As I write, Russian President Vladimir Putin has announced the annexation of regions of Ukraine, a clear violation of international law during the invasion that began in February 2022, following the events of 2014, and which continues a centuries-old narrative of aggression. In an effort to show solidarity with Ukraine, many are now looking to the country’s cultural history and focusing on its modern and contemporary artists. Among the most often cited is Kyiv-born Alexander Archipenko (1887–1964).1 During the 20th century, Archipenko was celebrated as Ukraine’s most prominent sculptor, especially in his homeland, but also in North America’s Ukrainian expatriate community. Not surprisingly, Archipenko’s work is now often highlighted on social media, museum websites, and in exhibitions such as “In Solidarity” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.2

This renewed focus on Archipenko represents an opportunity to revisit the artist’s contributions to modernism and the visual references to his home country that punctuate his work. It also allows us to trace his experience of multiple emigrations, processes of identification, and efforts to stay connected with his family and heritage. As we know, history is never black-and-white; instead, there are many nuances, and as we look at some of the layers in Archipenko’s history, we also see the complexities of Ukrainian history. Archipenko’s multilayered history is visible in his work, which cemented his reputation as an international pioneer of modern sculpture. This article traces references to his Ukrainian heritage and émigré experience in his complex artistic practice – including his efforts to aid relief efforts –offering a fresh perspective and understanding that connects his art to today.

Archipenko’s departure from Kyiv

Archipenko left Kyiv in 1908, at the age of 21, for a new artistic experience in Paris. The French capital was the first significant stop on his nomadic path, which subsequently led him to Germany in 1921. There he married Angelica (Gela) Forster (1893–1957), a recognized German Expressionist sculptor, settling with her in Berlin. Only two years later, in 1923, she joined him on his immigration to the United States, where they both became American citizens in 1929. Archipenko maintained his peripatetic lifestyle, living, working, and teaching in many places, including the urban centers of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Few primary sources are available to document his life in Ukraine. However, from his 1963 conversation with French artist and writer Yvon Taillandier (1926–2008), we understand his lifelong connection to his birth country and its influence on his creative practice.3 Archipenko’s main points in this exchange are his self-identification as an artist-inventor, the importance of symbolism to his practice, and memories of his family and of Ukrainian cultural heritage.

Archipenko belonged to a generation of artists born in Ukraine in the 1880s, one that includes Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979), Alexandra Exter (1882–1949), and Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné (1888–1944), who had moved to Paris at the beginning of the 20th century.4 Here, Archipenko joined a professionalized art community that appreciated his innovative contributions to modern sculpture, which included the reintroduction of color, the use of fragmentation and reflection, and the interplay of concave and convex shapes with immaterial space. Exhibiting regularly in Paris, and abroad, he moved among the different circles and artistic networks that formed the historical avant-garde and became associated in particular with the Section d’Or, French Cubism, German Expressionism, and Italian Futurism. He formed many friendships, including with Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1876–1918), Fernand Léger (1881–1955), Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), Wilhelm Lehmbruck (1881–1919), Léopold Survage (1879–1968), and Gino Severini (1883–1966). In this milieu, Archipenko began to identify as cosmopolitan.5

Among the qualities of the artist’s works from the Parisian years are their innovative visual language and a syncretism that led to signature works such as Medrano (1912), Dance (1912–13), Carrousel Pierrot (1913), and Woman Combing Her Hair (1915). Poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) recognized these syncretic aspects, describing how Archipenko combined archaic visual elements with contemporaneous interests in movement and dance, theories about time and space, and fresh approaches to material and color. While Archipenko acknowledged a variety of cultural and historic influences, such as the objects he studied at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro and at the Louvre, he also pointed to his Ukrainian heritage. Recognizing a universal character in artifacts’ abstract components, he blended elements of them with others from his home country such as the so-called stone babas, which he remembered seeing in the grounds of Kyiv’s Saint Vladimir Imperial University.6 He adapted various elements of the stone stelae, including the bulky forms, simplified bodies, crude heads, truncated legs, and sculpted, integrated bases, for example in Bather in 1912 (fig. 1). However, in contrast to the frozen symmetry of the stelae, dynamic movement defines the figural composition of Bather, which is cast in cement, rather than carved from stone, making use of a material and technique that Archipenko first explored in Paris.

