Zetlin’s
Parisian apartment, called by many “Paradise Salon,” was an
artistic and cultural center that was visited by many Russian politicians,
intellectuals and artists, living in Paris at the time, including members
of so-called “École de Paris,” a group of Montparnasse
bohemians that counted among its members Amadeo Modigliani, Diego Rivera,
Pablo Picasso. It is in that environment that the personality of Alexandra
was shaped and her artistic talents were developed.
In 1921, Alexandra began to study painting at the Montparnasse studio
of the Russian neo-classic artists, Vasili Shukhaev and Alexandr Yakovlev,
and then continued at the École des Arts Décoratifs, graduating
in 1928. A year later, she began to work with one of the leading Russian
avant-garde artists, Natalia Goncharova 
,
with whom Alexandra grew increasingly close until Goncharova’s
death in 1962. Goncharova believed that art is not an imitation of reality,
but its own reality and that the goal of the artist is to express reality
in a way that reveals its beauty-- to “raise the veil that obscures
the beauty of our frightening world.” She also believed that the
artists should be able to discover, by the intermediary of art, “what
they are looking for unknowingly and that may be otherwise inaccessible
to them. . . . Goncharova never forced her artistic vision upon her
students, and considered ‘that each person should develop his/her
own gifts. These were the wisdom and values of her teaching.’”
