Alexander Archipenko

Biography

In 1913 the Armory Show in New York included four Cubist sculptures and five drawings by a young man from Kyiv living in Paris; among the sculptures was “Family Life”. The New York World responded with caricatures.

Archipenko was twenty-five. Ten years later he would move to America himself.

He was born on 18 (30) May 1887 in Kyiv. His father, Porfiry Antonovich, was connected with Kyiv University, where he worked as a mechanic (by other accounts he was an engineer and inventor and taught there), and painted icons for his own pleasure, as his father had done before him. The family saw their son as a future scientist, not an artist. Alexander first attended Gottlieb Walker’s school, then in 1902 entered the Kyiv Art School and soon transferred to the sculpture department. In November 1905, before he could graduate, he was expelled for taking part in a student strike. In 1906 the first exhibition of his work was held in Kyiv, organised together with Alexander Bogomazov; according to some accounts, it was an exhibition of a free studio run by the landscape painter Serhiy Svetoslavsky. His early sculptures, “Zaporozhian Cossack”, “Horror”, “Judas”, are almost all lost. That same year he left for Moscow and attended courses at the School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, but could not settle there.

In 1908 Archipenko arrived in Paris. He enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts but left after a few weeks, finding it old-fashioned, and began to teach himself, going almost every day to the Louvre. He was drawn to Egyptian and early Greek art, while Rodin’s sculptures struck him as broken and tormented. His first Paris works, the terracotta “Adam and Eve” and, a year later, “Head on Knees”, are built of heavy generalised masses, and in them, it seems to me, one can still sense the ancient stone idols he had seen as a boy near Kyiv University. Until 1914 he lived in the artists’ colony La Ruche, alongside Wladimir Baranoff-Rossiné, Sonia Delaunay and Nathan Altman. From 1910 he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne, next to Alexandra Exter, Malevich, Braque and Derain. Together with the French-Hungarian sculptor Joseph Csaky he was the first after Picasso to apply Cubism in three dimensions: the figure is broken into facets, seen from several sides at once, and the void becomes part of the sculpture. In 1912 his first solo exhibition took place at the Museum Folkwang in Hagen, Germany, and from that year until 1914 he ran his own school in Paris.

In 1914 he moved to Nice. In 1920 he took part in the Venice Biennale, in 1921 he opened a school in Berlin, and in 1922 he exhibited at the First Russian Art Exhibition at the Van Diemen Gallery in Berlin, together with Exter, Malevich and El Lissitzky.

In 1923 Archipenko moved to the United States, and in 1929 he became an American citizen. His works filled an entire room of the Ukrainian pavilion at the Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago; in 1936 he took part in the exhibition “Cubism and Abstract Art” in New York; from 1937 he taught at the New Bauhaus in Chicago. He mixed genres all his life: he invented the “sculpto-painting”, a hybrid of relief and picture, brought collage to a wide public with his Medrano series, and later worked with clear acrylic and terracotta. He kept up his ties with the Ukrainian community in America and took part in creating monuments to Shevchenko, Franko and Prince Volodymyr. In 1962 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Alexander Archipenko died on 25 February 1964 in New York and was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. In his last year he had begun a smaller model of a statue of King Solomon; the full-size figure, about four and a half metres tall, was finished under his widow’s supervision. It was completed in 1968 and in 1985 given to the University of Pennsylvania, where it still stands. Twelve of his drawings are in the Hermitage.