1. Alexander Archipenko, Bather, 1912.

© Museum Rietberg, Zurich / photo Rainer Wolfsberger.

Archipenko also developed the concept of the relief, which he carried out in polychrome constructions that he called sculpto-peintures (sculpto-paintings), fusing painting and sculpture. In Before the Mirror (In the Boudoir) from 1915, he addressed the popular theme of a woman in front of a mirror (fig. 2). The sculpto-painting is made of several materials, including sheet metal and patterned paper, which are mounted and collaged on a wooden panel and painted polychrome. Like a painting, the work is intended to be seen from a frontal perspective and to be hung on a wall. The interplay of two-dimensional painting and three-dimensional forms, as well as the choice of bright colors and the play with reflection and light (including painted shadows), create strong optical effects. Adding to the works’ illusionistic character, Archipenko inserted a photograph of himself (in a painted picture frame), a visual signature and witty reference to his presence. Further, by blending the real and the represented, the artist references Orthodox icons.7 This reference is echoed in the formal elements of the sculpto-painting—its spatial organization, relief character, and polychromy. Icons were common examples of artworks that combined a colorful pictorial surface with a metal relief, often set with objects such as semiprecious stones and other kinds of ornamentation. Archipenko was familiar with icons; among the few objects that he had brought from Ukraine to Paris (and then to the United States) was an icon that he had carved and painted in 1907.8 Indeed, his grandfather was an icon painter.9 Thus, Archipenko introduced his Eastern European cultural heritage of religious symbolism, archaic forms, and folklore, and interlinked it with locally adopted traditions that also embraced non-Western art.10

2. Alexander Archipenko, Before the Mirror (In the Boudoir), 1915.

Juggling multiple languages and cultural frameworks

Language is often a perennial barrier to comfortable emigration. When Archipenko grew up in Kyiv, it was part of the Russian Empire and he spoke only Russian.11 After his arrival in Paris, he first connected with other Russian-speaking émigrés and relied on common experience and shared language. He also associated with the Circle of Ukrainians in Paris,12 and was in contact with other Eastern Europeans, including at the artist colony La Ruche. A few years later in Berlin, he joined Hromada, another organization founded by Ukrainian emigrants. In the Parisian milieu (and again later in Berlin), he became an important figure for Russian-speaking émigrés. He was considered an insider of the modern art scene, writing, for example, a review of the Salon des Indépendants for the Russian-language newspaper Parizskij Vestnik in 1911,13 and establishing his studio and art school as important meeting places for artists in Paris and international visitors.

Others identified Archipenko as Russian and included him among the artists of the Russian avant-garde. The term “Russian” was used fluidly in a variety of definitions (such as Russian as a nationality, a language, or a citizenship). In the context of art and in its contemporaneous application, “Russian” often encompassed the meaning of modern, innovative, and revolutionary.14 Archipenko himself chose to exhibit under the Russian label, for example in 1920, in a major solo exhibition within the Russian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale; and two years later, when he participated in The First Russian Art Exhibition in Berlin. The current art historical discourse and framework, differentiating between Ukrainian and Russian, is a fairly recent development.15

When Archipenko relocated to Berlin, he was able to build on his established reputation as a leading artist; he had already been exhibiting in Germany since 1912, and was working with Herwarth Walden (1878–1941) and Der Sturm, who often featured him in exhibitions and publications. In the German capital, Archipenko became an important facilitator in cross-cultural exchange. While Der Sturm functioned as a juncture between West and East, artists and other figures of the Central European avant-gardes attached themselves in particular to Archipenko, who, for his part, built new ties and formed friendships with their influential representatives. These included: László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), then a Berlin correspondent for the Hungarian magazine MA (Today); Karel Teige (1900–1951), the theoretical leader of the art group Devêtsil in Prague; and Ljubomir Micic´ (1895–1971), the editor of the journal Zenit in Yugoslavia. They shared common interests in art and philosophy, and were actively engaged in promulgating modern art. Working on behalf of the Section d’Or, Archipenko was also in contact with Katherine Dreier (1877–1952) in New York, and with a diverse group of artists such as Marthe Donas (1885–1967), Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931), several of the Italian Futurists, and artists active in the Dada movement. It is not surprising that Archipenko’s Berlin art school became an international hub. A photograph from this time shows the artist among a class of about twenty students (fig. 3), several of whom can be identified as artists from present-day Ukraine, including, in the last row, Alfred Aberdam (1894–1963) and Zygmunt Menkes (1896–1986), both from Lviv, as well as Joachim Weingart (1895–1942) from Drohobych.

