'Archipenko builds realities. His art approaches absolute sculpture closer and closer, a sculpture which will one day amalgamate with absolute painting and absolute architecture, an art beyond all style, beyond all techniques and auxiliary means.' —Donald KarshanComing to auction directly from the highly distinguished collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, this important work by Ukrainian-born sculptor Alexander Archipenko comes with an exceptional provenance.

 

 

Forms in Motion

'In sculpture, Archipenko seeks above all the purity of forms. He wants to find the most abstract, most symbolic, newest forms, and he wants to be able to shape them as he pleases.' —Guillaume ApollinaireSupremely elegant in its careful compositional balance and attention to structural form, Statue on a Triangular Base is a preeminent example of the distinctive visual language pioneered by Alexander Archipenko during this formative period of his career. One of the earliest artists to apply broadly Cubist techniques to three-dimensional forms, the young Archipenko was a central player in the European avant-garde in the significant early decades of the twentieth century and was included in some of the era’s most definitive exhibitions, including the infamous 1911 Salon des Indépendents and the epoch-defining 1913 Armory Show in New York.

 

First conceived in 1914 during the artist’s productive Parisian years, Statue on a Triangular Base is typical of the artist’s sculptural investigation of space, simultaneity, sensuality, and the female form that defines his finest work. Included in The Museum of Modern Art’s 1970 exhibition which took these ‘heroic years’ as its focus, Statue on a Triangular Base showcases Archipenko’s radical experimentalism with regards to the representation of volumetric movement and the fracturing of the body into simplified geometric shapes and interlocking planes. As Katherine Kuh has described, the female nude was absolutely central to this artistic project:

'Relying on the human body, preferably the female nude, as his point of departure, Archipenko constructed his figures with architectural precision, yet rarely sacrificed the rhythms of nature. His idealized women have the elongated elegance we sometimes associate with undulating plants, sometimes with those Gothic saints which echo the soaring churches they decorate.' —Kathrine KuhWith unbridled energy and a confidently fluid sense of form, Archipenko here extracts the essence of a female figure with a remarkable lightness of touch: presented in an exaggerated contrapposto pose, the angular form of the arm is perfectly mirrored by the triangular base of the title. Poised between these two, opposing diagonal forces, the sculpture contains an enormous amount of energy and kinetic potentiality, recalling the defining sculptural image of a body in motion, Umberto Boccioni’s Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio. Arriving in Paris in 1911, the Italian Futurist first visited Archipenko in his studio the following year, no doubt admiring the sculptor’s experimental approach and incorporation of moving parts in pieces such as Médrano I.

 

 

Section d’Or, Cubism, and Modern Art in America

 

'Cubism will remain a document of the newly awakened spirit of the beginning of the mathematical and geometric 20th century.' —Alexander Archipenko

Upon his own arrival in Paris in 1908, Archipenko had been immediately swept into the revolution in pictorial representation gripping the capital, as Cubism was reimagining the question of perception for a modern world. Employing multiple and often intersecting or overlaid viewpoints, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque directly addressed the concept of simultaneity across their painting, papier collé, and reliefs of the period. This concept, and its application in the representation of form chimed closely with Archipenko’s own and allowed him to radically extend his investigation of positive and negative space, expressed here in the careful tension achieved in the work whereby  ‘that which is concave is also convex’.ⁱ Establishing a lively dialogue between material and subject, the rendering of these geometric planes in bronze further accentuates the sense of taut musculature and fluid movement achieved in Archipenko’s treatment of plastic volume.

 

Swiftly adopted into the ranks of La Section d’Or after its formalisation as a group in the French Cubist school in 1912, Archipenko joined the likes of Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, and the Duchamp brothers in their regular meetings held in member’s homes in Puteaux and Courbevoie. The poet and critic of the age Guillaume Apollinaire championed his work, writing in Der Sturm magazine just the year before the present work was first conceived that ‘Archipenko builds realities. His art draws nearer more and more to absolute sculpture, which will one day have to blend with absolute painting and absolute architecture in order to arise as pure plasticity, beyond all styles, all techniques and methods.’ⁱⁱ

 

Alongside several important international solo exhibitions in these years, Archipenko continued to show alongside other members of the group, most notably in La Salon de ‘La Section d’Or’ held at the Galerie de la Boëtie in Paris in 1912 and the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art held at the 69^th Regiment Armory in New York. Better known as The Armory Show, this exhibition was highly significant as the first, large-scale exhibition that introduced European modernism to an American audience. Included in the Cubist Room alongside Marcel Duchamp’s much-derided Nu descendant un escalier, Archipenko’s reputation as a pioneer in modernist sculptural form was internationally acknowledged.

 

Looking more closely at Duchamp’s infamous painting, the relationship between the two artists in these formative years is striking, both in terms of their formal interests, and in Archipenko’s extension of Duchamp’s pictorial examination of the figure in movement into three dimensions. It was Duchamp too who personally convinced Archipenko to travel to America in 1920, and introduced him to Katherine Dreier, an American artist and important patron of the arts who co-founded the Société Anonyme, Inc., and gave Archipenko his first solo exhibition in the United States in 1921. Although often described as a ‘pioneer Cubist sculptor’, Archipenko went considerably further than this in his approach to plastic volume. As is clearly apparent in Statue on a Triangular Base, Archipenko ‘never merely transferred Cubist theories from painting to sculpture, he virtually invented his own kind of three-dimensional cubism’.ⁱⁱⁱ

 

Collector’s Digest

 

•    One of the most important sculptors working in Paris between 1908 and 1920, Alexander Archipenko is often credited as being the first artist to explore Cubist principles in sculpture.

 

•    Archipenko was included in some of the most significant group exhibitions of the early 20th century, including the 1910 Salon des Indépendants - his first public exhibition in Paris where he showed alongside Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Fernand Léger, and the Duchamp brothers – The 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art in New York, and was included in the last Cubist group exhibition at the Salon des Indépendents in 1920.

 

•    The focus of major solo exhibitions internationally following his 1912 show at Museum Folkwang, Hagen for which the poet Guillaume Apollinaire provided the catalogue introduction, Archipenko also enjoyed considerable success in America. After the 1921 presentation of his work by the Société Anonyme, Inc., Kathrine Dreier also organised Archipenko with the Anderson Galleries in 1928. As recently as September 2021, Archipenko was the focus of Archipenko in Italy held at ML Fine Art, Milan.

 

•    Today, his works can be found in the collections of numerous renown institutions, such as the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in Israel, the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis, and the Tate Modern in London.

ⁱ Katherine Dreier, International Exhibition of Modern Art arranged by the Société Anonyme for the Brooklyn Museum, (exh. cat.), New York, 1926, p. 77. 
ⁱⁱ Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Alexander Archipenko,’ in Harry E. Buckley, Guillaume Apollinaire as an Art Critic, Chicago, 1981, p. 223.
ⁱⁱⁱ Katherine Kuh, ‘Alexander Archipenko:1887 – 1964’, in Archipenko: The Parisian Years, (exh. cat.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 20 July – 18 October 1970, n.p.