HENRI GAUDIER-BRZESKA LG (1891-1915)

At his death in early June 1915, almost the entire artistic output of Henri Gaudier’s life was transferred to the estate of Sophie Brzeska. The total work comprised about two thousand drawings and some twenty or so sculptures. The output of a lifetime had been condensed to five short years. His death at the age of twenty-four terminated the farther prospect of artistic innovation and enterprise which, at that time, was unequalled anywhere in the world.

How did this arrogant, immature, yet brilliantly talented Frenchman come to capture the centre stage of British sculptural development in such a short time and with such tenacity and originality? Typically, he followed the pattern of other highly gifted, creative men and women by uprooting himself from the security and dominance of home at an early age. As other adolescents like him, he sought the companionship and excitement of exuberant and energetic young people, living a gregarious lifestyle. He thrived on the passion of argument. He relished the uncertainty of the interpretation of new philosophical ideals. Like others of his kind, this feverish activity around a focal point until it was completely exhausted, mastered, was a characteristic of emotional and artistic development; but in contrast, this process, which might take another ten years, with Gaudier took less than one! No sooner had he assimilated the principles and characteristics of one style or fashion, he was eager to move on to the next.

In the first two of these five years he was a frenetic eclectic, then an innovator, originator and creator. Such personalities do not accept limits or standard practices, anything and everything they do is valued and used for what it might be rather than for what it is or should be. Consequently drawing and sculpture in Gaudier’s mind and through his hand was suddenly subjected to exploration and exploitation, subsequently to be represented in entirely new ways.

Unfortunately, an enthusiasm for originality often isolates artists. While Gaudier yearned for the companionship of others, the more intense his exploration of unknown sculptural territories became, the more precarious became his associations. He paid less attention to personal hygiene and more attention to, for example, the fluidity and vigor in a series of twenty rapidly completed line drawings of horseback riders in Regent’s Park. He paid little attention to the necessities of food to maintain daily energy, and having worked a ten-hour office day would, for example, attack huge blocks of stone throughout the night with inadequate tools, in the faltering light from the furnace where he forged his broken chisels.

All such people need some kind of support from others, support which understands the nature of the ‘domain breakthrough’ that is imminent, support which is effective from someone who loves them unconditionally and assures them that they are not mad. What person is better suited to this than someone who is of similar creative temperament, or who is perhaps also mad? Gaudier had such support in the person of Sophie Brzeska. She was creative by temperament, and her subsequent incarceration in a lunatic asylum is certain confirmation of her insanity. She was mad. Gaudier had an ideal partner.
The confused explanations, which describe the relationship between Henri and Sophie, can be attributed in the first instance to Sophie herself. Twice his age, she explained her relationship with him to others variously as sister, lover, mother, wife and even a mon fils adoptif. In many respects, all were true.

Their lives together began by chance when she fled her family in Poland and took up residence in Paris, describing herself as an authoress. She lived on modest savings, and her loneliness and a solitary lifestyle enticed the immature young Frenchman into a web of mistrust, jealousy, fantasy and manic depression. As her son, she loved him and encouraged his every whim, as his lover she enticed and tantalised but yielded little, as his wife she criticised and demanded responsible behaviour, as his mother she verbally chastised him and yet secretly adored him. For his part, she was his sometime friend and lover, his scourge, his model, his confidante. As her moods swung erratically, so his feelings towards her changed. He confided in her, upbraided her, castigated her, left her in isolation without warning or reason, ignored her and disowned her. Their life together was an unpredictable turmoil, the stability of which fluctuated around her meager allowances, enhanced by begging, his paltry income, the squalid living conditions they shared, his parent's rejection of any possible relationship between them believing her to be ‘a woman of easy virtue’, and Henri’s obsession with his real work, that of becoming and being a great artist.

