Archipenko Oleksandr.Alexandre Archipenko: son oeuvre.Berlin, 1923

“It is impossible to imagine that our modern sculpture broke so completely with naturalism without the Ukrainian Archipenko.” — Hans Hildebrandt

Alexandre Archipenko: son oeuvre: 66 reproductions avec un portrait de l'artiste et une introduction / par Hans Hildebrandt, dr. prof.

Berlin: Éditions «Ukrainske Slowo», 1923. — 15, [2] с., [26] арк. іл. — 31 × 23,5 см.

Publisher's binding: covers bound in light-colored textured paper, spine in gray cloth; on the front cover, two gold bands with the artist's name in Latin and Cyrillic script — “ARCHIPENKO” and “АРХИПЕНКО”, in black; on the back cover, blind-stamped “Ukrainske Slowo” publisher's mark with a trident. Endpapers of paper with an embossed cloth texture. Color frontispiece — sculptomalaire “Femme assise” (1921); portrait of the artist from the Berlin Riess photo studio with facsimile signature. The covers are darkened and soiled, especially at the edges; on the back cover, uneven fading with a light rectangle in the center and stains; corners and edges rubbed, small tears in the paper at the bottom edge of the front cover, cloth of the spine rubbed at the ends; along the spine on the front cover, a row of small dark dots. Paper with natural yellowing, on p. 5 in the upper corner, a large yellow stain. Plates with reproductions are clean. Condition: good.

Lifetime edition. The book has historical and cultural value as a memento of the artist's Berlin period and the publishing activities of the Ukrainian emigration in Germany, and is of collector's interest.

INFORMATION

This monograph was published by the Ukrainian publishing house in Berlin in 1923 — the year Alexandre Archipenko moved to the USA. The album contains 66 reproductions of works from 1909–1923: sculptures in bronze, marble, plaster, wood, and faience, drawings, watercolors, and sculptomalaire — polychrome reliefs where the artist combined sculpture with painting. The list of illustrations provides for each work the year, material, height, and owner — from private collections to museums in Mannheim, Rotterdam, Essen, Hague, and Osaka. The introductory article was written by German art historian Hans Hildebrandt (1878–1957), professor at the Technical Higher School in Stuttgart, friend of the Bauhaus artists. He explicitly calls Archipenko Ukrainian and demonstrates that it was this sculptor, endowed with a keen sense of color, who led art toward the synthesis of sculpture and painting.

Alexandre Archipenko (1887–1964) — sculptor and artist, one of the founders of Cubism in sculpture. Born in Kyiv, studied at the Kyiv School of Art, lived in Paris from 1908, exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1910 alongside Picasso, Braque, and Malevich. In 1921–1923, he lived in Berlin, where he opened his own art school, and later moved to New York. He entered art history as an innovator who made emptiness — “negative space” — a full-fledged part of sculptural form.

The book was published by the Berlin publishing house “Ukrainske Slowo” (1921–1926), headed by Zenon Kuzelia: it published the eponymous Hetmanate newspaper and over seventy books. The publishing house released the monograph on Archipenko in several languages — Ukrainian with English, German, and French — to introduce the Ukrainian artist to the European reader. This copy is the French edition, which is referenced, among others, by the catalogue of the Centre Pompidou collection in Paris.