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Lot Essay
Venise - le bateau et la ville is an exciting rediscovery. It dates from the beginning of Exter's final Paris period, to where she had emigrated from Moscow in 1924, and it displays the influence of the Purist aesthetic championed by Léger, Le Corbusier and Ozenfant. Exter had joined the staff of Léger's Académie Moderne on her arrival in Paris in order to teach painting and stage design, soon assimilating the geometric and machine-inspired vocabulary of the Purists into her own wide-ranging visual syntax. Exter, as one of the most well-travelled of the Russian avant-garde, whose middle class background had enabled her to visit France and Italy regularly from 1907 onward and maintain contacts with the leading members of other avant-gardes, integrated its lessons.
The Venetian subject of the present work is perhaps a souvenir of Exter's involvement in 1924 with the Soviet pavilion at that year's Biennale. There is another work of a similar subject recorded in Chauvelin (loc. cit.). A hand-written label on the verso of the present work carries Exter's signature and Paris studio address at rue Broca, where she worked for the first three years of her French exile. In 1928 she moved to Fontenay-aux-Roses to the south of the city, taking the present work with her (see fig. 1).
The Venetian subject of the present work is perhaps a souvenir of Exter's involvement in 1924 with the Soviet pavilion at that year's Biennale. There is another work of a similar subject recorded in Chauvelin (loc. cit.). A hand-written label on the verso of the present work carries Exter's signature and Paris studio address at rue Broca, where she worked for the first three years of her French exile. In 1928 she moved to Fontenay-aux-Roses to the south of the city, taking the present work with her (see fig. 1).