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Lot Essay
As a sculptor, Gaudier-Brzeska was preoccupied with wildlife – ranging from swans and ducks to birds and fish. While walking through London and the countryside, he also loved to execute swift, spontaneous drawings of creatures who appeared on the way. And he devoted an extraordinary amount of time to carving a monumental head of his friend Ezra Pound. Around 1914, though, Gaudier suddenly decided to create a small series of impressive pastels inspired by the modern industrial world highlighted in BLAST magazine. He was delighted to sign the Vorticist manifesto and become a member of the rebel movement. BLAST was preoccupied with what Wyndham Lewis called the ‘forms of machinery, factories, new and vaster buildings, bridges and works.’ Gaudier’s pastels shared this fascination, and the rapidly changing structure of twentieth century London gave him plenty of opportunities to grasp the mechanistic transformation occurring everywhere he looked.
Hence his ability to convey this new world with great immediacy in Abstract Composition. It reflects a passage Gaudier wrote in his ‘Vortex’ essay published by BLAST. Arriving at his conclusion, he declared that ‘We the moderns: Epstein, Brancusi, Archipenko, Dunikowski, Modigliani and myself, through the incessant struggle in the complex city, have likewise to spend much energy.’ Gaudier’s Abstract Composition is alive with this restless dynamism. He invites us to become closely engaged with the forms created here, like an engineer staring at the mechanical parts which give the modern world its ever-increasing force. The shapes Gaudier invents in Abstract Composition cannot be pinned down to a particular function. But they evoke the contents of the machine world with great immediacy. Looking at this potent image, our eyes become so involved that we end up feeling that its parts stimulate us wherever we look.
Gaudier places us inside this world, so that we can appreciate the difference between the forms shooting off in vertical and horizontal directions, and the shapes curving around with far less emphasis on functional order. This fundamental contrast gives Abstract Composition an enormous amount of tension. Its world is active rather than still, and Gaudier heightens the sense of dynamism by deploying colours as heated as the prominent area of orange. It evokes a furnace, and combines with the lighter colours to offset the monochrome quality so evident elsewhere. The harshness of black and white plays a powerful role in Abstract Composition, thereby emphasizing just how strong the machine world has now become.
Gaudier was not remotely prepared to shy away from combat. One of his most potent sculptures is an alarming 1914 bronze called Bird Swallowing Fish, and when the First World War erupted he was more than willing to enlist in the French army. His reckless courage soon became evident on the battlefield, and he was twice promoted for his gallantry. But on 5 June 1915, the twenty-three year-old Gaudier was killed during an infantry charge by a bullet in his forehead, and the loss was immeasurable.
Richard Cork
Hence his ability to convey this new world with great immediacy in Abstract Composition. It reflects a passage Gaudier wrote in his ‘Vortex’ essay published by BLAST. Arriving at his conclusion, he declared that ‘We the moderns: Epstein, Brancusi, Archipenko, Dunikowski, Modigliani and myself, through the incessant struggle in the complex city, have likewise to spend much energy.’ Gaudier’s Abstract Composition is alive with this restless dynamism. He invites us to become closely engaged with the forms created here, like an engineer staring at the mechanical parts which give the modern world its ever-increasing force. The shapes Gaudier invents in Abstract Composition cannot be pinned down to a particular function. But they evoke the contents of the machine world with great immediacy. Looking at this potent image, our eyes become so involved that we end up feeling that its parts stimulate us wherever we look.
Gaudier places us inside this world, so that we can appreciate the difference between the forms shooting off in vertical and horizontal directions, and the shapes curving around with far less emphasis on functional order. This fundamental contrast gives Abstract Composition an enormous amount of tension. Its world is active rather than still, and Gaudier heightens the sense of dynamism by deploying colours as heated as the prominent area of orange. It evokes a furnace, and combines with the lighter colours to offset the monochrome quality so evident elsewhere. The harshness of black and white plays a powerful role in Abstract Composition, thereby emphasizing just how strong the machine world has now become.
Gaudier was not remotely prepared to shy away from combat. One of his most potent sculptures is an alarming 1914 bronze called Bird Swallowing Fish, and when the First World War erupted he was more than willing to enlist in the French army. His reckless courage soon became evident on the battlefield, and he was twice promoted for his gallantry. But on 5 June 1915, the twenty-three year-old Gaudier was killed during an infantry charge by a bullet in his forehead, and the loss was immeasurable.
Richard Cork