Alexander Archipenko
gigatos | May 27, 2022
Summary
Alexander Porfyrovych Archipenko is an American sculptor of Ukrainian origin, born in Kiev on May 30, 1887 and died in New York on February 25, 1964.
Son of an engineer, Alexander Archipenko also studied mathematics. The artist is also passionate about the relationship between art and science. He trained in painting and sculpture in Kiev and Moscow from 1902 to 1906. This period allowed him to develop a passion for Byzantine icons, frescoes and mosaics of Kiev. After a stay in Moscow, he moved to Paris in 1908 where he came into contact with the avant-garde currents, in particular the Cubist group. He settled in La Ruche, 2, passage de Dantzig, a former wine pavilion of the Universal Exhibition of 1889 converted into artists” studios. He worked alone, preferring to go to the Louvre Museum to study archaic Greek sculpture rather than go to the Beaux-Arts, where he disdained the academic teaching. A reproach that the artist has already addressed to his professors at the art school in Kiev, who eventually sent him away. Influenced by Rodin until his works presented in Moscow in 1906, he asserted himself from his Parisian works at the age of 24 as one of the leaders of the avant-garde sculpture.
In 1910, he exhibited at the Salon des indépendants in Paris. On Friday, April 21, 1911 at the XXVIIth Salon des indépendants, the works of Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, André Lhote, Joseph Csaky and Archipenko were the subject of incendiary criticism worthy of those provoked by the Fauve exhibition. Considered as “master-cubes”, even Guillaume Apollinaire is disconcerted by this exhibition. They were reproached for the deviation of cubism, its caricature and even its anti-academism. The absence of Picasso and Braque (who exhibited exclusively with the gallery of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler) at this exhibition is regretted.
His first solo exhibition took place in Germany at the Folkwang Hagen Museum in 1912. That year, he opened an art school in Paris and joined the Section d”Or and produced his first relief paintings: the sculpto-paintings. In October 1912, at the Galerie de la Boétie, the first exhibition of the Section d”Or group was organized, with Léger, Gleizes, Metzinger, Gris, Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Jacques Villon, Lhote, La Fresnaye, Marcoussis and Archipenko. Thirty-one artists with two hundred paintings without the presence of Picasso. This exhibition has a didactic character: cubism entered a theoretical phase four years after its birth. The exhibition of the Section d”Or group triggered harsh criticism against these revolutionary works: Apollinaire defended them in his columns in L”Intransigeant or in prefaces to catalogs.
In 1913, four of his works were shown at the Armory Show in New York. He made his first engravings which were reproduced in the Italian futurist publication Lacerba in 1914. He participated in the Salon des Indépendants in 1914 and in the Venice Biennale in 1920. During the war years, the artist lived in Cimiez near Nice. From 1919 to 1921, he traveled to Geneva, Zurich, Paris, London, Brussels, Athens and other European cities to exhibit his work. His first solo exhibition in the United States took place in 1921 in New York at the Société Anonyme. In 1923, he left Berlin for the United States where over the years he opened several art schools in New York, Woodstock, Los Angeles and Chicago. For the next thirty years, he taught in the United States in art schools and universities, even in the short-lived New Bauhaus. He became an American citizen in 1928.
In 1933, he exhibited at the Ukrainian Pavilion in Chicago as part of the Century of Progress World”s Fair. From 1937 to 1939, he was an associate instructor at the New Bauhaus School of Industrial Arts in Chicago. Most of the artist”s works in German museums were confiscated by the Nazis with the intention of purging degenerate art. In 1947, he created sculptures that were illuminated from within. He accompanied a traveling exhibition of his works throughout Germany in 1955 and 1956. He began to write his book entitled: Archipenko: 50 years of creation 1908-1958 which was published in 1960. In this book, a contribution of fifty art historians are gathered with texts of Archipenko on the artistic creation. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1962.
For Archipenko, “it is difficult to classify an artist”s work into periods”. He adds: “I never belonged to schools: I was expelled from schools. I did research, I invented and experimented, then I was imitated… For each artist, art is a creative current ascending towards the individual discovery of the truth in the forms of nature and the periods are only boxes in the minds of the critics.”
The problematic raised by the sculpture according to Archipenko, is the volume and the connection of the masses between them. In this he is even more extreme than modern sculptors such as Brancusi or Duchamp-Villon who are members like him of the Golden Section group. His main issue is that of the void which has the force of the absent object and creates volume. The simplification, the obviousness of volumes while maintaining the figurative aspect are the principles of his sculpture. His art, characterized by a great mathematical rigor, leaves a preponderant place to the female body. He likes to recall the omnipresence of the stone idols of the ancient Slavs in his childhood.
Picasso had elaborated the first rules of this sculptural grammar: polychromy, integration of the most diverse materials, rhythmic use of planes, appearances of open-worked forms. Like painting, cubist sculpture is mainly concerned with the relationship between objects and space, volumes and voids that separate them or into which they are inserted. The influence of Italian Futurism, especially through Boccioni, whom Archipenko met in 1912, led to the formation of dynamic forms. Archipenko especially explored the dialectic of concave and convex forms.
