Alexander Archipenko’s two-and-a-half years in Berlin from early 1921 to the autumn of 1923 present something of a paradox. His reputation at the time as a leading sculptor of the avant-garde was well established, perhaps nowhere more so than in Germany. At least four monographs devoted to Archipenko were published in Germany in the early 1920s, and supporters like the writer and critic Iwan Goll could self-assuredly make the now unlikely claim that ‘Archipenko is of the same importance for sculpture as Picasso is for painting.’ Yet despite this attention, Archipenko’s stature had faltered by the end of his time in Berlin as he struggled with his work and lost the support of key German critics. Indeed, few artistic reputations have fallen so far as Archipenko’s from his prominence in the 1910s and 1920s to a seemingly entrenched secondary, even tertiary, status in the pantheon of early twentieth-century modernism. Pivotal to any understanding of this downward trajectory is an account of Archipenko’s Berlin years, a time when his reputation seemed to be both towering and teetering. This essay takes as its subject the writing and criticism around Archipenko during his Berlin years as an exploration of the texture of sculpture criticism in postwar Berlin and the critical context of what might be termed Archipenko’s failure.

Happier times with a more certain sense of form
Some of the complexity of Archipenko’s situation in Germany and the crosscurrents of art and criticism in the early 1920s can be inferred from a puzzling 1923 essay on the artist by the art historian Hans Hildebrandt. Published in a lavishly illustrated album, Hildebrandt’s idolizing text seeks to bridge the gap between Archipenko’s pre-war ‘cubo-expressionism’ and his current artistic uncertainty. The text culminates with a discussion of Archipenko’s 1923 relief ‘Woman (Metal Lady)’, which Hildebrandt describes as a:

shimmering structure, vibrating in a thousand reflections and yet so inviolably solidly constructedÖ Made with never before used technical means, and developed from the purest sense of style, it is the absolute expression of a new aesthetic conception of the nature of art, which points not to the past but to the future.

Within this brief passage Hildebrandt invokes a series of modernist clichés about Archipenko’s technical innovation, formal purity and absolute expression. Like a work of modern engineering, Archipenko’s ‘Woman’, we are told, is both ‘inviolably’ solid in construction and made visually immaterial and transcendent by ‘vibrating in a thousand reflections’. Futuristic in its embrace of new materials, his work remains pure and totalizing in its ‘absolute expression of a new aesthetic conception’.