It is in this vein that Goncharova encouraged Alexandra and other students to develop their artistic gifts. In 1932, Alexandra first showed her work publicly in a group exhibition of young Parisian artists. Between 1935 and 1939, she exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants and in 1938 at the Salon d’Automn. In 1938, she also had her first personal exhibition at the Gallery de l’Elysée.

When the Nazis occupied Paris, Alexandra—together with her second husband, Boris Pregel, a physicist, whom she married in 1937—escaped from France and established herself in the United States, in New York City. Boris Pregel was immediately accepted into the American scientific community and held prestigious positions. Alexandra, however, had to start her career anew and again prove herself as an artist, since among everything left and lost in Paris there was the entire body of her extant works, some 300 pieces that she would never see again. At her first exhibition in the United States, in 1943 at the New School of Social Research, she showed thirty-six paintings, created since her arrival to the United States. Other exhibitions followed: Milch Gallery (1946) and The National Academy of Design in New York (1952); Gallery de L’Elysée, Paris (1947); “Painting in the U.S.A.” with Georgia O’Keefe and Salvador Dali, at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh (1948); and the Wildenstein Gallery, New York (1956).