ABSTRACT
Alexander Archipenko was born in Kiev, in the Ukraine, in 1887. Archipenko was one of the first of the many modern sculptors to have found the "key" to their sculptural imagination in the formal syntax of Cubist painting and collage rather than in the established conventions of sculpture itself. Much of the work at the Museum of Modern Art consists of bronze casts that put the Archipenko of the Paris period at a certain distance from our ability to respond to his exact quality. Much of the sculpture of the American period is disfigured by a kind of Gothic-cum-Art Nouveau streamlining that is fundamentally at odds with the basic Cubist syntax that is invariably the source of strength in Archipenko's art. As an accompaniment to the show at the Museum of Modern Art, the Danenberg Galleries has mounted an exhibition devoted to "The American Years, 1923-1963."
