Alexandra Exter

Simon Lissim collection
Leonard Hutton Galleries, New York
Private collection, Europe (since 1974)
Private collection, London

New York, Leonard Hutton Galleries, Alexandra Exter - Marionettes, 1975, no.25;
St Petersburg, The State Russian Museum, Time to Gather, 2007

Exhibition Catalogue Alexandra Exter - Marionettes, 1975, ill.p.36
Exhibition Catalogue A Time to Gather, St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2007, p.172, ill. plate no.166
Exhibition Catalogue Artist of the Theatre: Alexandra Exter, The New York Public Library, 1974, illustrated in a black and white photograph p.25

Structural Condition The canvas is unlined with an address label on the reverse and one very small repair in the lower right corner as viewed from the reverse. The stretcher would appear not to be the original. There are some very fine lines of craquelure, particularly in the green pigments in the centre of the composition, but these are entirely stable, not visually distracting and part of the natural drying processes of the artist's materials. Paint surface The paint surface has an even varnish layer. Inspection under ultra-violet light shows very small, scattered retouchings, the most significant of which are: 1) very small scattered spots in the lower left, 2) a thin vertical line, approximately 3 cm in length, and other minimal lines and spots, in the black semicircular forms in the lower right, 3) an area amongst the horizontal stripes by the right vertical framing edge, which measures approximately 4 x 1 cm, 4) small retouchings around the framing edges and just beneath the upper horizontal framing edge and other scattered spots and lines. It should be noted that these retouchings are all minimal in size. Summary The painting would therefore appear to be in very good and stable condition and no further work is required.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

'A kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness' was how Charles Baudelaire defined painters of urban life in 1863.  The Purist ideals displayed in this rare work from Alexandra Exter's Paris post-emigration oeuvre were suited to fulfil Baudelaire's dictum perhaps better than any before. Exter had visited Venice in 1924 to exhibit at the Soviet Pavilion in the XIV International Exhibition alongside Dobuzhinsky, Altmann and Annekov among others. The following year she emigrated from Moscow to Paris; the offered lot was among the first works she painted in her new studio on 154 rue Broca.

Soon after arrival in Paris Exter was invited to teach at the recently founded Académie Moderne by Léger and Ozenfant, the principle ideologues of Purism, where she had her own studio for 'composition and the theory of colour' from 1925-31. The object of Purism, as articulated by Ozenfant in a 1916 article, was to express not the accidental or picturesque, but the essential and invariant. Dubbed 'The Russian Léger', according to the art historian Jean-Claude Marcade, Exter had long since abandoned the Cubist syntax by 1925 but her sense of colour remained together with a strong conviction, shared with Léger, that a work of art should elicit a feeling of mathematical order. In its graceful interaction of fragmented planes and oscillation between emerging and receding elements, Venice echoes the more precise qualities that also appear in Léger's work at this time, both artists occupied with the continuous modulation of surfaces and the 'melody of construction' that Le Corbusier was still advocating in the 1930s.  But while Exter subscribed to Léger's theory that 'a painting in its beauty must be equal to a beautiful industrial production', she never fully embraced the aesthetics of the machine and rejecting the common opposition between ancient and modern, her work often retains a classical edge - for example in these trefoil windows, arches and vaults. Human figures, which had been nearly absent from her Cubo-futurist paintings, also return in other works from this period.

Simon Lissim first met Exter around the time she painted the present work. His parents had known her years before in Kiev and Simon would visit Exter and husband, George Nekrasov often in their small house at Fontenay-aux-Roses where she moved in 1928. He treasured her work for 'the feeling of pure perfection [it] conveys', in particular her colour combinations. '[They] are for her more of a science than an emotional value. She combines two or three colours, not because she feels they should be there, but because without any doubt that is how it has to be. They belong here; it is not the mood that evokes them - they create the mood.'

Lissim recalls how Exter was never satisfied as an artist, constantly studying and experimenting. Similarly impressed by her thirst for learning, Ozenfant commented 'I have met no one in my life so impregnated with theory and yet so profoundly cultured as Exter'. She was undoubtedly aware of the concept of 'defamiliarisation' for example, a term first coined by the influential literary critic Viktor Shklovsky in 1917:

'The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.'

An instance of this device is discernable in the present tight formation of the oars, seen from above. At the time, Exter and Leger were collaborating on the Ballet Mechanique and explored similar 'objectifying' techniques in cinema. 'A herd of sheep walking, filmed from above...' wrote Leger 'disorientates the spectator. That is objectivity. The thighs of 50 girls, rotating, in disciplined formation, shown as a close-up - that is beautiful and that is objectivity'. Like Braque and Picasso, Exter incorporates sand into certain areas of pigment to enhance the differentiation of surfaces, a technique also used to 'increase the length of perception'. The occasional lack of overlap between the boundaries of the textured surfaces and colour planes strengthens the paradoxical combination of tangible presence and elusive abstraction that makes Venice such a powerful work.

Venetian subjects occur in Exter's work as early as 1915. A gigantic panneau of the city was one of the final works she produced in the Soviet Union and exhibited in the 1924 Venice Biennale (fig. 2).