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Lot Essay
The Archipenko Foundation will include this work in the upcoming catalogue raisonné of sculptures by Alexander Archipenko.
Alexander Archipenko was a sculptural innovator whose work combined an innate feeling for elegant forms with a respect for traditional motifs. By 1912, Archipenko began to create sculptures that rejected the traditionally held view that space was a kind of frame around the mass of the object. Looking back on this revolutionary phase in his work Archipenko wrote, "In the beginning, in experimenting with the volumes of material in their relationship to the volumes of space, I tried to combine them in different ways. I extended material forms from the center of the composition into space [The Kiss, 1911, and Two Bodies, 1912]. In another experiment [Dancers] I encircled space with the material forms of the two figures...This was the beginning of the creative consciousness producing a form of space with symbolic meaning" (A. Archipenko, op. cit., pp. 56 and 58). Inspired by Archipenko's 1913 sculpture La tête the poet Blaise Cendrars penned the phrase "mouvement perpetuel", which seems equally applicable to the dynamic movement of Dancers. As Katherine Jánszky Michaelsen notes, "To conceive of sculpture in this way, as a framing device for space, with space not only taking an active role, but, one might say, becoming the very reason for the sculpture, was unprecedented" (Alexander Archipenko: A Centennial Tribute; exh. cat., Washington D. C., 1986, p. 30).
Dancers, also known as Dance, marked "the first time in modern sculpture [where] a spatial environment is defined by encirclement through the use of opened, outstretched, architectonic forms that appear to join by abutment rather than by fusion; a precursor of a constructivist syntax" (D.H. Karshan, op. cit., 1985, p. 34). It understandably provoked lively debate within artistic circles when it was exhibited in Berlin at Der Sturm in September 1913. While the English magazine The Sketch derided it on the cover of its 29 October 1913 issue, the second issue of the January 1917 edition of De Stijl featured a detailed diagram of the sculpture that analyzed its formal construction and praised the inherent motion of the work. According to Donald H. Karshan, the first version of Dancers was in plaster, measured 24 inches and was conceived in 1912. The second version, 3 inches larger, was most likely a reconstruction created in 1955, and the third version, of which the present bronze is an example, most likely dates from 1960.
Alexander Archipenko was a sculptural innovator whose work combined an innate feeling for elegant forms with a respect for traditional motifs. By 1912, Archipenko began to create sculptures that rejected the traditionally held view that space was a kind of frame around the mass of the object. Looking back on this revolutionary phase in his work Archipenko wrote, "In the beginning, in experimenting with the volumes of material in their relationship to the volumes of space, I tried to combine them in different ways. I extended material forms from the center of the composition into space [The Kiss, 1911, and Two Bodies, 1912]. In another experiment [Dancers] I encircled space with the material forms of the two figures...This was the beginning of the creative consciousness producing a form of space with symbolic meaning" (A. Archipenko, op. cit., pp. 56 and 58). Inspired by Archipenko's 1913 sculpture La tête the poet Blaise Cendrars penned the phrase "mouvement perpetuel", which seems equally applicable to the dynamic movement of Dancers. As Katherine Jánszky Michaelsen notes, "To conceive of sculpture in this way, as a framing device for space, with space not only taking an active role, but, one might say, becoming the very reason for the sculpture, was unprecedented" (Alexander Archipenko: A Centennial Tribute; exh. cat., Washington D. C., 1986, p. 30).
Dancers, also known as Dance, marked "the first time in modern sculpture [where] a spatial environment is defined by encirclement through the use of opened, outstretched, architectonic forms that appear to join by abutment rather than by fusion; a precursor of a constructivist syntax" (D.H. Karshan, op. cit., 1985, p. 34). It understandably provoked lively debate within artistic circles when it was exhibited in Berlin at Der Sturm in September 1913. While the English magazine The Sketch derided it on the cover of its 29 October 1913 issue, the second issue of the January 1917 edition of De Stijl featured a detailed diagram of the sculpture that analyzed its formal construction and praised the inherent motion of the work. According to Donald H. Karshan, the first version of Dancers was in plaster, measured 24 inches and was conceived in 1912. The second version, 3 inches larger, was most likely a reconstruction created in 1955, and the third version, of which the present bronze is an example, most likely dates from 1960.