3. Archipenko Art School, Berlin, c. 1922.

Courtesy The Archipenko Foundation.

In the early 1920s, Archipenko was juggling not only several languages, but also multiple cultural frameworks, and he was part of overlapping creative networks that were characterized by extraordinary mobility. While he was often identified as a Russian artist, in 1923, the Soviet authorities promoted a policy of Ukrainization,16 allowing a revival of Ukrainian literature and the use of the Ukrainian language. In 1923, Archipenko’s monograph, authored by the German art historian Hans Hildebrandt (1878–1957), was issued by the émigré publishing house Ukrainske Slowo (Ukrainian Word) in five languages: English, French, German, Spanish, and Ukrainian.17 This was not only an important homage to the artist’s international status and growing popularity, it also represented a significant symbolic gesture in support of the Ukrainian community at large. That same year, Angelica and Alexander Archipenko identified as Ukrainian citizens and obtained Ukrainian passports, which they used in their immigration to the United States (fig. 4).

4. Passport of Alexander Archipenko, issued by the Ukrainian Mission, Bern, Switzerland, 1923.

© 2023 Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

From New York: Thoughts about identity

While he lived abroad and exhibited internationally, Archipenko stayed connected with his family and corresponded with them regularly, in particular with his older brother Eugene (1884–1959).18 He wrote in Russian, while Eugene would sometimes write in Ukrainian. From the correspondence, we are able to glimpse the hardship of those first years in New York:

From the letter to Father, you will find out that my business here is really bad and that I am dreaming of returning to Europe, where I have a much greater respect. I regret that my trip to America has turned into a shady enterprise […]. When I return to Europe, I will publish memoirs about my stay in America and you will understand how barbaric this country is.19

His discouragement notwithstanding, Archipenko did not return to Europe, instead persisting in his efforts to find success in his new milieu. In the United States, he questioned the idea that his art could have any national character, explaining: “There is no nationality in my creations. In that respect, I am no more Ukrainian than I am Chinese.”20 He pointed us to the experience of multiple emigrations that had informed his creative identity. Since the French Revolution, nationhood and national identity were understood as being rooted in political and cultural geography.21 In the case of Archipenko, who traveled extensively and juggled multiple frameworks, including Ukrainian, Russian, French, German, and American, this methodology does not fully address the complex processes of self-identification and acculturation.

Connecting with the Ukrainian expatriate community

In the 1930s, Archipenko connected with the Ukrainian expatriate community in North America. Over the next 30 years, they would support him by sponsoring and commissioning artworks. He produced several sculptures dedicated to national poets such as Taras Shevchenko and Ivan Franco, and he engaged in learning Ukrainian. In 1933, Archipenko represented the Ukrainian community in the Ukrainian Pavilion at the Century of Progress International Exhibition during the Chicago World’s Fair. The large pavilion was built as a traditional, colorful wood structure, adorned with blue and golden national flags. Ukraine was then part of the Soviet Union; the pavilion was the only one at the event not sponsored by a government, but instead by the expatriate community. Here, among examples of Ukrainian crafts and folklore, Archipenko was represented prominently with more than forty sculptures, paintings, drawings, and lithographs.

The overall theme of the World’s Fair was technical innovation. Beginning in the mid-1920s, mechanical advances and progress in design and fabrication were celebrated in the United States and were paralleled by the search for new approaches to art. It was fitting then that Archipenko, who considered himself an artist-inventor, participated in the event. Surprisingly though, instead of presenting machine-related art,22 he chose to embrace spirituality and humanity in a new series of sculptures dedicated to the theme of Mâ (fig. 5). Key to understanding the symbolism of these figures is the artist’s short story “Mâ,” reproduced in the exhibition catalogue: This is the story of a man who, having lost himself and his inspiration, employs the help of the superpowers of Mâ to reactivate his creative genius. One wonders if Archipenko did not describe here his own experience of disconnection and loss after emigration, as well as his transcendence thereof. In the artist’s personal life, this experience coincided too with the loss of his parents, and with a separation from and reunion with his wife, Angelica.

