Panorama du fleuve

Here is finally reissued Alexandra Exter's Panorama du Fleuve, de la Côte et de la Montagne published by Père Castor in 1937 and 1938. Consisting of six square plates assembled in accordion fashion, each of these albums unfolds to form a long frieze, accompanied on the back by sensitive comments by Marie Colmont. In the first of these panoramas, the child follows the course of a river, from its source among the mountains to its estuary... In the second one, his eyes fly over the seashore. Beaches, creeks, cliffs, rocks, port city follow one another, while in wilder places, the waves break with crash against the rocks... Snow-covered peaks loom on the horizon of the third panorama overlooking the valley and its villages. In the close-up, a mountaineer climbs a vertical wall while a herd of sheep peacefully graze on the grass of the mountain pastures. Alexandra Exter preferred modernity to a purely pastoral vision, the one that Russian children's books of the 1920s had exalted: an electric pylon, a sign of progress and human conquest, imposes its presence in the middle of the vast landscape.