Woman Combing Her Hair

The creative evolution of Alexander Archipenko’s early modernist style of sculpture took a quantum leap during the years 1912-1915, as the young artist fully immersed himself in the world of the Parisian avant-garde, and in particular the ground-breaking formal language of the Cubists. When Archipenko had arrived in Paris in 1908 from Kiev, the emotive, expressive art of Auguste Rodin dominated the realm of sculpture. Disappointed by his lessons at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which he attended for just two weeks as he felt they were too academic, Archipenko instead found himself drawn to the museums of Paris, including the hallowed halls of the Musée du Louvre, where he studied Egyptian, Assyrian, archaic Greek, and early Gothic sculpture intensively. However, it was the dynamism and innovative spirit of the younger generations of artists he met in the French capital that transformed his sculptural vision—from the notorious artist studios at La Ruche in Montparnasse, to the Sunday salons of the Duchamp brothers and the cubist gatherings in the studios of Henri Le Fauconnier and Albert Gleizes, Archipenko’s precocious talent was warmly welcomed by the city’s most revolutionary artists.
Within this stimulating environment, Archipenko’s artistic vocabulary underwent a powerful transformation, as his encounters with the avant-garde began to reshape his approach to form. Notably, the impact of the cubist language pioneered by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso began to reveal itself in his work around 1911. With its emphasis on employing multiple viewpoints and its signature concept of “simultaneity” in rendering form, Cubism had fostered the understanding that mass and space, solid and void, could be granted equal value within a composition. Archipenko took the principles of this idea and translated it from its two dimensional origins into his own, unique form of modern sculpture. “Cubism will remain a document of the newly awakened spirit of the beginning of the mathematical and geometric twentieth century,” Archipenko later wrote. “I cooperated in creating it, together with a small group of artists” (quoted in op. cit., 1960, p. 50).
The female body remained an important touchstone for Archipenko throughout this period of exploration, its sensuous curves at the core of his search for a “purity of forms” within sculpture. In Woman Combing Her Hair, the sculptor distils the figure into a series of clear, expressive planes, which are then animated by subtle inflections and the interplay between convex and concave surfaces. Adopting a contrapposto stance, the woman’s curvaceous form is filled by a vivid sense of internal tension and movement, her body captured in a sinuous, flowing line that runs the length of her form. As Katharine Kuh noted, Archipenko’s figures were rarely static: “They turn, twist, bend; they are inverted, foreshortened, and tautly poised. They move, yet more important—light moves over them with rippling speed” (quoted in Archipenko: The Parisian Years, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970, n. p.). However, it is the contradictory notion of positive and negative space within the sculpture which proves most captivating element within the piece. For example, the female visage is marked not by its presence, but rather its absence, denoted by an elegantly curved perforation atop the figure’s concave neck and framed by the arabesque of hair that surrounds it at the crown, its form appearing as a simplified silhouette of a face in profile.
The present Woman Combing Her Hair is a monumental, life-size example of Archipenko’s original 1915 sculpture. The artist had envisioned enlarging this iconic piece to the present scale in the mid-1950s, a project that took several years to complete. Other examples of this monumental sculpture are held in the collections of The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.