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Lot Essay
Frances Archipenko Gray has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
In the radical innovations of his sculpture between 1908, the year he left Russia for Paris, and 1914, Archipenko advanced a revolutionary restructuring of sculpture's visual syntax. His work during these years often straddled the line between relief and free-standing sculpture. Under the influence of Cubist collage and Futurist sculpture, he began attaching painted plaster sculptures to two-dimensional backgrounds as a means of linking his sculptural forms to their environment and connecting sculpture with the picture plane of painting.
Archipenko sent four sculptures to the legendary 1913 Armory Show in New York, the exhibition that introduced America to modernism. Writing in 1914, Guillaume Appollinaire heaped unreserved praise on the artist: "He has composed remembrances of one vision or another, one gesture or another. He has let his fancy, enriched by oriental imagery, create freely, while at the same time always remaining mindful of the instruction of his European masters, who have restrained him from falling into high-handedness and have bound him to them through well-assimilated knowledge and through dexterity never carried to excess. The art of the young Russian Archipenko who works in Paris, presses toward a new thing as yet unseen sculpture has hitherto been only a melody. The works of Archipenko are harmony—its first chords" (quoted in D.H. Karshan, Archipenko, International Visionary, Washington, D.C., 1969, pp. 13-14).
In the radical innovations of his sculpture between 1908, the year he left Russia for Paris, and 1914, Archipenko advanced a revolutionary restructuring of sculpture's visual syntax. His work during these years often straddled the line between relief and free-standing sculpture. Under the influence of Cubist collage and Futurist sculpture, he began attaching painted plaster sculptures to two-dimensional backgrounds as a means of linking his sculptural forms to their environment and connecting sculpture with the picture plane of painting.
Archipenko sent four sculptures to the legendary 1913 Armory Show in New York, the exhibition that introduced America to modernism. Writing in 1914, Guillaume Appollinaire heaped unreserved praise on the artist: "He has composed remembrances of one vision or another, one gesture or another. He has let his fancy, enriched by oriental imagery, create freely, while at the same time always remaining mindful of the instruction of his European masters, who have restrained him from falling into high-handedness and have bound him to them through well-assimilated knowledge and through dexterity never carried to excess. The art of the young Russian Archipenko who works in Paris, presses toward a new thing as yet unseen sculpture has hitherto been only a melody. The works of Archipenko are harmony—its first chords" (quoted in D.H. Karshan, Archipenko, International Visionary, Washington, D.C., 1969, pp. 13-14).