Gaudier’s life with Sophie was engulfed in one long and continuous struggle. He almost seemed to expect, and may, paradoxically, have even gained sustenance from challenging Sophie’s moods, fetishes and tantrums. It was good preparation for the challenges he soon encountered with the critics who protected traditional values in art. He defied them all in speeches and writings and as a leading exponent of the Vorticist Movement he publicly challenged the futurist outbursts of Marinetti. His most controversial writing appeared in Wyndham Lewis’ short-lived magazine Blast, volumes 1 and 2, where his ideals and beliefs shook the foundations of the ‘accepted faith’, and laid a platform for less avant-garde ideas to become readily acceptable.

Since his death, the letters between Sophie and Henri have been edited to present a particular interpretation of their relationship. But we know little, from any publication, of his childhood sweetheart, Kitty Smith, to whom Gaudier wrote throughout his life, and all the more regularly when Sophie was being particularly obtuse and spiteful. On these occasions, by agreed separation, she left him in London to live in the country. Without her, once his life had quietened down, his thoughts always returned to Kitty. His letters to her were lucid, caring and sensitive and ignored the difficulties, which surrounded him. Equally, letters to his parents and sisters were reflective and modest and concealed the poverty, anguish and turmoil of his daily life.

Sophie’s distress and guilt at Henri’s death were recorded in hundreds of pages of closely written, almost unintelligible scrawl. She was so distraught and overcome that her already unbalanced mind was tipped into insanity, an illness for which there was no cure. Her writings reveal the deterioration of her reason until her recorded marks are no longer a decipherable language.

Henri Gaudier can hardly have set out in life with the expectation of such encounters. His father and mother nurtured a quite normal son in a generous working class home at St. Jean de Braye, near Orléans, in France. The young Gaudier was academically outstanding at school, and in his spare time was fascinated by nature, and drew and sketched animals, birds and insects in the surrounding countryside. The drawings were untutored, and life at school directed his attention instead to two academic awards to study languages and commerce abroad. It was not until August 1907, at the age of 16 that Gaudier began to draw seriously, filling sketch and note books with copious observations and drawings. Of his own volition he began to occupy every spare moment of his time studying some aspect of art.

The first scholarship he won brought him to Bristol in 1908. Additional to his studying, Bristol, with its museums, churches and streets provided a focus for his real enthusiasm for recording every aspect of the world around him. He even ventured into the surrounding countryside and developed landscape studies reminiscent of home.

His architectural drawings were tightly accurate, with traditional shading and cross-hatching to describe the depth of the subject and give it form. His drawing was still self-taught and only an adjunct to his main activities, which were to study English and Commerce to a high enough level to qualify for employment as an accounting clerk. He succeeded. His move late in 1909 to Cardiff to employment in the docks provided not only commercial experience, but also new images from his office window.

By the time he arrived in London, Gaudier had filled some twenty notebooks and sketchbooks with observations of the places where he had lived and worked, together with the records of his travels while studying in Germany. In spite of the hardships he encountered, the quantity, size and scale of the drawings increased. He attempted very large cartoons and poster designs, none of which were commercially successful. He studied in museums and galleries at the weekends, avidly assimilating every style and mannerism he encountered. He studied in public libraries, and in letters home he enthused about the characteristics of drawings by artists as dissimilar as Ruskin and Michelangelo.

Most aspiring young artists at the age of twenty have professional teaching and guidance in order to shape their development. Gaudier had only that which he acquired for himself, which makes the rapid development of his artistic skills the more remarkable.

It was during 1910 that Gaudier came to the idea that he wanted to be an artist rather than an office clerk. The conflict this exacerbated in his relationship with Sophie was torturous. Trying to earn his living while spending every spare moment and all his meager income on his drawings and studying brought about a traumatic separation from Sophie, his physical collapse with anemia and a recommendation from his doctor that he stop all work for at least two months. Henri heeded the advice for three or four weeks but could stand the inactivity no longer, and in December 1910, as the first Post Impressionist Exhibition was being launched in London, he became reunited with Sophie.

