Perhaps no sculptor since Rodin has put such a stamp on his time as Archipenko. In the first decade of his career, he developed new laws of modern sculpture and grew up in the history of art as a leader of the artistic revolution, which led to many others.
Sviatoslav Hordynsky, artist, art critic
Oleksandr Archipenko was a world-famous Ukrainian-American sculptor, graphic artist, and one of the founders of Cubism in art.
The artist was born in 1887 in Kyiv to Porfyriy Archipenko, a professor at Kyiv University. Oleksandr was expelled from the Kyiv Art School in 1905 for participating in a student strike. In 1906, he began studying with the artist Serhiy Svitoslavsky, and in the same year, together with Oleksandr Bohomazov, he organized the first exhibition of his works in Kyiv. Later, he continued his studies at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Since 1908, he lived abroad. First, he emigrated to Paris, settled in the artists’ colony “Vulyk (Beehive),” and continued his education at the Paris College of Art (École des Beaux-Arts).
In 1910, he traveled extensively to Italy, Sweden, France, and Germany to exhibit his works. In 1914, he moved to Nice. In 1920, he participated in the Venice Biennale, and in 1921 he opened his school in Berlin. In 1923, Archipenko and his wife Angelika moved to the United States. In New York, he opened his school of Plastic arts. In 1933, he participated in the design of the Ukrainian pavilion at the Century of Progress International exposition in Chicago. He taught at the Chicago Industrial Arts & Design Center and the Kansas City University. The artist died in 1964 in New York. According to his will, Ukrainian music was played during Archipenko’s burial at New York’s Woodlawn Cemetery. The artist became one of the founders of Cubism in sculpture. He also created the “archipeinture,” a device that made plexiglass drawings move (advertising billboards are based on this principle). The artist was first who combined sculpture and painting, volume and flatness, shape and color, so called “sculpture painting”; experimented with “sound sculpture”.
