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The Paintings

Alexandra Pregel was a versatile painter. Unfortunately, since we have only the paintings completed after her emigration to the United States, our study of her works can be only based on her American period. The loss of her Parisian work is likely very significant, since as an artist she did not find emigration to America to be an easy transition. It may have fueled, however, experimentation with many styles and genres. She began as a figurative painter, went through a transitional period between figurative and abstract, and then experimented with abstract art. She also painted in the style of the Surrealists, Cubists and Precisionists. In the latter part of her life, she returned to figurative painting.

Although she did not invent her own style and did not belong to any particular school of painting, her expression in established styles shows her own originality, and especially an individualistic mood of discomfort, estrangement and desperate inner loneliness. Some might say that this mood is not particularly original since it could remind us of the spirit of Pregel’s contemporary, Edward Hopper, the well-known American painter of the 1930s and 1940s. The reasons for the appearance in Pregel’s works of estrangement and solitude and the artistic ways of expressing them are different from Hopper’s. His solitude and the estrangement of his characters are a reflection of the American Depression of 1930s, which made people desperate and disconnected, and whose despair was accentuated by their existence in large cities. Pregel’s solitude, discomfort, and estrangement are more likely related to the triple loss of her native cultural environments: the loss of Russia, her original homeland; the loss of France, her adopted homeland; and the loss of Europe, devastated by the Second World War. Remaining deeply an European artist, whose past was destroyed, but who had to go forward toward a world which was inherently foreign to her and with which she never effectively merged, her works characteristically express the spirit of non-belonging and a resulting estrangement and loneliness.