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Published on 8/29/08
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Pablo Picasso gets most of the credit for creating modern art as we know it, but Ukrainian artist Alexander Archipenko revolutionized sculpture in the first half of the 20th century with his Cubist-inspired works. “Les Formes Vivantes” (1963) captures the artist’s meditations on geometric and human forms, even though this portfolio of ten large-scale lithographs is not in his signature medium.
Some prints, such as Le Groupe, recall Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings with thin, curving lines that shape negative space alongside solid forms of varying opacity. Yet Archipenko’s depiction of light bouncing off abstract figures and his manipulation of shadows reflect an accomplished sculptor’s knowledge of texture, surface and space. Most of these prints could pass as sketches for unrealized sculptures, but in one of the most compelling—La Danse Noire—Archipenko skips his usual 3-D modeling, instead expressing the complex relationship between two dancing figures through simple brushstrokes.
Archipenko had blurred the line between mediums before: His “sculpto-paintings,” for example, projected paintings’ surfaces into space. “Les Formes Vivantes”—of which only 75 copies exist—reveals what almost 50 years of experimentation accomplished.