5. Alexander Archipenko, Ma Distributing Power, 1933.

For Archipenko, who adopted the female form as the main vehicle for his artistic language, women and their spiritual embodiment as Mâ were fundamental. Moreover, the word “Mâ,” in connection with the image of the two halves of a sphere and an empty space between them, evokes the Japanese concept of “ma” used in art and design to describe negative space.23 Archipenko had explored the void in his sculptural work and thus may have been familiar with this concept.24 Additionally, his visual manifestation of these superhuman figures points not only to Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch, but also to Slavic mythology and concepts of avatars,25 and an interest in Eastern philosophy. To show their appreciation, the Association of American Ukrainians purchased a bronze cast of Ma Mediation in 1932, as a present to the National Museum of Lviv.26

Aiding relief efforts

In the 1930s, Ukraine suffered great hardship in the form of the Holodomor, a famine that killed millions under the Soviet Regime. Concerned with the mass starvation, Archipenko donated The Past, a sculpture from the World’s Fair exhibition, to the Emergency Relief Committee for Starving Ukrainians (under the sponsorship of the Ukrainian National Women’s League of America).27 His donation was a gesture of support for Ukrainians. More significantly though, it represented an important public confirmation of a humanitarian catastrophe that while now considered genocide, was not widely publicized at the time. The topic was taboo and has only been increasingly addressed since 1991, that is, the end of the Soviet Union and Ukraine’s independence.28 Archipenko’s donation, which could be understood as an official witnessing of the tragedy, conveyed invaluable symbolic and moral support.

During times of crisis and war, artists often come to the fore to address the events and to contribute to aid efforts. Perhaps the most notable example is the anti-war painting by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) created in 1937, Guernica. While the painting narrates the cruelty of war, it also raised funds for Spanish war relief and refugees when exhibited during an extensive tour. As we have seen, Archipenko, too, used art to demonstrate solidarity. By the same token, in 1938, on the eve of the outbreak of the Second World War, he began working on Moses Appealing to God (fig. 6). He had heard about the growing Nazi German aggressions and anti-Semitic persecutions, the labeling of “degenerate” art, and the rise of fascism, and was prompted to produce Moses as a symbol of anti-fascism that would benefit artists in need in Germany. With the choice of Moses as subject matter, Archipenko linked contemporaneous politics with history, but also created a paradigm for symbolism. Like Michelangelo in his well-known Moses sculpture, Archipenko too depicted the Old Testament figure holding the Ten Commandments, symbolizing a belief in laws that guide human actions and spirituality. From a clear anti-Nazi perspective, he sent an important signal of solidarity. He noted on a photograph of the work, preserved in his archives: “This 7-foot statue is dedicated to everyone who suffers from injustice and persecution.”

6. Alexander Archipenko working on the model for Moses Appealing to God, 1938.

Courtesy The Archipenko Foundation.

Archipenko developed the sculpture over several months, sketching and painting the idea, and building smaller models of it.29 The final work was conceived as a 2.1-meter-high monument. Photographs illustrate how he built a large wooden armature on which he applied cement-like composite material (fig. 7). He had developed the material especially to keep the tall sculpture light, to facilitate the ease of its transportation. He finished the work by applying a metal spray coating and paint. Today, Moses is obscure, perhaps because the large construction has been destroyed.30 At the time however, Moses was considered sensational. It was sent on an exhibition tour across the United States and received coverage in national media, including Time magazine and Newsweek.

7. Alexander Archipenko working on Moses Appealing to God, 1939.

Courtesy The Archipenko Foundation.

Archipenko understood and valued symbolism. Early in his career, as a student at the Kyiv Art Institute, he had experienced its power, including as a tool for political propaganda: In 1905, he had exhibited a sculpture titled Thinker that sparked a confrontation with the police.31 The artist believed in symbolism and the capacity of art to address humanity. Moses summarized his artistic concerns, from the experimentation with materials to a symbolic and archaic theme, as well as a true belief that art had a function in society. This belief prompted him to become an organizer and jury member of the Artists for Victory exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1942, where Moses and Ma Meditation were also exhibited.32

Searching for the universal in art

During the 1930s and 1940s, Archipenko faced complex realities. He was establishing himself as an artist in the United States, organizing exhibitions with different dealers and curators, including a difficult exchange with Alfred H. Barr Jr. (1902–1981), the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, over the Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition. Archipenko was traveling frequently and relocated from New York to the West Coast in 1935, where he taught at several art schools. In 1938, he reconnected with László Moholy-Nagy who invited him to teach at the Chicago Bauhaus. In addition, he built his summer art school in Woodstock, New York. He created new bodies of work, focusing on terracotta and, after the Second World War, on plexiglass.

