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拍品專文
Conceived in 1914 and carved in 1920, Archipenko’s graceful Flat Torso offers a visual bridge between the two seminal decades of the artist’s storied oeuvre. Upon arrival to Paris in 1908 from his native Kiev, the young artist discovered the realm of sculpture was dominated by the expressive art of Auguste Rodin, and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts by contrast, by academic tradition. Within two weeks of his enrollment, he had abandoned his formal studies in favor of the hallowed halls of the Musée du Louvre. By day, he explored the ancient and hieratic Egyptian, Assyrian, archaic Greek and early Gothic sculptures. By night, he immersed himself in the dynamism and innovative spirit of the younger generations of artists who had flocked to the French capital. From the notorious artist studios at La Ruche in Montparnasse to the cubist gatherings in the studios of Henri Le Fauconnier and Albert Gleizes, Archipenko’s precocious talent was warmly embraced 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 that would cement him as a foremost sculptor in the first quarter of the century.
Flat Torso is an early result of this ambitious reevaluation of form and space, and yet one that prefigures the reductionist impulse that would reappear throughout Archipenko’s practice. Viewed frontally, the sculpture offers an elegant array of intersecting concave and convex inflections set in motion by the female figure’s contrapposto stance. Through an economy of means, her sinuous form emerges—the slope of her breast echoing the curve of her abdomen and the arc of her hips, whose fluid line runs the length of her figure. In startling contrast, when viewed in the round, her fecund form dematerializes to the weight of a knife-edge. As Katharine Kuh noted, Archipenko’s “greatest contribution was metaphysical. He made what is, seem what it is not. It was the duality of vision that interested him, less the image itself than our reaction to the image. Turning total voids into solid form, he also discovered that surrounding space could become as potent as dense mass” (quoted in Archipenko: The Parisian Years, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970).
Adapting Flat Torso to marble in 1920, Archipenko embraced the new classicism that came to define the aftermath of the First World War. If he had recently dispensed with the hard contours, cut-outs, and elaborate convex-concave configuration of formal elements in his cubist figures and sculpto-paintings of the previous decade, he instead sought to emphasize once again that more simplified and reductionist classical impulse which had also been a guiding principle. In contrast to his contemporaries, whose formal approach departed from their work of the prior decade, Archipenko rather looked to his own oeuvre for precedent. The present marble, with its echoes of antiquity, is at once ancient and modern, offering a timeless formal language that both embraced tradition and propelled the plastic arts into the 20th Century.
Shortly after it was carved, Flat Torso was acquired by the Surrealist artist and gallerist, E.L.T. Mesens, reflecting Archipenko’s influence on the next generation of artists flocking to Paris in the years following the war. Mesens subsequently sold the work to Georges Vriamont, whose collection included works by Rene Magritte and James Ensor. Flat Torso was acquired by the late owner in 1974 and has not been publicly displayed since 1951, constituting an exciting rediscovery within Archipenko’s oeuvre.
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 that would cement him as a foremost sculptor in the first quarter of the century.
Flat Torso is an early result of this ambitious reevaluation of form and space, and yet one that prefigures the reductionist impulse that would reappear throughout Archipenko’s practice. Viewed frontally, the sculpture offers an elegant array of intersecting concave and convex inflections set in motion by the female figure’s contrapposto stance. Through an economy of means, her sinuous form emerges—the slope of her breast echoing the curve of her abdomen and the arc of her hips, whose fluid line runs the length of her figure. In startling contrast, when viewed in the round, her fecund form dematerializes to the weight of a knife-edge. As Katharine Kuh noted, Archipenko’s “greatest contribution was metaphysical. He made what is, seem what it is not. It was the duality of vision that interested him, less the image itself than our reaction to the image. Turning total voids into solid form, he also discovered that surrounding space could become as potent as dense mass” (quoted in Archipenko: The Parisian Years, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970).
Adapting Flat Torso to marble in 1920, Archipenko embraced the new classicism that came to define the aftermath of the First World War. If he had recently dispensed with the hard contours, cut-outs, and elaborate convex-concave configuration of formal elements in his cubist figures and sculpto-paintings of the previous decade, he instead sought to emphasize once again that more simplified and reductionist classical impulse which had also been a guiding principle. In contrast to his contemporaries, whose formal approach departed from their work of the prior decade, Archipenko rather looked to his own oeuvre for precedent. The present marble, with its echoes of antiquity, is at once ancient and modern, offering a timeless formal language that both embraced tradition and propelled the plastic arts into the 20th Century.
Shortly after it was carved, Flat Torso was acquired by the Surrealist artist and gallerist, E.L.T. Mesens, reflecting Archipenko’s influence on the next generation of artists flocking to Paris in the years following the war. Mesens subsequently sold the work to Georges Vriamont, whose collection included works by Rene Magritte and James Ensor. Flat Torso was acquired by the late owner in 1974 and has not been publicly displayed since 1951, constituting an exciting rediscovery within Archipenko’s oeuvre.