How to Navigate in this Site

Using the Galleries provides a comprehensive and organized view of Alexandra Pregel's work. The galleries are arranged first by medium, then by topical genre and finally paintings are shown chronologically; the chronology of watercolors and illustrations is often less certain. The links in the Galleries menu bar above lead to thumbnail navigators, then to large scale image pages which have been designed to give the largest possible view with standard screen resolutions. Navigation of the Galleries has been organized to allow visitors flexibility in viewing and comparing individual items.

Please note: Each gallery navigator and each image page opens in its own new window to allow you to make comparisons. You can move windows around on your screen, minimize and restore them and close them when you are finished. You can choose from a list of open browser windows in the Windows Task Bar or the Macintosh OS X Dock, or from the Go or Windows tabs in most browsers. The large scale image pages have a menu bar to allow you to open any of the unopened main navigators.

Alexandra Pregel's Work

Alecia Voiskoun, Curator of The Maria and Mikhail Zetlin Museum of Russian Art in Israel made the following comments for an exhibit in 2000:

Pregel’s art consists of various styles and subjects--still life, landscape and nude. The impression left on her from the events of the Second World War are evident in her figural compositions. Similar influences can also be seen in some of her New York paintings. Pregel was described by critics to as a serious and intelligent artist. Some consider her a European artist, to be more exact, a Russian painter, whose paintings express “the mysterious Russian soul”.

Pregel created most of her paintings indoors, in her studio. The “inner-outer” dualism is evident in many of her paintings as a confrontation between the cold urban world and nature, between the world outside the window and the house inside, between the abstract outline of strange buildings and the domestic objects familiar to her.

The artistic language of Pregel changed at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s. (On one side) In some ways she “adopted the American accent” and (on the other hand) and in others was influenced by surrealism. Her still life of this period includes images reminiscent of death (memento mori): ropes, torn letters, empty broken eggshells. That mood is expressed also in the symbolic compositions--a kind of nostalgic metaphor--that testifies to Pregel’s feelings, especially at a mature age…

For other views about Alexandra Pregel's art visit a site created for an exclusive exhibit at the University of Illinois, Springfield.

Copyright 2005 Julia Gauchman All rights Reserved