiev and converted her studio into a free education centre. She formalised her teaching activity in 1921 when she took over one of the colour workshops in the Vkhutemas school in Moscow. However, in 1924 she took advantage of her presence in the Biennale di Venezia to leave her country and settle definitively in Paris, where she remained and worked as an artist, illustrator and theatre set designer.

Far from being obliged to adopt a different language or different forms in each medium, Exter succeeded in transferring her artistic achievements from painting to costume design. Her spatial and volumetric compositional devices enabled her to think differently about the dancer’s body, and also about the purposes that were fulfilled by costumes and sets. She was driven by a spatial principle, and her work exploited the possibilities of movement, with the result that bodies, costumes and set – masses, lines and colours – interacted and became an extension of the plot. She did remarkable work for Alexander Tairov, director of the Kamerny (Chamber) Theatre in Moscow: Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (1917) and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1921). In her exhibitions she showed her film set designs and her work with puppets. She produced striking designs for the film Aelita (Yakov Protazanov, 1924) and published an outstanding anthology, Alexandra Exter: Décors de Théâtre (1930).

Another facet that Exter developed was illustration. The children’s book Panorama de la côte, with text by Marie Colmont, forms part of a trilogy of “panoramas” – together with Panorama du fleuve and Panorama de la montagne – which she produced between 1937 and 1938 for the Flammarion publishing house as part of their Albums du Père Castor collection, created in 1931. The book is designed in an accordion-fold format in keeping with the theme – a panorama and view of scenery by the sea – and with the book’s function as an instrument for learning and reading, for getting to know about nature and for appreciating aesthetic, formal and spatial aspects, contrasts of colours, and so on.

In this book, text and image seem to be dissociated. On one side there is the text: Colmont’s comments about various activities connected with the landscape, accompanied by a few small pictures; and on the other there is a mural frieze that uses figurative language to depict the panorama of the coast. Exter constructs it with a rhythm of concave and convex lines that lead the eye along a coastline that ranges from civilisation (beach, town, harbour) to rough open sea (cliffs). The book consists of ten pages, ten points on the coast. When the eye moves over them and sees them as a whole they form a single image; and the motif (or compositional device) that links them all together is the line of the horizon.

References
Jean Chauvelin and Nadia Filatoff: Alexandra Exter. Monographie. Max Milo, Paris, 2003.
John E. Bowlt and Matthew Drutt (eds.): Amazons of the Avant-Garde. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2000.
A.
L. de Saint-Rat: “Children’s Books by Russian Émigré Artists: 1921–1940”. The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, vol. 11, no. 2 (Russian/Soviet Theme), Winter 1989, pp. 92–105.