Arts and Letters

There has always been a peculiar and persistent drift, if it may be called so, of painters into the field of sculpture, and the tendency has been accentuated in recent times. It may be that the insistence on two-dimensionality in so much of modern painting has had something to do with it: the confinement of the painting to the flat, surface-of-the-canvas plane, the renunciation of the sweeping perspectives of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century artists. At any rate, modern painters, from Degas to Picasso and beyond, have been drawn, it would seem almost compulsively, to have a try at sculpture—as one way, one might think, of seeing the figures they have been painting really "in the round."

One of the singularities of Alexander Archipenko's career is that he reversed this process. A sculptor from the beginning to the end of his life, he has the unique distinction of drawing painting into sculpture, instead of the other way around; and one of his first achievements, and in many ways still one of his greatest—certainly in many ways his most adventurous—was his attempt, centering in the first and second decades of the present century, to adapt the strict Cubist techniques to the plastic modes of sculpture.

He was not alone in this, for there were others, particularly among the Futurists, who were working in the same direction. It would be wrong, though, to suggest that he was trying to superpose the art of painting on that of sculpture. His attempt, as I see it, was rather to evolve a form of expression that would partake of both, and it was a special challenge, since the Cubist form of abstraction is as invincibly two-dimensional as sculpture is inescapably three-dimensional. But although it is a question whether or not he achieved a real synthesis of the two major plastic arts (though, too, he soon drew away from the Cubist pattern to experiment with more fluid and possibly more fundamental, archaic patterns) his attempt was still in the same direction. Until the day of his death, which occurred on February 25th of this year, his constant attempt was to use the stratagems of painting—color, texture, economy of form, and so on—to increase the range, flexibility, and power of sculpture.

Alexander Archipenko was born in Kiev in 1887, and as frequently happens there were evidences of artistic leanings among his forebears. Though his father was a professor of engineering at the University of Kiev, his grandfather had been a painter, specializing in murals. With such a cultural background, there was no objection to the young man's taking up art, and he was early enrolled in art school in Kiev. He was almost as quickly expelled, for having derided the teaching as "too academic." But a few years later, in 1907, aged twenty, he was in Paris, where, after a brief foray into the École des Beaux Arts and another brisk exit (again, "too academic") he was quick to align himself with the then emergent Cubist movement.

Always venturing, he was one of the first, if not the first of the moderns to visit this country. He came over in 1923 and, unlike the others, he stayed—this despite the fact that the move quite probably delayed the recognition he deserved, for he came at a time when the public here was ill-prepared to appreciate a man as advanced as he was, while at the same time, in so doing, he cut himself off from the cozy, coterie quality, the logrolling, in short, of the Paris groups. A stockily built, solid man of enormous energy, he died suddenly of a heart attack he'd been warned might follow on a milder one he'd had shortly before, if he didn't stop working so hard. He didn't stop, and it did.

It is difficult to be completely objective about Archipenko's achievement. It is hard even to summarize it, for he was so truly experimental, and in such a bewildering variety of fashions, that it is almost impossible to bring it all, so to speak, in one focus. It is clear, though, that all modern sculpture is to some degree in debt to him. He was the first, for example, to introduce "voids" into his compositions—those open spaces in figures that in latter days so many other artists have added to their repertory. He was also, as far as I know, the first to explore the possibilities of the so-called "negative forms," in which concave forms are played off against convex ones, and a part of a figure, say a woman's breast, may be presented either as a projection or a cupped indentation. He developed this device originally, I believe, to emphasize the "flatness" of his compositions, and so ally them still more firmly with Cubist doctrine. But it also helped immensely to tighten his work generally, especially in the uses he later developed for the method. He was among the first too to revive the ancient practice of polychrome in statuary, and he was bold both in the colors he used and in the variety of textures he applied to his surfaces. The list could still go on. The important point is, I think, that his innovations were never idle. Till the day of his death, he was still trying out new notions and ideas. But he was also striving to correlate them with his solid, old accomplishments—and also with the range and reach of sculpture in general.