With no paid employment, having given up his job, Gaudier, stimulated by the excitement of London life, drew everything he saw in the streets all day, and then expected Sophie to pose for him in their squalid accommodation at night. In the parks and bars he did portraits of customers for a penny while Sophie begged. The accuracy of observation needed to complete quick sketches rapidly developed a caricaturist style with an economy of line and certainty of shape and form. Together with his continuing studies of Michelangelo’s figures and the composition and arrangement of his detailed studies of anatomy, Gaudier’s technique of drawing noticeably changed. Almost despite his circumstances, he seemed drawn by a relentless determination to discover new and unexplored aspects of art, and by March 1911, having found employment as a translating clerk and correspondent in three languages; he decided to become a sculptor as well! “I long to make a statue of a single body”. As with many of the seemingly irrational decisions Gaudier made, he had only just overcome one problem in his life when he now charged himself with another apparently unattainable goal.

Further study took him in new directions, he read and studied Rodin and became fascinated in the sculptures and carvings he found in museums. Simultaneously, his figure drawings began to change and the cross-hatching of the earlier drawings reappeared in a looser style this time in an attempt to describe the form and structure of figures. These drawings explore the relationship of the complexity of forms with apparent ease and confidence. Sometimes a suite of drawings of one figure will come together and only then can it be seen how reliable his interpretation of the structure of the figure was. Whilst a series of six or ten drawings is similar, they develop attention to particular arrangements of form and line by reducing the figure to semi abstract shapes, anticipating the work, which was soon to follow.

By the end of 1912, Gaudier had found a drawing style which enabled him to work out three-dimensional ideas in a two dimensional manner. The drawings from the 1912 period show a mature confidence, which is quite remarkable. Founded on the early architectural studies Gaudier developed a visual repertoire during 1913, which enabled him to describe people within a city landscape with the precision and economy of line of a master draughtsman. The best of these drawings capture the essence of the subject by identifying the essential characteristics of a figure or a group of figures either at rest or going about their daily business. Frequently, the subject is captured ‘in a moment’ and his keenly attuned eye was sensitive to particular details and nuances, which distinguished one movement, gesture or posture from another. When there were no suitable subjects around him, he drew Sophie in varying attitudes of dress, undress, activity and rest in their inadequate rented rooms.

He had also transformed his observation skills of people to the study of birds and animals, and over the next years these studies were to be a continuing source of inspiration, enjoyment, relaxation and exhilaration. In a sense, these drawings are a return to the enthusiasms and interests of his childhood and as such were frequently an escape from the rigours of daily life. The crosshatched figure studies complemented by the studies of birds and animals in this more fluid style of 1911/12 mark another stage in Gaudier’s rapid development.

Following this change, the most rapid development in 1912 and 1913 took place, and the drawings became more abstract. In itself this was an extraordinary change, and yet the skills and characteristics on which it depended were all founded in the drawing studies, which had taken place earlier. The abstract work was based upon the human figure portrait heads, birds and animals, and it is unlikely that the growth and rapid development which took place in 1913 and 1914 could have been achieved had it not been for the penetrating studies which took place over the preceding years. The manner of his abstract drawing development is clear to see, for Gaudier is at his best when he brings together diverse experiences from many sources to create unique designs. Some of the abstract and subsequent designs are eclectic as stylised shapes from other cultures are integrated with one design. Naturally enough, in the small quantity of seventy sculptures, which he produced in less than three years, some are more successful than others. The drawings, however, are quite unique, and many are totally original in their concept and execution. Figures, which only a year earlier would have been studied for the line of a hip or directions of an arm are now twisted, bent, exaggerated and distorted to create unique designs. Wrestlers, dancers and reclining figures feature alongside rabbits, birds and fish to make individual forms in their own right or combined arrangements, which defy reason.

