Group (Feminine Solitude)

Two entwined women comprise Alexander Archipenko’s striking Group (Feminine Solitude). Sculpted from gleaming marble, one kneels at the foot of another, and their slim, interrelated bodies evoke a musicality, an aspect that the artist sought to incorporate into his three-dimensional works. Ever conscious of producing a visual rhythm, Archipenko’s sculptures play with volume, line, and void to create myriad and layered perspectives when viewed in the round. As the artist noted, ‘Traditionally there was a belief that sculpture begins where material touches space … Ignoring this tradition, I experimented, using the reverse idea, and concluded that sculpture may begin where space is encircled by the material’ (quoted in A. Keiser, ‘Encircling Space: An Introduction to Alexander Archipenko’ in Alexander Archipenko: Space Encircled, exh. cat., Eykyn Maclean, New York, 2018, p. 7).
Born in Kyiv, Archipenko moved to Paris in 1908. Initially, he enrolled in classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts but left after only a few weeks, electing instead to direct his own education. Archipenko spent many hours wandering the corridors of the Musée du Louvre, and found himself drawn again and again to the classical sculptures. ‘The Gothic elongation and distortion emanate from religious ideas, ecstasy, and gravitation toward highly soaring divine power,’ he later reflected. ‘The Egyptian, Gothic, and modern styles, by leaning toward creative abstract qualities, prove that they are subordinated to the same dynamism of nature with its perpetual transforming power which they set out to express’ (Archipenko: Fifty Creative Years, New York, 1960, p. 40). Yet even as Archipenko was studying early artforms, he was also immersing himself wholeheartedly in the city’s avant-garde scene. He found space at La Ruche, a set of studios in the fifteenth arrondissement, where artists such as Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, and Sonia Delaunay worked. Like his contemporaries, Archipenko, too, was intrigued by new avantgarde movements such as Cubism, and vestiges of this sense of planar simplification can be seen in the lithe forms of Group.
Following his move to Paris, Archipenko’s reputation quickly flourished. In 1910, he began exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendants and two years later had a solo presentation at the Folkwang Museum, Hagen. His work was included in the 1913 Armory Show in New York; the exhibition, which included Marcel Duchamp’s landmark Nu descendant un escalier (No. 2), is retrospectively remembered as the dawning of Modernism in the United States. The artist organised exhibitions across Europe and was included in the 12^th Venice Biennale in 1920. Group was conceived shortly thereafter, during this momentous period for the artist.
The unadorned bodies within the present work demonstrate Archipenko’s engagement with the new classicism that flourished in the post-war period. In the wake of the destruction wrought by the First World War, artists embraced the human figure and more traditional approaches to representation. Dispensing with the angular contours and convex-concave contrasts that had distinguished his earlier work, Archipenko adopted a more simplified treatment of form that drew inspiration from the ancient sculptures that he so admired. Yet the willowy limbs of the two figures in Group also reflect the fashionable Art Deco style as seen in works by artists such as Tamara de Lempicka, revealing the artist’s deft ability to blend historical and contemporary influences within his practice.
Group (Feminine Solitude) was acquired by Ruth and Harold Uris in the 1950s and has been held by the family ever since. The couple’s collection had a Modernist focus and also included works by Amedeo Modigliani, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Paul Cezanne, and Pablo Picasso. Philanthropists to their core, in 1983, the Urises established the Ruth and Harold D. Uris Center for Education at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.