Lot 262 | HENRI GAUDIER-BRZESKA, 1891-1915 MATERNITÉ
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.HENRI GAUDIER-BRZESKA, 1891-1915
MATERNITÉ.
bronze
carved in Seravazza marble 1913, cast in bronze c. 1965
The subject of the mother and child was a popular one among early 20υth century avant-garde European sculptors, whose dedication to 'primitive art' was matched by their address to primal relationships and emotions. Continental artists such as Alexander Archipenko and Constantin Brancusi and British contemporaries Jacob Epstein and Eric Gill all carved modernist madonnas in the pre-war years, while Gaudier-Brzeska himself made several. In addition to the present work his catalogue includes a plaster of 1913 (lost), the Portland stone Maternity (also known as Caritas, 1914, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Orléans) and one of his last documented works, a wooden Maternity carved in the trenches from a German rifle-butt (lost). The present work is his finest on the theme, described by Roger Sécretain as 'one of Gaudier's masterpieces'υ[1] and by Roger Cole as 'one of his most accomplished sculptures.'υ[2]
To begin with, the work has a remarkable tenderness; as Evelyn Silber has observed, 'the relationship of mother and child [is] emotional, intimate, the mother's embrace private, enclosed.'υ[3] While this humanist expression derives from the figures' essential naturalism, there is a powerful, dynamic plasticity to the anatomy. The forms of bodies, heads and limbs have what Gaudier-Brzeska's friend and supporter Ezra Pound called a 'soft bluntness'υ[4], establishing a point of departure for later sculptors such as Henry Moore. In terms of Gaudier-Brzeska's own stylistic development, Maternité is a key, transitional work. While it still retains something of what the artist self-mockingly described as his 'agglomeration of Rodin-Maillol mixture,'υ[5] the work's blocky construction and firmly articulated planes anticipate the more abstract geometries of his later, vorticist works.
The original marble carving of 1913 is now in the collection of the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris; the present work is one of only eight casts made in the 1960s by the London foundry Fiorini for Gaudier-Brzeska's biographer, collector and advocate H.S. Ede. Of these eight, five are now held in public collections: Tate, London; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Kettle's Yard, Cambridge υ(2); Kunsthalle, Bielefeld.
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