An Illustrious Unknown

"I have made an experiment," wrote a French infantry sergeant from the trenches of World War I. "Two days ago I pinched from an enemy a Mauser rifle. Its unwieldy shape swamped me with a powerful image of brutality. I broke the butt off, and with my knife I carved a gentler order of feeling, a mother and child." A few days later, on the afternoon of June 5, 1915, an other German weapon put a bullet through the Frenchman's head. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, not yet 24, was dead.

Until the 50th anniversary of his death last month, Sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska (pronounced Zshairsh-ka) was what the French call "an illustrious unknown." His few working years had been spent mostly in London; his works were rarely shown outside that city. Yet his reputation flourished underground, especially among young sculptors. Ossip Zadkine hailed Gaudier as "one of the men who really invented something in sculpture." British Sculptor Henry Moore names Gaudier, along with Epstein and Brancusi, as among his formative influences: "He made me feel certain that in seeking to create along paths other than those of traditional sculpture, it was possible to achieve beauty, since he had succeeded." Thus it was that an anonymous British collector, eager that the French should know Gaudier's work, recently gave more than 50 sculptures and sketches to Paris' Musee d'Art Moderne, which in turn has opened a permanent Gaudier room.

Three-Way Love Affair. Born in the Loire Valley near Orleans, Gaudier was a descendant of masons and stone carvers who had worked on the Chartres Cathedral. He began drawing in early childhood, did so brilliantly that at 14 he won a scholarship to London. Two years later, he won a second scholarship, this time to Bristol College, with funds to study art in Germany. All the while he sketched feverishly, often with a pen, explaining, "That prevents me from getting sentimental in the lines." Traveling through the Lowlands to Munich, he sold sketches "in the manner of Rembrandt." When the money ran out, he returned to Paris. There he made his most important decision: to be a sculptor. There, too, he met the woman with whom he was to share the rest of his brief life--a Polish-born poetess 20 years his senior named Sophie Brzeska.

Adding her name to his own, he set up an odd menage `a deux, often passing Sophie off as his sister. She was an extremely neurotic woman who had had bouts with mental illness; he was an intense young man embarking on a career. But they shared an interest in Henri's future, and "it was a three-way love affair--he, she, sculpture." Said Gaudier at the time: "The chisel and the thumb are the most beautiful instruments." Returning to London, they fell in with the literary group that included Journalists Frank Harris and Wyndham Lewis, Authors Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry (who later wrote that Gaudier and D. H. Lawrence were the only two geniuses he ever met). The figure that probably impressed young Gaudier most was Poet Ezra Pound. When Gaudier, too poor to buy materials, was reduced to picking up scraps left over from some grandiose tombstone, Pound bought him his first good-sized stone, and Gaudier carved a portrait bust of the poet. Said Pound of the sternly chiseled results, which today stand on his estate in the Italian Tyrol, "Mon pauvre caractere, the good Gaudier stiffened it up quite a lot. We joked of the time when I should sell it to the Metropolitan for $5,000." Shortly thereafter, the young Frenchman went off to war, never to return.

Passionate Predilections. There remained only a few dozen sculptures, a pile of sketches and drawings, lucid letters and articulate writings on art for the literary periodicals Blast and The Egoist. But as the Paris exhibition shows, Gaudier traveled a remarkable road in the brief span of less than two years. At first strongly influenced by Rodin, he developed a passion for the primitives and a feeling for the flowing figuration of Maillol, which is exquisitely realized in his marble Maternite, went on to experiment with cubist and abstract approaches, and ended with totally original avant-garde works. His stones, though small are yet monumental, none more so than the smooth white marble Femme Assise. One of his finest pieces, it bears all the impressions of his predilections; at once powerful and gentle, it is a work startlingly modern--and strikingly his own. Says Musee Curator Marguerite Menier, "Any sculptor who can do that at the age of 23 is a genius."

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