Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

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Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (6 October 1891 – 5 June 1915) was a French sculptor who developed a rough hewn, primitive style of direct carving.

Henri Gaudier was born in St. Jean de Braye near Orléans. In 1910 he moved to London to become an artist, even though he had no formal training. With him came Sophie Brzeska, a Polish writer twice his age that he had met at the Bibliotheque St. Genevieve in Paris, and began an intense symbiotic relationship with her, annexing her surname although they never married.

Gaudier-Brzeska fell in with the Vorticism movement of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, becoming a founding member of the London Group. He advocated that sculpture should leave behind the highly finished, polished style of ancient Greece and embrace a more earthy direct carving, in which the tool marks are left visible on the final work as a fingerprint of the artist. From his original admiration for the work of Rodin, he also drew from primitive ethnic sculpture arriving at the Victoria and Albert Museum and British Museum. His drawings also show the influence of Cubism.

Gaudier-Brzeska was influenced by the Chinese calligraphy and poetry which he discovered at the "Ezuversity", Ezra Pound's unofficial locus of teaching. Pound's interaction with Ernest Fenollosa's work on the Chinese brought the young sculptor to the galleries of Eastern art, where he studied the ideogram and applied it to his art. Gaudier-Brzeska had the ability to imply, with a few deft strokes, the being of a subject.

At the start of the First World War, Gaudier-Brzeska enlisted with the French army. He appears to have fought with little regard for his own safety, receiving a decoration for bravery before being killed in the trenches at Neuville St. Vaast on 5 June 1915.

Following his death Sophie Brzeska became distraught, eventually dying in an asylum in 1925. Jim Ede bought a sizeable portion of Gaudier-Brzeska's work from Sophie Brzeska's estate including numerous letters sent between Henri and Sophie. Ede used these as the basis for his book Savage Messiah on life and work of Gaudier-Brzeska, which in turn became the basis of Ken Russell's film of the same name.

Despite the fact that he had only four years to develop his art, Gaudier-Brzeska has had a surprisingly strong influence on 20th-century modernist sculpture in England and France. His work can be seen at the Tate Gallery, Kettle's Yard, the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris and the Musée des Beaux Arts Orléans.

[edit] Further reading

Ede, H. S., Savage Messiah (London: Heinemann, 1931; rpt. London: Gordon Fraser Gallery, 1971 ISBN 0-900406-15-1)—biography of Gaudier-Brzeska
Pound, Ezra, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (London: John Lane, 1916; rpt. New York: New Directions, 1970 ISBN 0-8112-0527-4)—memoir of Pound's time with Gaudier-Brzeska, including letters and photos of sculpture
"We the Moderns": Gaudier-Brzeska and the Birth of Modern Sculpture (Cambridge: Kettle's Yard, 2007 ISBN 1-90-4561-225)—catalogue of an exhibition of the same name