This week’s painter came from a Belarusian family, was born in Poland, trained and launched her career in Kyiv, and went on to build her reputation in Paris: she’s the truly international Oleksandra Ekster (1882–1949).

Aleksandra Grigorovich (as she was then) was born in 1882, in the city of Białystok, now in Poland, not far from its border with Belarus. Her father was a wealthy Belarusian businessman, and the family moved south-east to Kyiv when she was three. She trained at Kyiv Art School alongside Oleksandr Bohomazov and the sculptor Oleksandr Arkhypenko, under teachers including Mykola Pymonenko, and left there in 1903. For the next two decades she was one of the leading figures in avant garde circles in Kyiv, as well as travelling extensively to Odesa, Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Paris and Italy. In 1905 she married a Ukrainian lawyer and became Oleksandra Ekster or Alexandra Exter.

Early in her career she was introduced to Ukrainian folk art, which was to remain a life-long influence. In 1906 she was one of the organisers of a major arts and crafts exhibition in Kyiv, where she recreated an affluent Ukrainian house from the eighteenth century, in which to exhibit traditional crafts.

She stayed in Paris from 1906, where she attended the Académie Julian and Fernand Léger’s art school, and was influenced by the work of Henri Matisse and the Fauves, although Ekster remained more structured in her use of colour.

Bridge, Sèvres from about 1912 marks a reduction in the chroma of her paintings, with denser Cubist composition. At that time, Ekster was associating with Italian Futurists, and developing her own Cubo-Futurism. This shows the bridge over the River Seine at Sèvres, outside the city of Paris.

She painted City at Night in 1913.

Still Life also dates from 1913, and is a collage with oil paint on canvas.

In early 1914, she exhibited with Futurists in Rome, then that summer returned to Kyiv, where she became artistic director of the Verbivka folk embroidery studio in Ukraine. The following year, she organised an exhibition in Moscow of more than two hundred embroidery works from that studio, many based on designs by modern Ukrainian artists, including Kazymyr Malevych.

She painted Composition (Genoa) between 1912-14.

In 1916, as she was moving to non-objective painting, she made this Dynamic of Colours.

In early 1918, Ekster was trapped in Kyiv by the Revolution, and had to open her own art school to generate income. She was so successful that by the summer she was teaching lessons in two shifts. She then spent much of 1919 in Odesa, before leaving for Moscow the following year.

Painted in 1921, Construction is typical of her late non-objective works.

In 1924, Ekster and her husband emigrated to Paris, where they remained for the rest of their lives. In the late 1920s she was a professor at Fernand Léger’s Academy of Contemporary Art in Paris.

Her Theatrical Composition from about 1925 refers to her long involvement in stage design.

Although she painted Carnival in Venice in the 1930s, her work was featured in the Venice Biennale in 1924.

During the 1930s, her health started to decline, which wasn’t helped by her poverty during the Nazi occupation in the Second World War, and she died in France in 1949. Although she never returned to Ukraine after 1920, her home in Paris remained rich with Ukrainian embroideries and tapestries, and she always served food in traditional ceramic pots and dishes.

References

Wikipedia

Andrey Kurkov and others (2022) Treasures of Ukraine, A Nation’s Cultural Heritage, Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978 0 500 02603 8.
Konstantin Akinsha and others (2022) In the Eye of the Storm, Modernism in Ukraine 1900-1930s, Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978 0 500 29715 5.