Alexandra Exter

Mikhail Kolesnikov, "Samyi sovremennyi stsenograf - Aleksandra Ekster," Dekorativnoe Iskusstvo SSSR, 1988, vol.1, p. 27, illustrated
Mikhail Kolesnikov, "Aleksandra Ekster dlia baleta budushchego," Sovetskii Balet, 1987, vol.6, p. 64, illustrated
G.F. Kovalenko, Aleksandra Ekster, Moscow: Galart, 1993, p. 91 illustrated
Mikhail Kolesnikov, Aleksandra Ekster- ot Impressionizma k Konstruktivizmu (Alexandra Exter -- from Impressionism to Constructivism), Moscow: Sovetskii Khudozhnik, 1988, illustrated

The most cosmopolitan member of the Russian avant-garde, Alexandra Exter began to make frequent trips to Western Europe in 1908. She studied under Henri Caraux-Delvai at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris from 1908 to 1914, and soon became associated with numerous major avant-garde artists and writers, including Picasso, Braque, Delaunay, Léger, Max Jacob, and Apollinaire. She learned about Cubism at first hand and became an important figure in the transmission of Parisian artistic developments to Russian artists. Her involvement with Russian avant-garde groups and participation in exhibitions of avant-garde work was also extensive. In 1908 she exhibited with Contemporary Trends in St. Petersburg and at Zveno (The Link) in Kiev, which she organized together with David Burliuk, Mikhail Larionov, and Natalia Goncharova. Many other exhibitions followed, including the Izdebsky Salons in Odessa (1909-11) and all of the Knave of Diamonds exhibitions of 1910-16.

Exter exhibited at the Salon des Indépendents and Section d'or in Paris in 1912. In 1914, her works were also featured in the First International Futurist Exhibition at the Galleria Sprovieri in Rome. Exter became acquainted with a number of the Italian Futurists. Between 1918 and 1920, Exter ran a teaching workshop in Kiev, where her students included the future famous artists Pavel Tchelitchew and Anatolii Petritsky, among many others. Before developing her own style, highly charged with color and movement, Exter explored various modernist styles, including Fauvism, Cubism, and Futurism. In 1924 Exter exhibited at the Venice Biennale and that same year immigrated to Paris, where from 1925 to 1930 she was a professor at Ferdinand Léger's Académie d'art Contemporain.

The movement of forms in space was of particular interest to Exter -- an interest that extended to the movement of the actors on the stage, whom Exter envisioned as living nonobjective constructions in motion. This concern is reflected in Exter's 1920 costume design for a series of dances by Elsa Kruger, a very popular dancer in pre-Revolutionary Russia, called "the Queen of Tango," who was a close friend of the artist. Exter created many costume designs for Kruger's dance performances both in Russia and Western Europe. It was Kruger who convinced Exter to leave Kiev after the Bolshevik Revolution and to later pursue her career in the West.

While still in Russia Kruger frequented Odessa, staying there between 1917 and 1919, and finally leaving for the West in 1920. Kruger opened the School of Stage Arts in Odessa. Exter opened her own studio there as well, and she often collaborated with Kruger not only on costume designs but also on developing an overall image of a particular dance performance. In Odessa, Kruger worked with the theater director K. Miklashevsky on the Oscar Wilde play Salomé, with music by Richard Strauss. However, the production was not realized.

In 1920-22, Exter taught at the Moscow VKhUTEMAS (Higher Art-Technical Workshops). At this time she embraced the radical approach of the Constructivist artists gathered around Aleksandr Rodchenko. Based on simple geometric forms, this costume design for dances by Kruger reflects Exter's interest in Constructivist aesthetics. The costume is divided into single geometric sections, while structurally different materials are brought together in an elaborate, colorful ensemble; a decorative motif reminiscent of Exter's Cubist-style painting is also included. Costumes played an especially vital role in Kruger's earliest ballets, many of which were single-actor performances danced on a bare stage, without any décor.

During the early 1920s, Exter also designed stylish costumes and work clothes for the Fashion Studio in Moscow. In her theoretical work on costume design from this period, Exter argued that a dress should consist of simple geometric shapes, and that certain materials were appropriate to certain forms. In her article "On the Structure of Dress" for the journal Atel'e (No. 1, 1923) she wrote that the type of costume "constructed" on the dynamic movement of the body "must itself be "mobile" in its components." She also pointed out that "It is the artist's job to unveil the new shape associated with contemporary man... and to stabilize the rhythms in accordance with the silhouette of the garment and the dynamism of the human body."

After leaving for the West, Kruger danced The Andalusian Night and a series of tangos with Boris Romanoff's Ballets Romantiques Russes at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris. Kruger was married to a German tobacco tycoon who admired his wife's talent, financing the spectacles in which she took part. Kruger's collaboration with Exter continued, and in 1929, Kruger commissioned Exter to create sets and costumes for the production of the Gluck ballet Don Juan at the Cologne Opera House in Germany.