Archipenko

The esthetic gods of yester-year go fast. Rodin (died 1921) was only a sentimental impressionist in sculpture, according to the critics of insurgence. The great names of today were unknown a decade ago. The post-impressionist sculptors who have received the critical accolade -- men whose work would be incomprehensible to a Canova or a Thorwaldsen -- are Aristide Maillol, whom Clive Bell, English oracle of modernism, Sheldon Cheney and many others consider the greatest sculptor alive; Bourdelle and Gaudier, other Frenchmen; Jacob Epstein (an American, by the way) and Eric Gill, an Englishman; Grancusi, Bohemian carver of geometrical solids; Mestrovic, the Serbian; Archipenko.

Alexander Archipenko has just seen the Statue of Liberty for the first time. He came here to found what he claims will be "the only modern Art school in the world," because America, young, unspoiled and the only great country not gravely crippled by the War, is the place to look for the great Art of the future. He is a Ukrainian, born and bred in Kiev. In Berlin he recently closed a school to which flocked students from all over the world. At Prague he did a bust of Masaryk, President of Czecho-Slovakia. His bust of his wife (a native of Berlin), who accompanies him to America, is in the Leipzig Museum.

Archipenko is the quintessence of cubism, the sculptural analogue of Pablo Picasso. He represents a movement which has as yet scarcely penetrated the American consciousness, but is the dominating mode in Continental Art today. Archipenko will never have a great popular following, but he has made his reputation with artists. He experiments with bizarre media for sculpture -- glass, wood, papier-mache and paint, polished sheet-iron reflecting surrounding men and things. He uses symbolism, hieroglyphics, simplification, expresses cerebral intangibilities, "models the atmosphere" by leaving holes in matter.

Whether America will take this alien creed to her bosom is a moot query. That Archipenko will arouse violent opinion on both sides is patent. A hint of what he may expect at the hands of orthodoxy was contained in a review by Lucia Fairchild Fuller, A. N. A. (painter), when Archipenko's cubistic statue of a soldier was shown in Manhattan in 1921: "The thing is worthless. Only a fundamental degeneration could have produced it, and it is an ominous sign when any sane human being finds it of interest."