At first glance, Alexandra Exter’s City at Night is incomprehensible. What are we looking at? Explosions? A city breaking away from its foundations?
Gradually, details emerge: tall buildings, a colorful billboard, the glowing headlights of cars traveling down a steep slope. Ahh, now I understand—I’m viewing Kyiv from above, like a drone camera would.
Exter captured this dizzying urban perspective from her own attic studio at 27 Funduklievskaya Street, just steps from the Kyiv Opera Theatre.
From this vantage point, she watched motor cars illuminate a city transformed by a new sports stadium, a new music academy, and a new national library. By 1913, Kyiv had become one of the most beautiful and sophisticated cities in Europe.
Exter so loved to paint the city at night, when somehow everything becomes transformed and reflected in each other. New electric lights illuminate old architecture, modern advertisements illuminate centuries-old walls, triangles of light criss-cross ancient canals.
Art historian Georgy Kovalenko, 2013
Before painting City at Night, Exter visited Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in their Paris studio. She was eager to see the strange new style of painting they were inventing, now called Cubism. One critic charitably called their approach “not as bad as it seems at first glance.”
Exter admired how Cubism captured the natural world from multiple perspectives at once. However, she rejected its dour palette of browns and grays because for her, color was everything.
Alexandra executed a number of truly Cubist pieces that were masterful but inwardly cold. The Cubists modulated the scale of colours and this inhibited her violent, colourist temperament.
Author Benedikt Livshits, “The One and a Half-Eyed Archer,” 1933
Shifting gears
Instead of adhering strictly to Picasso’s style, Exter blended Cubism’s interlocking planes with Futurism’s colorful celebration of modern urban life. This fusion of styles, which became popular in Russia and Eastern Europe, is known as Cubo-Futurism—a name she likely coined.
The Futurists believed technology would create a more equitable life for everyone, no matter their social class. Accordingly, everyday objects in their paintings morph into geometric shapes imbued with machine symbolism. Their landscapes look like the flickering colors seen from a speeding car.
Umberto Boccioni, the Italian artist who helped forge the aesthetic of Futurism, juxtaposed unblended complementary colors: red and green, yellow and purple, blue and orange, chartreuse and magenta. His work looks strikingly modern, even a century later.
Exter was also influenced by Robert and Sonia Delaunay, French artists who believed that complementary color pairings could create the illusion of depth on a flat surface without relying on a more rigid, 15th-century invention called linear perspective.
Exter often visited the Delaunays in their Paris studio. Sonia, a Ukrainian-born artist, and her husband Robert both embraced vibrant colors and geometric shapes in their work. Robert spoke frequently (and perhaps a bit over-optimistically) about the potential of certain color pairings:
I attach great importance to observing the movement of complementary colors. Simultaneous contrast is a honey of a technique. It creates visible depth without the old craft.
The Great War disrupts Exter’s career
Amid the upheaval of World War I, Exter transformed her attic studio into a classroom for aspiring artists.
By night, her home became a hangout for Kyiv’s creative elite. This group of painters, poets, actors, and dancers allowed Cubo-Futurist ideas to circulate quickly. It wasn’t long before choreographer Bronislava Nijinska invited Exter to collaborate on scenery for a new ballet.
Exter’s cutting-edge style also caught the eye of director Alexander Tairov, who was determined to shake up every aspect of theater production. The elements he found most challenging were visual, so he persuaded Exter to join his production team.
In a theatrical environment, Exter found it easy to apply Cubo-Futurist ideas. She replaced flat, trompe l’oeil scenery with three-dimensional sets. She created colorful interlocking planes that moved in sync with the drama. And she accentuated costumes with color, wire, and padding to provide actors with new ways to be expressive.
Alexandra Exter responded with exceptional sensitivity to the dynamic elements of the theater. From the point of view of verisimilitude, her designs may seem stylized. But I think they are more truly real because theater is art.
Russian theater director Alexander Tairov, “Notes of a Director,” 1921
Exter flees to Paris
The 1919 Treaty of Versailles ended much of the violence of World War I. However, Ukrainian lands east of the Polish border were soon annexed by the newly formed Soviet Union, ending a certain tolerance for modern artists in the region. Lenin and Stalin despised the avant-garde, whom they considered elitist agents of change.
Exter moved from Kyiv to Paris and became a college professor with help from French artist and filmmaker Fernand LĂ©ger. “I have never met anyone in my life who was more imbued with theory and so profoundly cultured as Exter,” he said.
For years, Exter’s contribution to Cubo-Futurism was all but forgotten. Today, she is enjoying a resurgence. But as the value of her work rises, so does the number of forgeries. Art historians will need to sort it all out, and it is well worth their time.
Ukrainian-Russian artist Alexandra Exter (Aleksandra Ekster) is one of the stars of European modernism. Her work captures the fragmented energy of a world falling apart and being rebuilt. It’s time to bring her in from the margins of art history, where far too many women still languish.
Postscript: How to view more Ukrainian modern art…
Discover additional works of art by Alexandra Exter and her Ukrainian peers by taking a virtual tour of In the Eye of the Storm at the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum in Madrid. Moving these masterworks out of Ukraine wasn’t easy, what with Russian missiles flying overhead. But this is one way to safeguard Ukraine’s artistic heritage.
