ARCHIPENKO AT 74

TO speak of Alexander Archipenko is, for many, to speak of a ghost--an artist whose glories are in the past and who only haunts the present. Yet no ghost could be more lively. This week an Archipenko retrospective will open at Manhattan's Perls Galleries, and another show will head for a tour of Canada. Archipenko has always been an innovator; at 74, he still is.

Archipenko's father was a mildly successful inventor in the Russian city of Kiev, and invention has held a fascination for Archipenko all his life. While the father thought of an invention as a mechanical problem, the son saw it also as an esthetic one, an assemblage of forms. By the time he moved to Paris at the age of 21, young Archipenko was not only a trained engineer but an accomplished sculptor as well.

In 1908, when the cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque began to appear in Paris, Archipenko fell under their spell. He was perhaps the first (historians disagree) to bring cubism to sculpture. Today his work of that great period (see color} seems as vital as it was when it was done in the years before the first World War. But if these show Archipenko at his most memorable, they do not fully reveal him.

When he first settled in the U.S. in 1923, he was hailed by the critics as "the greatest sculptor since Rodin." The fact was that he loathed Rodin. "Since photography," he said, "representation is unnecessary." His sculpto-paintings--many-colored shapes arranged, friezelike, upon a flat plane --were pioneer constructions. He boldly used glass, wood, clay, metal or mother-of-pearl to achieve new effects, often allowing the materials to shape their own destinies, much as today's abstractionists let their work grow out of itself. Long before the younger Henry Moore, he gouged holes in his sculpture to turn space inside out; often he would make concave what nature had made convex. He was--and still is --one of the few sculptors to use color to add dimension to his volumes. The complete sculptor, he says, should know color as well, as form; "This was true of the ancients, in Greece, in India,"

There are times in Archipenko's more recent work when experiment drowns out art, when the struggle is too obvious, the effect too contrived. But in 1961 he could still turn out work of extraordinary range. His Kimono at the Perls Galleries has the simple and timeless authority of a primitive mask; his Linear Oriental is a daring swoop of lines as graceful as a woman's dress. Archipenko is not much in fashion these days; yet the old freshness still shows through. Modern art owes him a debt, and the debt has not all been paid.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.