Word: archipenko
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Died. Alexander Archipenko, 76, Ukrainian-born sculptor who in 1909 shocked Paris by giving a third dimension to the cubism of Braque and Picasso, produced in the years that followed a 1,000-piece gallery of fluid and generally bulbous angularities (among the best-known: The Boxer and Gondolier), developing many popular techniques, such as the use of hunks of glass and mother-of-pearl, tunneling holes through anatomy long before Henry Moore; of a heart attack; in Manhattan...
...join the Armory Show of 1913, it drowned out whatever noise the Americans were making. Yet this week, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington has a well-thought-out show to prove that Americans had plenty of vitality between 1900 and 1940. There were the new open sculptures of Archipenko, the mobiles of Calder, the precisionism of Charles Sheeler, the cubism of Max Weber, and the soaring abstractions of Joseph Stella. But the case of Stanton Macdonald-Wright was something else again, one of those bitter little footnotes to the history of art that serve as a reminder that experimentation...
...four are by no means the only places in Manhattan to buy a masterwork. For certain living masters-Miró, Giacometti or Balthus, for instance-the place to go is the gallery owned by Pierre Matisse, son of Painter Henri Matisse. The Perls Galleries represent Calder and Archipenko, and they do a reputable business in "painters of the Picasso generation" like Braque, Modigliani, Soutine and Utrillo. Catherine Viviano on East 57th Street is strong on modern Italians like Afro and Cremonini, but she also represents the surrealist Kay Sage and the estate of Max Beckmann...
...show also offers two rare plaques by Thomas Eakins, some magical shadow boxes by Joseph Cornell, a fine head by Gauguin, some abstractions by David Smith, whom Hirshhorn began buying 20 years ago. From A (for Archipenko. Armitage and Arp) to Z (for Zadkine, Zajac and Zorach), the exhibition provides a splendid survey of modern sculpture, all the more refreshing because Hirshhorn collected it with no pretensions and no esthetic doubletalk, but simply out of his own compulsive love. When asked why he bought Epstein's Visitation, he explains: "It was a serene, beautiful piece which excited...
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...