Torso in Space

In Torso in Space, Alexander Archipenko presents the streamlined essence of a reclining headless and armless female nude superimposed against two less defined shapes that hint at a bed and a shadowy seated figure that, lover-like, seems to lean yearningly toward the nude. These forms float in an atmosphere of mottled blue, denser around the central figure as if suggesting a subtle shadow. Soft shadows following the rounded contours of the nude are networks of fine curving lines, suggestive of hair, that differentiate legs, highlight breasts, and indicate a truncated neck. The economy of Archipenko's nearly abstract forms and the graceful rhythmic balance of his composition combine for a serene meditation on the formal beauty of the female body. The work echoes the classic type of the recumbent nude Venus, Roman goddess of love, as interpreted by painters and sculptors since antiquity.

 Working in Paris early in his career, Archipenko applied to his figurative sculpture the groundbreaking ideas of cubism, an approach to representation in which forms are interpreted in terms of their component masses, planes, and angles. After he immigrated to the United States in 1923, he further developed a distinctive modernist vocabulary that streamlined the nude into a powerful unified form. Although he is known primarily as one of the great sculptors of the twentieth century, Archipenko also made over fifty prints during his career. In a bold and unusual combination of graphic techniques, this print recasts the particular motif of the floating torso that the artist had explored for almost two decades in various media, including bronze and collage. In both two- and three-dimensional interpretations, Archipenko experimented with perceptions of figure and ground relationships and positive and negative spaces, concerns also explored in Milton Avery's similar Night Nude (TF 1996.57), made around the same time.

Figures and Forms: Selections from the Terra Foundation for the Arts, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, May 9–July 9, 2000.

L'Amérique et les Modernes, 1900–1950 (American Moderns, 1900–1950), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, July 25-October 31, 2000. [exh. cat.]

On Process: The American Print, Technique Examined, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, January 13–March 2, 2001.

Terra Collection-in-Residence, Ashmolean Museum of Art & Archaeology, Oxford, United Kingdom, September 15, 2022–September 30, 2026.

Karshan, Donald H. Archipenko: The Sculpture and Graphic Art; Including a Print Catalogue Raisonné. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1975. No. 37, pp. 124–25.

Archipenko: Sculpture, Drawings and Prints, 1908–1963; As Collected, Viewed, and Documented by Donald Karshan. (exh. cat., Norton Center for the Arts, Centre College). Danville, Kentucky: Centre College and Indiana University Press, 1985. No. 85, p. 143.

Cartwright, Derrick R. and Paul J. Karlstrom. American Moderns, 1900–1950. (exh. cat., Musée d'Art Américain Giverny). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 2000. Text pp. 29, 60 (checklist); pl. 2, p. 29 (color). [specific reference to Terra print]

Cartwright, Derrick R. and Paul J. Karlstrom. L'Amérique et les modernes, 1900–1950. (exh. cat., Musée d'Art Américain Giverny). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 2000. Text pp. 29, 60 (checklist); pl. 2, p. 29 (color). [specific reference to Terra print]