Page 27 - Studio International - December 1973

NOTES FROM The following notes were written for the Alexander Archipenko
catalogue of the exhibition 'Tatlin's Dream' at Kiev 1887-1964 New York
AN UNPUBLISHED Fischer Fine Art, London, in November. Although deeply involved in the Paris cubist
CATALOGUE Unfortunately, during the final editing of the milieu, Archipenko's activity during 1909-1914
catalogue all the entries were compressed. Thus
was also allied to the concern of the Russian
Andrei B Nakov the biographical portions, which were avant garde. His atelier in the Impasse
originally of considerably less importance than Bourdelle, not far from the Academie Russe
the commentaries on the works, became the (later called the Academie Vassilieff) on the
most prominent. With the exception of a Avenue du Maine, was one of the centres where
paragraph at the end of the biography on Puni, young painters from Moscow and Petersburg
added as a result of John Bowlt's book review could become acquainted with Parisian Cubism.
in Studio in November, the present extracts are The descriptions given in the memoirs of Ivan
as they were originally prepared in July r973. Puni (`Contemporary Painting' p. 16, published
This is in no way a monographic approach to in Russian in Berlin, 1923), Alexander
the work of the two artists discussed, but remains Gritchenko (`The Years of Storm and Stress',
limited within the range of a catalogue New York 1967, pp 38-39, in Ukrainian) and
commentary, with all the restrictions implied. especially Soffici, permit one to reconstruct the
The general theses which one can perceive atmosphere and to have an idea of what most
implicitly will be developed in a book on impressed the Russian painters. During the
Russian Constructivism to be published by winter 1913-1914, the peak of Archipenko's
Secker and Warburg in 1974. The Introduction sculptural creativity, he was in contact with the
to 'Tatlin' s Dream' has already been published Russian futurists through the intermediary of
in the November issue of this magazine; the Alexandra Exter, who qualified him as the 'only
texts below constitute a follow up. sculptor in Russia' (in a letter to Kul'bin, now
in the Archive of the Union of Youth, Russian
Museum, Leningrad). An article written in
Paris (in Russian) on his art was to have
appeared in the Petersburg almanac Union of
Youth (1914, No. 4) but unhappily this issue was
never printed. Also as a result of his Russian
contacts, Archipenko exhibited with Exter and
Rozanova in the Russian section of the
`Esposizione libera futurista internazionale di
pittori e scultori'in Rome (Galeria Sprovieri) in
the spring of 1914. His contacts with Exter and
the poet Aksionov provided him with an
invitation to the Moscow futurist group
`Centrifuga', directed by the poet Bobrov.
With Exter and Gontcharova he was to make
illustrations for the third issue of Centrifuga, to
have appeared in 1917 (Markov, 'Russian
Futurism', p. 410, note 93). The First World
War and the October Revolution which
followed, did not cut Archipenko off from his
contacts with Russia. In 1922 he exhibited five
sculptures (Nos. 538-542 in the catalogue) in
the famous 'Erste Russische Kunstausstellung'
at the Galerie Van Diemen in Berlin. In the
early thirties his work was considered of
importance in Russia by one of the first
historians of Russian Futurism. In his memoirs,
Benedikt Livshitz reproduced Archipenko's
most audacious sculptures of the spring of 1914.
The comparison of the formal development
of Tatlin and Archipenko is striking in every
respect and is worth studying. While employing
different materials, they used such academically
insignificant subjects as the female nude, to
experiment with large curving forms. This led
each of them to the revolutionary concept of the
void. As of 1911 the concept of a spiral pattern,
so important for Constructivism, became part of
the visual path which the spectator was invited
to complete on looking at a sculpture by
Archipenko (the Viennese critic Gregor called
Archipenko Head 1913 this stage Barokdynamismus in 1926).
Bronze, h.15 in.
Fischer Fine Art, London Proceeding in parallel from cubist and futurist
223