‘Venice’ set design project for the 1st act

of the staging of Romeo and Juliet, after Shakespeare ,1920, directed by Alexander Taïrov at the Chamber Theatre ( Kamernyj teatr) in Moscow May 17, 1921.

Taïrov, Alexander. Zapiski rezhisëra (Director's notes). Moscow: 1921. German version published in 1921.

Tugendhol'd, Yakov, ed. Zarja. Aleksandra Ekster kak zhivopisec i khudozhnik sceny (Alexandra Exter, painter and stage designer). Berlin: 1922. Published in Russian, French, German and English language versions.

Nakov, Andréi. Alexandra Exter. Paris: 1972.

Tomilovskaja, E. P., E. N. Andreeva, T. B. Klim and A. V. Smirnova. Aleksandra Ekster - eskizy, dekoracij i kostjumov iz sobranija GCTM im.A.A.A.Bahrushina (A. Exter - sketches of costumes and sets in the collection of the Bakhrushin Theatre Museum). Moscow: 1986.

Chauvelin, Jean and Nadia Filatoff. Alexandra Exter. Paris: Max Milo Editions, 2003. Illustrated on p.182, no. 158.

Kovalenko. Georgij Aleksandra Exter. Moscow: 2011. Illustrated on p.15, t.2.

Strutinskaja, E.I. ed. Kamernyj teatr i ego khudozhniki (Chamber Theatre and its painters). Moscow: 2014. Summary catalogue of the collection of the A.A. Bakhrushin Theatre Museum in Moscow.

Originally, this work was part of Alexandra Exter's Parisian studio and in this capacity, under the artist's will, it was bequeathed to Simon Lissim who resided in Dobbs Ferry, NY (USA). Several crates of works were shipped from Paris to the United States in the early 1950s. However, they forgot to send one of the boxes containing Exter's works, which was not sent to Lissim. Yvette Anziani, the artist's companion in the last period of her life (1928-1949) who inherited Exter's house in Fontenay-aux-Roses and whom I frequented from 1970 until the end of her life, noticed this omission only in the late 1960s when she moved from Fontenay-aux-Roses to Paris. From the correspondence exchanged between Anziani and Lissim (archives Exter - Lissim- Nakov, Paris), it results that at that time Lissim was not interested in recovering this last case because he simply had too much to do with the whole workshop that reached him in the USA. Thus, this last part of the artist's studio was sold by Yvette Anziani's heirs in 2001, many years after Anziani's death, which ended in Paris in the late 1980s.

Made on paper, in gouache, this composition belongs to one of the artist's favourite themes; a subject that since 1912 (the date of her first trip to Venice) has permeated almost all of her plastic creation. Alexandra Exter had a particular attachment to this city, which she visited several times (1912, 1913, 1924). One of her first and most original cubo-futurist paintings of the winter of 1912-1913 (tondo 87 x 69 cm, former private coll. Petrograd-Hamburg, now private coll. Europe) is entitled "Venice". We can already see a cubist construction elaborated vertically, "in steps".

Later, Exter developed this subject by leading it to abstraction, as shown by another canvas also entitled "Venice" (oil on canvas, 123 x 97 cm) which is now part of the collection of the Moderna Museet by Stockolm. In 1922 the work was reproduced in the first monograph dedicated to the artist by Exter's biographer Jakov Tugendhold and was included in the famous "First Russian Exhibition" at the Van Diemen Gallery in Berlin at the end of 1922. During the winter of 1923-1924 the Venice theme resulted in an extraordinary monumental panel (268 x 639 cm), a painting that is now preserved in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

At the end of 1920, Exter was called from Kiev to Moscow by director Alexander Tairov to produce the costumes and sets for "Romeo and Juliet", after Shakespeare. Exter had already worked with Taïrov in 1916 ("Famira Kifared" by I. Annenski) and 1917 ("Salome" by Oscar Wilde); very successful if not spectacular collaborations that had established his reputation in Russia. "Romeo and Juliet", which premiered at the Chamber Theatre (Kamernyi) in Moscow on May 17, 1921, would prove to be a new success, even if the new "constructivist" avant-garde criticized this staging as a luxury of effects that were now beginning to be described as "formalist" and therefore excessive.