Skip to main content
Alexander Archipenko
1887–1964
BirthplaceKiev, Ukraine
Death placeNew York, New York, United States of America
BiographySculptor, printmaker, illustrator, and teacher Alexander Archipenko experimented both with new ways to represent the human form and with innovative materials and techniques. Archipenko was born in the Ukraine, the son of a prominent engineer. During convalescence from a childhood accident, he began to study art. After briefly training in painting and sculpting in Kiev, he moved to Moscow and then to Paris, in 1908. Archipenko's interest in the relationship between art and mathematics dovetailed with emerging artistic movements such as cubism, the representation of forms in terms of their component planes and geometric elements. Abandoning the traditional pedagogy of the École des Beaux-Arts, where he initially enrolled, Archipenko eagerly studied works of ancient and early Gothic (medieval) art in the Louvre museum. He also circulated in the studios of Paris's avant-garde artists, many of whom were experimenting with abstract and non-representational art. Archipenko himself never entirely abandoned the inspiration of the human form in his art.
Archipenko began showing sculpture in independent exhibitions beginning in 1910, and soon his work was seen in international exhibitions, including the important display of European and American modernist art, known as the Armory Show, that opened in New York City in 1913. He constructed forms by combining materials in new ways, reintroduced polychroming (surface painting) of sculpture, and pursued problems of representing voids in three-dimensional terms. Archipenko operated his own art school in Berlin for two years before moving to the United States in 1923. In New York he opened another art school and launched a summer program in the artists' colony of Woodstock, New York. Later he taught in California and in 1937 he moved to Chicago to teach at the new Bauhaus School of Industrial Arts (now Illinois Institute of Technology), a reincarnation of the progressive design school, called the Bauhaus, that had been relocated from Germany after being banned by the Nazi regime. Archipenko's own works in German museums were confiscated as "decadent modern art" in 1939.
Archipenko's prolific activity as a teacher did not sideline his artistic production. His sculpture was featured in numerous exhibitions in the United States and, in the 1950s, in Central and South America and in Germany. In that decade, he returned to printmaking, which he had abandoned in the early 1920s: the two-dimensional surface offered a new vehicle for Archipenko's continuing quest for ways to represent space as well as form. As a sculptor, he continued to innovate with such methods as lighting a sculpture from within and introducing motorized movement to his mixed-media constructions. He also wrote and self-published an autobiography. A large traveling retrospective of Archipenko's drawings, sculptures, and prints opened in Rome, Italy shortly before the artist's death at the age of seventy-six.
Archipenko began showing sculpture in independent exhibitions beginning in 1910, and soon his work was seen in international exhibitions, including the important display of European and American modernist art, known as the Armory Show, that opened in New York City in 1913. He constructed forms by combining materials in new ways, reintroduced polychroming (surface painting) of sculpture, and pursued problems of representing voids in three-dimensional terms. Archipenko operated his own art school in Berlin for two years before moving to the United States in 1923. In New York he opened another art school and launched a summer program in the artists' colony of Woodstock, New York. Later he taught in California and in 1937 he moved to Chicago to teach at the new Bauhaus School of Industrial Arts (now Illinois Institute of Technology), a reincarnation of the progressive design school, called the Bauhaus, that had been relocated from Germany after being banned by the Nazi regime. Archipenko's own works in German museums were confiscated as "decadent modern art" in 1939.
Archipenko's prolific activity as a teacher did not sideline his artistic production. His sculpture was featured in numerous exhibitions in the United States and, in the 1950s, in Central and South America and in Germany. In that decade, he returned to printmaking, which he had abandoned in the early 1920s: the two-dimensional surface offered a new vehicle for Archipenko's continuing quest for ways to represent space as well as form. As a sculptor, he continued to innovate with such methods as lighting a sculpture from within and introducing motorized movement to his mixed-media constructions. He also wrote and self-published an autobiography. A large traveling retrospective of Archipenko's drawings, sculptures, and prints opened in Rome, Italy shortly before the artist's death at the age of seventy-six.