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Gaudier-Brzeska: Life and Art. - book reviews
Art Journal, Fall, 1997 by Francine Koslow Miller
When Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-1915) died at age twenty-three in World War I, one of the most promising voices of the European avant-garde was silenced.(1) His early death placed the responsibility of guarding the young French expatriate's legacy on a select group of friends, artists, and scholars who believed in his value as a sculptor and draftsman. As Evelyn Silber aptly states in the introduction to her meticulously detailed and scholarly monograph, Gaudier-Brzeska: Life and Art, "Gaudier-Brzeska's reputation has therefore largely been constructed posthumously through his writings and those of his companion Sophie Brzeska, from the memoirs of his friends and through the labours of artists and art historians working within the variously framed readings of Modernism" (7).
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Ezra Pound, the artist's close friend and supporter, was so devastated by Gaudier-Brzeska's death that some twenty years later he memorialized him in his "Canto XVI," a mourning roster for his friends:
They put him on Hill 70, in a trench dug through corpses With a lot of kids of sixteen, Howling and crying for their mamas, And he sent a chit back to his major: I can hold out for ten minutes With my sergeant and a machine gun. And they rebuked him for levity And Henri Gaudier went to it, and they killed him, And killed a good deal of sculpture, ...(2)
A short life coupled with chronic indigence resulted in a notably small body of sculpture, with many diminutive works modeled from clay or carved from common household plaster. During his entire lifetime, Gaudier-Brzeska only once had a large piece of marble with which to work: the one that became the 1914 Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound. His sculptural production lasted a mere seven years (1908-14), with the majority of works made during the last two. Although no one can estimate what he might have accomplished had he lived longer, Gaudier-Brzeska managed to produce some 120 sculptures (70 extant) and well over 2,000 drawings. According to Silber, Director of Museums and Galleries in Leeds and an expert on Gaudier-Brzeska's colleague, the sculptor Jacob Epstein, "There are more than a dozen sculptures of which each is a quite outstanding example of its kind" (142).
Gaudier-Brzeska: Life and Art, a major addition to scholarship on the artist and his times, features an annotated catalogue raisonne of his recorded sculpture. Although the jacket of this beautiful monograph proudly proclaims it to be "the first major study of his life and work," incorporating the "first catalogue raisonne of his sculpture," neither statement is completely accurate. Already extant major studies of Gaudier-Brzeska include texts by Pound, Harold S. (Jim) Ede (who purchased Sophie Brzeska's estate in 1926), the artist's dear friend Horace Brodzky, and British scholars Mervyn Levy and Roger Cole. By 1916 Pound presented the first practical catalogue to Gaudier-Brzeska's sculpture in Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (London: John Lane). This text, translated into French in 1992 as Henri Gaudier-Brzeska par Ezra Pound (Toulouse: TRISTAM), includes articles by Remy de Gourmont, Mady Menier, and this writer; in addition, it is heavily illustrated with Christian Roger's dramatic photographs of the artist's sculpture. In Burning to Speak: The Life and Art of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (Oxford: Phaidon, 1978), Roger Cole presented the first illustrated catalogue of the sculpture - a major source for Silber's own more extensively researched and lavishly illustrated catalogue. As with the some 2,500 drawings Gaudier-Brzeska left behind, compiling a complete catalogue raisonne of the sculpture is still impossible because of loss, the inaccessibility of works in private collections, and inaccurate record keeping. To date, Silber's catalogue, which establishes a tentative chronology based on the fragmentary documentation available, aims to include all of Gaudier-Brzeska's recorded work with copious notes on the making and posthumous castings of individual sculptures. With descriptions of 115 works, it will doubtless supplant the previous catalogues.
Unique to Silber's monograph are 184 photographs of sculptures by David Finn, the famed photographer of Henry Moore's work. Executed with great attention to detail and sensitivity to light and surface, Finn's color and duotone photographs reveal the beauty of the sculpture from a variety of angles. The result of fifteen years of labor, they are useful study tools far superior to Roger's dark, overly romantic interpretations.
Gaudier-Brzeska: Life and Art is divided into two main sections: "Part One: The Life of Gaudier-Brzeska 1891-1915" and "Part Two: The Art of Gaudier-Brzeska," which includes the catalogue raisonne and an extensive bibliography. Silber's stated purpose was not to write another biography, but "to unravel the facts and re-created legends of Gaudier-Brzeska's life . . . to examine how these stories relate both to prevailing ideas about the artist and the English art world at the beginning of the twentieth century" (8). Extraordinarily thorough accounts of Gaudier-Brzeska's life and artistic milieu are accompanied by archival photographs and fine illustrations of numerous drawings that document the artist's developing ideas and interests. Mostly biographical, the seven chapters that compise part one are largely drawn from Gaudier-Brzeska's letters and Sophie Brzeska's diaries, many of which Jim Ede first translated for his Savage Messiah (London: Heinemann, 1931). Although she is sympathetic to the fascinating romantic details of the artist's too short life, Silber balances each chapter with solid art-historical research without underplaying his personality. The eight chapters that comprise part two, describing various aspects of Gaudier-Brzeska's art, tend to be more speculative and somewhat pedantic. Although baring witness to Silber's vast knowledge of European intellectual and sculptural history, lengthy analyses of works Gaudier-Brzeska may have seen or referenced do little to enhance our appreciation of his actual achievement. Also, much effort is given to scrutinizing Gaudier-Brzeska's aesthetic interest in the philosophy of Henri Bergson. Although letters do document an interest in Bergson and Hippolyte Taine's theories of art, Gaudier-Brzeska was neither a major intellectual, nor a philosopher. He was a rough-hewn, self-taught, and highly intelligent draftsman, sculptor, and critic who made his mark on the English avant-garde in a remarkably short period of time.