He developed a personal style with stereometrically simplified body masses, figures erected in space, beveled forms, sharp angles, crystalline fractures from the formal inventory of Cubism and is also inspired by mannerism.
With the exception of Boccioni, no sculptor has posed the analysis of space, the central problem of that decade, as an absolute. No artist has pushed the interaction between volume and void in such a personal way towards expressive and lyrical, dynamic and statuary domains. He has achieved a union between formal rigor and playful appeal. He unified in one form the four elusive elements: space, transparency, light and reflection, resulting in a modern sculpture with a concave form.
Torso (1909) is his first sculpture with cubist tendency. It opens the way he disarticulates the volumes and perforates them in order to make penetrate the space.
In 1909, and the following year, he still knows nothing of Cubism and is inspired by the folded sculptures of Barlach or Köllwitz (Woman and cat in 1910 or Woman with cat in 1911). In 1911-12, they unfold, and one senses the Cubist influence in his thighs and arms inflated or, on the contrary, an eticism (Woman walking in 1912). From 1911, he actively participated in the Cubist movement. The plastic problems that his sculpture tackles are resolutely new: full volumes, relationships between the empty and full volumes in hollow. He wishes to symbolize “the absent reality”. With Femme qui marche in 1912, he spared a head in negative for the first time. In 1912, he identifies his favorite theme: interpenetration of the body and space, development of concave and convex curves so that the sculptural form becomes somehow perceptible by its matrix. He develops his own theory of complementary forms: every void generates its imaginary antithesis.
With Medrano, created in 1912, he created his first assemblage of various painted materials (glass, wood and metal). In constant artistic research, he developed new methods of creation and created an interaction between painting and sculpture. With Medrano I The Juggler, in 1912, he uses wood, glass and metal wire.Medrano are articulated dolls resembling wooden harlequins using glass, metal foil of wire, cone cylinders and discs energized by polychrome paint. With this liberation of form, Archipenko breaks with traditional sculpture and asserts himself as a master of the avant-garde. He revived a genre neglected since the 17th century by Western sculpture, polychromy.
His sculpto-paintings created in 1912 are painted plaster reliefs. Between painting and sculpture, he studies the reciprocal relationship between form and color, one accentuates or diminishes the other. These two arts are unified or contrasted on a visual and spiritual level, depending on the goal sought.
From 1913 to 1916, form predominates reality. With The Dance in 1912, he defined an ascending interior space imbued with lightness through the arabesque formed by a couple. He organizes this sculpture around the void. In carrying out this work on the void and the full, he is careful not to complete the bodies whose members he stops when the plastic commands it by introducing the void as a stakeholder, as in Woman in 1915, whose head is drawn around a lack.
In 1913, he created a wire sculpture that Apollinaire named “en baleine de parapluie”. Later, his treatment of cubism will be oriented towards constructivism.
With La Boxe in 1913, the artist tried to translate the brutal energy of sport into abstract forms. The boxers are reduced to sharp shapes intertwined with each other and violently clash, the muscles are replaced by rhythmic energy.
Tête constructiviste (1913) is made of an assembly of planes. The Gondolier (1914) is composed in slightly shifted sections in order to give, in the futurist perspective, the sense of movement.With Still Life (1915), this innovator also gives one of his rare paintings in relief.
Upon his arrival in the United States in the early 1920s, he embraced the tradition: smooth prevails, perfect and relaxed. With Woman (1920), he immediately resumed sculpture with a tall metal figure on a painted panel. He becomes traditional.
From 1924 to 1928, he developed the Archipentura. The archipeintura in 1924 are canvases set in motion by cleverly concealed motors: an electric mechanism at the base of the device imparts a back and forth movement to the central frame and thousands of painted fragments that follow one another appear on the surface to constitute a complete painting. This invention was implemented in New York. His research has always been the visual animation of his works, either by perforating them in the mass so that the space penetrates them, or by using materials such as glass, wood or metal and even for his sculpto-paintings by adding color.
En Famille (1935) is a work both concentrated and influenced by constructivism.
In the two dimensions, also slip an exceptional work as this female figure in gouache, whose alternating brown and white masses create the relief of the body (Moonlight in 1937).
In the 1940s and 50s, he continued his artistic explorations using materials and techniques. Thus, for Figure assise, he uses cut and lit plastic. He resumed his initial forms, most of which had disappeared, in gigantic formats (Figures of Steel in 1951, Cleopatra in 1957). In the 1950s, he realized that he had made a mistake in his orientation and for some time he tried to pastiche his beginnings or to reconstitute them, since many of his works did not survive the First World War.
From the end of the 1950s, he returned to his cubo-constructivist style, with very geometric figures, preserving the significant voids, and most often symmetrical (Kimono in 1961 or King Solomon in 1963).
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