Aleksandra Aleksandrovna Ekster

Aleksandra Aleksandrovna Ekster (born Jan. 6 [Jan. 18, New Style], 1882, Belostok, Russia [now Białystok, Pol.]—died March 17, 1949, Fontenay-aux-Roses, France) was a Russian artist of international stature who divided her life between Kiev, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Vienna, and Paris, thus strengthening the cultural ties between Russia and Europe. In this way and through her own artistic achievement, she did much to further the Russian avant-garde.

Ekster spent her early years in Kiev and graduated from the Kiev Art School in 1906. There she met some of her future comrades in the struggle for Russian New Art: Aristarkh Lentulov, Aleksandr Bogomazov, and the sculptor Aleksandr Arkhipenko (Alexander Archipenko). 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 (1908–15), 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. 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 (1917–18) and Construction (1922–23).

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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; Eng. trans. Thamyris Kitharodos in The Russian Symbolist Theatre) and Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (1917).

In 1924 Ekster moved to Paris but did not cut her ties with Russia. 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.