Portrait of Aleksandra Ekster
Aleksandra Ekster in her studio
Kiev, Ukraine
Aleksandra Ekster in Kiev
Pablo Picasso
Georges Braque
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(Exhibition catalogue for an exhibition held at the Lincol...)
Exhibition catalogue for an exhibition held at the Lincoln Center Spring - Summer 1974.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00HMQ9M0O/?tag=2022091-20
Alexandra Exter
artist ceramist designer painter suprematist cubo-futurist constructivist
Aleksandra Ekster was born Aleksandra Grigorovich on January 18, 1882, in Białystok, at that time Grodno Governorate, Russian Empire (today’s Poland) into a wealthy Belarusian family. Her father Aleksandr Avramovich Grigorovich was a wealthy Belarusian businessman. Her mother was Greek.
Ekster received an excellent private education, studying languages, music, art, and taking private drawing lessons. She spent her early years in Kiev and graduated from the St. Olga Gymnasium in 1889. From 1901 to 1903, she attended Kiev Art School as an auditor. In 1906, she became its regular student, and graduated in 1908. There she met some of her future comrades in the struggle for Russian New Art: Aristarkh Lentulov, Aleksandr Bogomazov, and the sculptor Aleksandr Arkhipenko. Two years after completing her studies at the Kiev Art School, Ekster married and moved to Paris, where she met the Cubist painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Her brief period of study at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière ended when she was expelled for not following the academy’s artistic direction.
In 1908, Ekster began exhibiting her works, first in Kiev and then in St. Petersburg in the “Exhibition of New Currents.” That same year, together with David Burlyuk, Mikhail Larionov, and Natalya Goncharova, she organized an exhibition with Impressionistic leanings called “Zveno” (“Link”). She went on to organize a series of increasingly radical exhibitions, and her own work also became progressively more avant-garde. Within a period of a few years (1908–1915), Ekster evolved from Impressionism through Cubism and Cubo-Futurism to nonobjective art. Initially, she painted cityscapes, and she then moved on to abstraction of geometrical forms, still-lifes (such as Vase and Assortment of Fruit, 1914), and more complicated, almost abstract, cityscapes (such as Venice and City at Night, both 1915). Her work was dynamic, though she did not attempt to portray movement in space as did many Futurist painters; her dynamics lay in the rhythmical quality of her colour equilibrium.
In Paris, Aleksandra Ekster was a personal friend of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who introduced her to Gertrude Stein. She exhibited six works at the Salon de la Section d'Or, Galerie La Boétie, Paris, October 1912, with Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Marcel Duchamp and others. In 1914, Ekster participated in the Salon des Indépendants exhibitions in Paris, together with Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Archipenko, Vadym Meller, Sonia Delaunay-Terk and other French and Russian artists. In the same year she participated with the “Russians” Archipenko, Koulbine and Rozanova in the International Futurist Exhibition in Rome. In 1915, she joined the group of avant-garde artists Supremus. In 1915–1916 she worked in the peasant craft cooperatives in the villages Skoptsi and Verbovka along with Kazimir Malevich, Yevgenia Pribylskaya, Natalia Davidova, Nina Genke, Liubov Popova, Ivan Puni, Olga Rozanova, Nadezhda Udaltsova and others. Ekster later founded a teaching and production workshop (MDI) in Kiev (1918–1920). Vadym Meller, Anatol Petrytsky, Kliment Red'ko, Tchelitchew, Shifrin, Nikritin worked there. Also during this period she was one of the leading stage designers of Alexander Tairov's Chamber Theatre.
From 1916 Ekster completely immersed herself in nonobjective art—plane surfaces and depth, equilibrium and movement, colour and light—displaying her mastery of these elements in such works as Movement of Planes (1917–1918) and Construction (1922–1923).
Ekster’s most productive period was from the mid-1910s to the beginning of the 1920s. Parallel to her success in painting came success in stage design. Ekster’s collaboration in Moscow with Aleksandr Tairov in the Kamerny Theatre (“Chamber Theatre”) he had founded was very productive. Her set designs for the plays Tairov directed became classic; the most renowned of these were Innokenty Annensky’s tragedy Famira-Kifared (1916) and Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (1917).
