Alexandra Exter

St.Petersburg, State Russian Museum, Russkii Parizh, 28 April - 21 July 2003
Koblenz, Ludwig Museum, Treffpunk Paris, 5 September - 23 November 2003

Russkii Parizh 1910-1960 exhibition catalogue, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2003 illustrated p.167

Structural Condition The canvas has been lined onto a new stretcher and this is providing an even and secure structural support. Paint Surface The paint surface fluoresces unevenly under ultra-violet light but this would appear to be caused by the artist's pigments rather than later retouching and is most evident in the pale yellow pigment of the girls face and shoulder. There would appear to be only very minimal retouchings. Summary The painting would therefore appear to be in very good condition and no further work is required. Held in a modern gold painted frame and unexamined out of frame.
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This work was executed in 1927-1928.

In the hands of the Expressionist movements of the early twentieth century portraiture transformed into an infinitely more complex genre. Picasso's iconoclastic decision to deliberately replace the individual features of his sitter with a primitive mask of abstract features was one of the turning points and there a clear parallels between the offered work and a set of variations on a portrait Picasso painted of his lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter in 1931-2 (fig.1).

In Alexander Exter's Woman with Birds the two-dimensional areas of colour, boldly and sweepingly outlined, all belong to a tradition of distortion established by twentieth century Expressionist artists. These smooth and elongated limbs are juxtaposed with the mechanical form of the birdcage, which conversely is a distinctly eighteenth century motif and appears in the work of Lancret and Boucher as a recurring symbol of the potential loss of virginity.

Following her emigration to Paris in 1924, Exter's style underwent a significant transformation as she abandoned the starkly cubo-futurist compositions of her years in Kiev and Moscow in favour of a more linear approach. This change reflected a shift in artistic values which was taking place in the French capital. As early as 1918 the artist Amedée Ozenfant together with architect Charles-Eduard Jeanneret Le Corbusier published a treatise in which they criticised the fragmentation of the object with lay at the centre of Cubism and proposed a more Purist approach, which represented basic forms stripped of detail.

Exter embraced this trend, applying it in particular to the representation of the human figure, which had up until then been altogether absent in her work to create her own individual style. Dating from 1927-8, a period when Exter was working on a series of illuminated manuscripts, which included Euripides, Ronsard and Villon, the lyrical and enigmatic subject of the offered work illustrates the influence which the study of these Classical texts were having on her easel work.