The sheer ingenuity of invention is breathtaking in its versatility and vigour. No material is excused from being bludgeoned into submission under the artists’ relentless determination to bond design and material in one. The most remarkable insights occur when the final sculptural forms are compared with the drawings, which frequently preceded them. Those in the cubist manner anticipate the cubist form, those, which seek to translate the movement of the figure, seek out the essential characteristics which are then present and sometimes even develop within them the three-dimensional form. There is a synergy between them, which is quite unique.

The most significant drawings and sculptures created by Gaudier at this time were achieved in a totally original way. The hieratic head of Ezra Pound, Stags, Bird Swallowing a Fish, Red Stone Dancer are but four works, the designs of which were originated in the ferment of Gaudier’s youthful exuberance and newly discovered abstract fusion of forms and exist as accomplished works of art which are the achievement of a sophisticated and original artist. But they are more than the achievement of the month in which they were created, for they express everything that Gaudier knew and understood and conjectured about the subject, the antitheses of his entire life's study.

By choosing, in 1915, to return to defend his homeland against the German invasion, Gaudier turned his back on London and left Sophie with his entire creative output for safe keeping. Many young men at that time regarded war and joining up with friends to fight an ‘as yet’ unseen enemy as an act of bravado. Gaudier was moved by a far greater sense of patriotism, but even he can never have anticipated the horrors, which awaited him. Like all parents, his were proud of his love for his country but terrified for his life, and whilst in his letters he was jovial and sometimes cavalier, it was surely the only way he could conceal the squalid slaughter of human life that lay strewn in the fields and woods around him.

As for many young men, promotion was rapid, a sign that the enemy was eliminating men in the officer ranks almost as quickly as they were promoted. From the trenches, in spare moments, he wrote letters and included abstract designs of men at war and the horror of battle that crashed around him. He also completed at least one small carving, but his most important achievement was to write two articles for the new magazine, published in London, called Blast. Faced with the possibility of death at any minute, unfalteringly he asserts that his ideals and principles about sculpture will always remain the same; inspired by the study of the ordinary things around him, but interpreted through the arrangement and juxtaposition of shape, line and surface to create unique abstract forms.

Committed, assertive, resolute to the last, he was shot on 5th June 1915 in an attack on Neuville St. Vaas, and France had lost yet another brilliant young man and Britain a champion.

Without Gaudier, Sophie was virtually alone in London, a foreigner in a country at war. She felt alienated, and blamed herself for his death. To help assuage her guilt, she planned his memorial in an Exhibition, but as the plans progressed, so her mind, constantly blighted by her loss, deteriorated until, by the time of the final acclaim at The Leicester Galleries in 1918, she was almost lunatic. Sadly she represented him at the Exhibition with staring eyes of bewilderment, straggling hair and disheveled clothing, but to those of his friends who had not been destroyed by war, it was a celebration of unsurpassed achievement.

This son of France, who had thrust his arrogant challenges upon English art and who, in so few years, had set so much turmoil in accepted practices had, in fact, changed the course of art history. To speculate as to what might have been had he lived is to ignore what was achieved in so brief a life.

Many who had been his friends, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Horace Brodzsky, Claude Lovat Fraser, Enid Bagnold and T E Hulme would later recount in many ways how they had befriended and helped him. All had been irrevocably influenced as a consequence of his friendship. After his death, the lives of others were to be similarly affected as they discovered his work. Not least amongst these was Henry Moore, who acknowledged the significance of Gaudier’s influence as formative in his own personal development. Another sculptor, Jacob Epstein, who befriended Gaudier, was also influenced by him. They were born in the same year, 1891, and in the year of Gaudier’s Memorial Exhibition, 1918, three years after his death, Epstein wrote that he had now turned his back on his apprenticeship to begin the real work! Henri Gaudier, this exuberant and highly talented young artist, had already made the most of his work, and left an unqualified testimony of his beliefs forever.