During the mid-1930s, intellectually, Archipenko reconnected with philosophies that he had previously encountered in Europe, in particular the writings of French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941). Several unpublished manuscripts from Archipenko’s archives illustrate the extensive research of processes of creativity, inspiration, and artistic genius. He examined these concepts in conjunction with a serious study of sciences, including philosophy, biology (especially botany and zoology), psychology, and astronomy, which he framed as the basis for his art and pedagogy. He began these writings in the early 1940s, when his contemporaries in the United States were engaged in defining a new art and American avant-gardism. In particular, with his personal experience of two wars, Archipenko was looking for an art that was free of political content but had a universal character and a spiritual component.

Throughout his career, the artist employed different solutions to sculptural problems, producing an extensive body of work in an idiosyncratic style that he considered international. While he employed archaic references in his early work, he also reconnected his later works to elements previously developed in the context of Cubism. These works from the 1950s, included eight new sculpto-paintings, incorporating different materials such as mother-of-pearl, Formica, and Bakelite.

In Cleopatra (Repose), from 1957 (fig. 8), a horizontal panel just over two meters long, Archipenko combined carved and painted elements with found objects, forming an abstracted female reclining figure whose partial reflection is shown in a mirror. The sculpto-painting illustrates his continued interest in combining materials and polychrome, fusing two-and three-dimensional elements, and connecting to history and memory. Again, we find references to icons. The work’s subject matter brings to mind familiar images, such as the Rokeby Venus by Diego Velázquez and the Grande odalisque of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres,33 but also representations of Venus and images of a woman in repose in Archipenko’s own oeuvre. He reworked the sculpto-painting from around 1960, changing the mirror and reflection, and adding the eyes, which are reminiscent of the ancient Egyptian Eye of Horus. Cleopatra combines formal language with symbolism and spiritual content in a visual style of the fifties characterized by biomorphic shapes and abstract elements.34

8. Alexander Archipenko, Cleopatra (Repose), 1957.

Courtesy The Archipenko Foundation.

Wood, Bakelite, found objects (jewelry, mirror), and paint, 96.5 × 213.4 cm, private collection, United States.

Memories of Ukraine

In the late 1950s, memories of Ukraine may have been on Archipenko’s mind, as we can see from a handwritten list, from around 1956, in the artist’s archives: Archipenko reviewed biographical events and annotated them with specific references to his birth country such as the Carpathian Mountains and the Dnieper. He was planning a film that he hoped could be sponsored by the Ukrainian community. Aware of the support mechanisms for British sculptor Henry Moore (1898–1986), he was hoping for something similar to secure his own legacy. While the artist’s film was not realized, in 1960, he self-published a monograph, Fifty Creative Years: 1908–1958. He edited the book with the help of Frances Archipenko Gray (b. 1936), a former student, whom he married that year.35 The monograph, with an introduction by Ukrainian-born iconographer Sviatoslav Hordinsky (1906–1993), includes Archipenko’s writings about philosophy, art, and creativity, and almost three hundred illustrations, many in color. Archipenko was celebrated too in several large retrospective exhibitions that toured in Germany and Italy, from 1955 until 1963. While he traveled to Western Europe for these events, and was able to reunite with his older brother Eugene in Germany, he never returned to Ukraine.

Archipenko, who experienced political oppression, two world wars, the Great Depression, and numerous personal and professional challenges, continued to believe in art as a foundational element of society and humanity. He suggests that art is “useful and indispensable for cultural progress in general and especially for our confused civilization,” and notes that the urge to create “can be directed for the better destiny of mankind towards a happy existence and progress instead of holding millions of innocents under constant fear of being exterminated in the destructive chaos.”36 Archipenko moved through diverse art world communities that shaped the fabric of modernism and shared his ideological beliefs in creativity, in the spiritual in art, in innovation, and in educating the younger generation. For him, transformation equaled progress. In this process he recognized a freedom, the freedom of creating.