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signed on right hand panel l.r.

oil on panel

Quantity: 3

CATALOGUE NOTE

In the late 1920s Alexandra Exter's style underwent a dramatic shift away from the cubo-futurism of her Kiev and Moscow years. She emigrated to Paris in 1924 and found herself in a city where cubism, which had long been the dominant style in painting, was finally running its natural course. As many saw it, cubism was becoming decadent, both repetitive and decorative, and thus change became necessary to find new meaning.

As far back as 1918 the prominent artist Amedee Ozenfant and architect Charles-Eduard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) published a small treatise entitled "Apres le Cubisme" in which they expounded a new kind of art they termed "Purism". They criticised the fragmentation of the object a central precept of cubism and instead proposed a new kind of painting in which objects were represented as powerful basic forms stripped of detail. Exter embraced these new ideas in her later work.

One major difference which distinguishes Exter from her purist contemporaries who were obsessed with the world of the machine, was her growing interest in the human figure, which in her own oeuvre also was a relatively new departure. "Human figures, which had been nearly absent from her Cubo-futurist period, came back in her Purist period, which was not exactly in line with that current. Their design is specific, with flexible, carved out shapes, and different colour flats in the centre, maybe a homage to Archipenko, who painted the hollows as fulls and vice versa." Chauvelin and Filatoff, Alexandra Exter, Paris, 2003, p.p.268-269.

At this time she also became interested in book illustration, producing a number of lavishly decorated volumes often based on subjects taken from classical antiquity. This married well with the preoccupations of the purists, whose paintings often included references to classical architecture, and whose style was based on the harmony of form and lines.

The offered lot is a large work painted on three panel and set together to form a screen. It relates directly to the illustrations she executed for Andre Gide's The Treatise of the Narcissus from 1938-1940. Originally published in 1891, the book was one of Gide's earliest and was printed privately after meeting Oscar Wilde who also at this time published a story on the tragic fate of Narcissus, The Disciple. Gide, who lived in Paris and was at one time painted by Yuri Annenkov, had become deeply interested in Communism in the early 30s, although his initial enthusiasm quickly turned to bitter disillusionment. Exter produced illustrations for several books in these years based on classical subjects, including "Aeschylus: The Seven Against Thebes", 1943 and "Euripides: The Bacchantes", 1944-45.