Word: brzeska
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...many of the lesser-known things in this show -- like the dense and acerbic paintings of Degas's friend Walter Richard Sickert, or Matthew Smith's responses to fauvism, or the work of the vorticists around 1914 (Wyndham Lewis, William Roberts, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska), or that of individuals like Stanley Spencer, David Bomberg, Jacob Epstein and Paul Nash, and so on through to the post-'60s paintings of men like Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach, R.B. Kitaj and Howard Hodgkin -- now strike us as not just a footnote to, but an essential part of, the visual culture...
...Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and other Bloomsbury-approved painters into the one dedicated to Britain's avant-garde at the time of World War I is to move from cozy provincialism to formidable energy. Its monument (or perhaps, its idol) is the only large marble carving that Henri Gaudier- Brzeska was able to complete before his death in an infantry charge, at the age of 23, in 1915. This is the Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, 1914, and hieratic it is; the face, with its wedge of a nose, embrasure-like eyes and triangular goatee, is as powerful...
...having emigrated to London, became a central figure in the avant-garde before being killed in World War I at the age of 24. Russell's theme is the long, violent and platonic love affair between Gaudier and a neurotic Polish writer almost twice his age, Sophie Brzeska, whose name he joined to his. Hampered by poverty, his life truncated at a moment when most artists are only beginning to work, Gaudier-Brzeska did not produce a large body of sculpture; but he was an indefatigable letter writer, and much of his correspondence survives. The letters -like the sculpture...
...dealers' windows, spouting off against Establishment art values from the top of an Easter Island head in the Louvre, and performing unlikely - and, in real life, unrecorded - feats of gymnastics like carving a marble torso several feet high in six hours flat to im press a dealer. Sophie Brzeska is played by Dorothy Tutin - an elegantly controlled and touching exercise in tight, fey dottiness...
Alas, the context in which Russell sets these performances is obtuse to the point of caricature. Did Gaudier-Brzeska have a mistress? Then she must be a pneumatic and witless art groupie (Helen Mirren), daughter of a landed cavalry officer, who does her obligatory nude scene on the staircase of an immense, frigid Adam country house; she must also be a suffragette, which gives Russell much opportunity for lumpen-sexist travesty by having her do a song-and-hop number about votes for women in a nightclub and then, at Gaudier's demand, drop her knickers onstage. Around...