In 1919, together with other avant-garde artists Kliment Red'ko and Nina Genke-Meller she decorated the streets and squares of Kiev and Odessa in abstract style for Revolution Festivities. She worked with Vadym Meller as a costume designer in a ballet studio of the dancer Bronislava Nijinska.
In 1921, she became a director of the elementary course Color at the Higher Artistic-Technical Workshop in Moscow, a position she held until 1924. Her work was displayed alongside that of other Constructivist artists at the 5x5=25 exhibition held in Moscow in 1921. In the same year Ekster’s work in fashion design began. Though her mass production designs were wearable, most of her fashion design was highly decorative and innovative, usually falling under the category of haute couture.
In 1923, she continued her work in many media in addition to collaborating with Vera Mukhina and Boris Gladkov in Moscow on the decor of the All Russian Exhibition pavilions.
In 1924, Aleksandra Ekster and her husband emigrated to France and settled in Paris, but she did not cut her ties with Russia. Initially she became a Professor at the Academie der Moderne in Paris. That year she collaborated with the filmmaker Yakov Protazanov on what is considered to be Russia’s first science fiction film, Aelita, and a year later she helped set up the Soviet pavilion at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris (International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts). Her period outside Russia was quite fruitful—she was involved in exhibitions, theatrical work, and book illustrations—but she never again managed to attain her former artistic eminence. From 1926 to 1930, Ekster was a professor at Fernand Léger's Académie d'Art Contemporain.
In 1933, she began creating extremely beautiful and original illuminated manuscripts (gouache on paper), which are beyond doubt the most important works of the last phase of her life. The "Callimaque" manuscript (c. 1939, the text being a French translation of a hymn by Hellenistic poet Callimachus) is widely regarded as her masterpiece. In 1936, she participated in the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art in New York and went on to have solo exhibitions in Prague and in Paris. She was a book illustrator for the publishing company Flammarion in Paris from 1936 until her death in the Paris suburb of Fontenay-aux-Roses.
During the past few decades her reputation has increased dramatically, as have the prices of her works. As a consequence, hundreds of fakes have appeared on the market in recent years, and virtually all of the recent monographs on Exter were published for the sole purpose of making such fakes appear to be authentic.
Aleksandra Ekster was one of most famous Russian Avant Garde female painters that gained international recognition. She was a multi talented artist - a painter, ceramist, graphic artist, clothes designer. She became a co-founder of the Art Deco. In Paris, Aleksandra Ekster was a personal friend of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and many other famous artists. Ekster’s creative heritage had a huge impact on the development of world art, clothing design and theatrical art.
(Exhibition catalogue for an exhibition held at the Lincol...)
Still life
Venice
View of the bridge
Costume design for theatre Moscow
Satanic Ballet
Color construction
Florence
Three Female Figures
Costume Design
Woman with birds
Costume Design for "Modern Khlestakov"
Blue, black, red
Women's costume for the Spanish dance
Interno cubista
Painting
Costume Design for the play "Famira Kifared"
Woman with fish
Two dancers
Still life, bowl of cherries
Costume Design for The Bacchae from drame "Famira Kifared"
City
Color Dynamics
Costume design for "Dance of the Seven Veils"
Venice
Women's costume
Construction
Operetta
Bridge. Sevres
Costume design for Salome
Don Juan, and death. Sheet of from the album "Theater Set"
Costume for Romeo and Juliet
Still life
Women's costume for the Spanish dance
City
City at Night
Romeo and Juliet, costume for first mask at ball
Cityscape (composition)
Still life with egg
Futuristic composition
Costume design
Venice
View of Paris
Seven Against Thebes
Genoa
Theatrical costume design for the play by William Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet "
Costume Design for the play "Famira Kifared" by Innokentiy Annenski. Maenad.
Women's costume for the Spanish dance
View of the bridge
Costume Design for the play "Famira Kifared"
In 1903, Aleksandra Grigorovich married her cousin and successful Kiev lawyer, Nikolai Evgenyevich Ekster. The Eksters belonged to cultural and intellectual elite of Kiev. Nikolai Ekster died in 1918. In 1920, Aleksandra married an actor Georgiy Georgievich Nekrasov.
