Archipenko, Alexander

Archipenko, Alexander (1887–1964). Russian-born sculptor who became an American citizen in 1928. In 1908 he moved from Moscow to Paris, where he was introduced to Cubism by Léger and became one of the outstanding sculptors of the movement. In works such as the bronze Walking Woman (1912, Denver Art Mus.), he analysed the human figure into geometrical forms and opened parts of it up with concavities and a central hole to create a contrast of solid and void, issuing in a new idiom in modern sculpture. At about the same time he began making sculptures that were assembled from pieces of commonplace materials, paralleling the work of Picasso. Archipenko quickly built up a reputation in France and elsewhere (especially Germany), and although his career was interrupted by the First World War, he vigorously relaunched it afterwards, and by the time of his first one-man show in the USA (given by the Société Anonyme in 1921) he was undoubtedly the best known and most influential of all Cubist sculptors. In 1921–3 he lived in Berlin, then settled in the USA. He taught in various places, but principally in New York, where he ran his own school of sculpture from 1939 until his death. The work he produced in America did not compare in quality or historical importance with that of his European period, but he continued to be imaginative and technically resourceful. In 1924, for example, he invented the Archipentura (a kind of Kinetic painting), and after the Second World War he experimented with ‘light’ sculptures, making structures of plastic lit from within. His work was influential in both Europe and America, notably in the revival of polychromy, in the use of new materials, and in pointing the way from a sculpture of solid form towards one of space and light.