“It is unthinkable that contemporary arts such as painting and sculpture could have entirely separated themselves from naturalism, into whose wide sea all the currents of the nineteenth century flowed, had the Ukrainian sculptor Archipenko not appeared on the scene.”
A signature piece from Archipenko’s American period, this biomorphic form suspended in space places the artist firmly in the ranks of the great pioneers of modernist sculpture. Taking the classical female nude as a starting point, Archipenko harks back to the headless fragments of Greek and Roman sculpture, only to subvert all expectations of naturalism with his radical use of sinuous lines and a weighty sense of physicality. A radical work, as well as an iconic one, Torso in Space is better understood in the context of the experimentation of his contemporaries, Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi or Henry Moore.
This subject was conceived in the mid-1930s while Archipenko was teaching and working in Los Angeles, where he had opened an art school. In 1937, Archipenko had access to a large firing kiln and created a large-scale version of Torso in Space in terracotta. The terracotta was metalized with bronze, and is now in the Whitney Museum of American Art (acquired 1958). The estate completed an edition of six in bronze in the 1960s, three of which are in museums, including a bronze in the Whitney, in addition to the terracotta they acquired.
“In less than seven years, he introduced to sculpture changes more radical than it had known for many centuries.”
“Do you really think she is the sister of the one at the Louvre?” “Yes, but they had different fathers.”