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Artist or Maker: Alexander Archipenko (1887-1964)
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Provenance: Bernard Danenberg Galleries, Inc., New York.
Acquired from the above by the present owner, 1970.
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Literature: D.H. Karshan, Archipenko: The Sculpture and Graphic Art, Including a Print Catalogue Raisonné, Tübingen, 1974, pp. 11, 12, 15, 18, 23, 32, 34, 36, 39 and 149 (larger bronze version illustrated, pp. 10 and 149).
D.H. Karshan, Archipenko: Sculpture, Drawings and Prints, 1908-1963, Danville, Kentucky, 1985, pp. 4, 79, 185.
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Notes: The Archipenko Foundation will include this work in the upcoming catalogue raisonné of sculptures by Alexander Archipenko.
Gondolier was among the four Archipenko sculptures featured at the spring 1914 Salon des Independants, an event that heralded a pivotal moment in the artist's career and earned him celebrity as the first Cubist sculptor. Since arriving in Paris in 1908, Archipenko had moved away from his pared down monoliths to emphasize an increasingly Cubist vernacular of abutting planes, quotidian materials, and polychrome. By embracing negative space as an active element of sculptural articulation, Archipenko drew a new equivalent between the dialectics of plane and shadow in two-dimensional media and the play of presence and absence implied by concave and convex shapes. Alfred H. Barr Jr., the legendary director of the Museum of Modern Art, described Archipenko in 1936 as "the first to work seriously and consistently at the problem of Cubist sculpture" (A.H. Barr, Jr., Cubism and Modern Art, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1936, p. 104).
Archipenko resisted categorization and insisted on the formal evolution apparent within his oeuvre as evidence of his virtuosity, "As for my own work, the geometric character of three-dimensional sculptures, Boxers, 1913, Silhouette, 1910, Gondolier, 1914, is due to the extreme simplification of form and not to Cubist dogma. I did not take from Cubism, but added to it. At this time no other sculptor reduced forms to their fundamentally geometric structure" (A. Archipenko, Archipenko: Fifty Creative Years 1908-1958, New York, 1960, p. 49).
Gondolier evinces the transformation of shape into geometry. The radical fusion of a gondolier's leg and pole into one dynamic diagonal adds thrust to the static sculpture, suggesting movement in three-dimensions. Donald H. Karshan referred to Georges Vantongerloo's diagram of the Gondolier, published in De Stijl January 1918; "Vantongerloo describes the 'mouvement perpetuel' of the Gondolier; movements which are at once cross-axial and rotational and seem to extend beyond the mass of the sculpture itself" (D.H. Karshan, Archipenko: The Sculpture and Graphic Art, Boulder, 1975, p. 32).
Gondolier is a quintessential example of Archipenko's work from his early period. Casts of the sculpture are owned by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art. Katherine J. Michaelsen and Nehama Guralnik have written; "In retrospect, the years 1913 and 1914 stand out as the creative high point of Archipenko's early period. His most successful and important sculptures, among them some unqualified masterpieces were created in these two years. Incorporated into these works are all of the significant sculptural innovations that earned Archipenko a position among handful of pioneers of modern sculpture" (K.J. Michaelson and N. Guralnik, op. cit., pp. 45-46).
Please see department for better color illustration.
