The Brooklyn Rail

A most interestingly problematic show is about to close here in New York: the first solo American museum exhibition of Alexsandra Exter, or Aleksandra Ekster (1882–1949), at the Ukrainian Museum, in the East Village until January 19. Everyone concerned has been waiting day-by-day for the scholarly catalogue to arrive, and now I must finish this review before it is too late.

I confess to a vested interest in Ekster because as a student I had the nerve, in a short article in Artforum (January 1972), to claim Composition (1922) by Ekster (similar to a stage set published by her in the same year) as a pastiche, not to say a rip-off, based on Juan Gris. Then again, I have come to see that much of what comes out of synthetic cubism is also a pastiche; but that’s another story except insofar as Ekster herself proves to be a stylistic wellspring of ever classy-popular “Art Deco.” And if quite a few images in the present show testify to that, others with big square pillars recall aspects of Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966) stage designs that quite anticipate Minimalism.

Ekster may have been a poor-little rich girl in the middle of the revolutionary transformation in Russian art from Suprematism to Constructivism; and the exhibition’s subtitle, “The Stage Is a World,” is obviously a clever way to justify her considerable scenographic work as something more than applied art, since no one minds that scenography always plays second-fiddle to something else. Hence one needs to see whatever artistic evidence can be mustered. The work in the show comes from an extensive collection held at the McNay Art Museum, in San Antonio, as well as from private collections.

Basically, Suprematism as such is only faced head-on here by a mixed-media Abstract Composition (1915–16) in which a perceptual gradient of units, like paint-chip samples, goes from white to gray to black, against a red and red-orange ground; and an oil and gouache Composition (1916) that plays on the succession of one–two–three. Almost all of the other works are figurative, though in more theatrical designs the figures approach the puppet designs that El Lissitzky made tit-for-tat in 1923, for Malevich’s version of Victory Over the Sun (1913). One of the very best pieces is literally a stage design, meaning a design for how the actual platform is to look, from about 1923. Its several high stations, like big bird perches in varied heights, beautifully painted in combinations of brown, tan, and blue, surround a stage in reverse perspective (as in the Russian icons, not to mention Cézanne).

A certain curatorial problem obtains whenever related images are hung in “decorator” groups, without consideration of either dates or modalities. Thus one finds a row of three figural works on paper: a watercolor dated 1921, a pochoir print dated 1930, and a gouache dated 1924. The last might look the most like an Erté, but the best, which has the most constructivism in posing, is the pochoir, in the middle, which is the only multiple (as if settling on it) and was in fact done last.

More observant of historical sequence is another triplet of medium-sized canvases: two female dancers, from 1924–26, then a pair of reclining female nudes in the woods, of 1928–30 that recall Manet, and finally, a brace of dancers with reciprocally swinging arms, on a beach, also of 1928–30.

One can confront Ekster’s costumes in action thanks to an abbreviated video showing of the 1924 science-fiction film Aelita: Queen of Mars, with sets designed by Isaac Rabinovich and Victor Simov. As campy as it seems, including the costumes, this film adumbrates Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. As for Ekster’s problem concerning Art Deco—where otherwise competent formal decisions wind up advancing sheer décor, a highlight of the film’s scenography consists of pseudo-scientific equipment as props that have serious interest as constructivist sculpture, six years before Moholy-Nagy’s Light Prop for an Electric Stage (a.k.a. Light-Space Modulator), of 1930, at that.

Robert Pincus-Witten used to like to use the term petit maître, which means “little master” in the sense of a male artist, but without implying dandyism. Can the same be said to an apply to a female artist as a petite maîtresse? Maybe; but then again, the two Suprematist works are too good for that.