?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,500 - $ 3,500
ALEXANDRA EXTER. Two-sided book illustration. Mixed media on paper. 295x230 mm; 11 3/4x9 inches, sheet. Hand-painted text from a sonnet by Petrarch translated into French as Il Compte L'effet Du Temps. Unsigned but with Exter estate and Simon Lissim rubberstamps including his signature lower right border. Painting on verso with archival tape at upper margins just touching image. Shortly before she died in 1949, Exter bequethed her studio and documentation to Lissim, an artist well-known in his own right who immigrated to Paris from Kiev and then to America. Circa 1939; with later date of April, 1978, from Lissim's Dobbs Ferry, New York, gallery.
Fine example of Exter's later manuscript illustration work. "Her particular interest in Greek poetry is evidenced by the impressive quality of her pictorial output on such publications. Echoes of her abstract experience took her in these figurative illustrations to new visual heights. Bursts of colour and centrifugal arrangements, very often thrown into oblique paths of great complexity, attest to the vivacity of her creativity" (A. Nakov, Encyclopédia de l'art moderne, 2012).
