Exhibitions

Refashioning the figure: The sketchbooks of Archipenko continued the Henry Moore Institute’s programme of exhibiting in Britain little-known works by well-known sculptors. This exhibition brought three sketchbooks of Alexander Archipenko to Leeds City Art Gallery.

Alexander Archipenko was born in Kiev in 1887 and died in New York City in 1964. In between those dates he was a peripatetic artist, working and showing first in Paris, then in Berlin, and latterly in Chicago, Hollywood and New York. The Archipenko Foundation, established in 2000, is located in the summer school he ran near Woodstock, in up-state New York, and is devoted to maintain the legacy of his work.

Archipenko was a celebrated artist of his generation, a leitmotif to the many avant-garde movements in pre-war Europe, cited with approval by the Cubists, Futurists and Constructivists. Yet identifying Archipenko himself, and understanding his contribution, is rather harder, despite the trail of evidence he left behind. This study exhibition asked the questions to what extent should we understand him as an influence, and to what extent as a mirror, reflecting a community of ideas.

Archipenko exemplifies the many-faceted nature of the European avant-garde, centred perhaps on Paris or on Berlin, but combining artists from many countries, drawing on different national understandings of the ‘modern’. The fluid nature of artistic experimentation is well illustrated in the sketchbooks which were exhibited in Leeds; dynamic compositions which re-fashion the figure in ways reminiscent not only of Cubism and Futurism, but also of Art Deco fashion plates, Baroque sculpture and Russian icons. This was the first time the sketchbooks have been exhibited since the early 1920s. Their pristine quality and range provide new insights into his career.

The exhibition was accompanied by an essay by Dr Marek Bartelik, a Polish art-historian based in New York, which develops the reading of Archipenko (and of the avant-garde) as essentially nomadic.