Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915) 

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was one of the earliest modernist sculptors at work in Britain who espoused direct carving. He moved from his native France in 1908 and was taught to carve marble by some Italians under the arches of Putney Bridge. He was prolific during his short life and produced life drawings with furious and precise invention. His small œuvre of sculpture is stylistically varied. It includes artworks made in an exaggerated mode of naturalism and others with sophisticated, radically simplified forms, which were informed by primitivist aesthetics of the period emergent from a study of non-European collections at the British Museum. The pinnacle of this latter mode is the Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound (1914). Gaudier’s partner was Sophie Brzeska and unusually he assumed her surname. He belonged to various circuits of London’s avant-garde art scene and was friendly with Nina Hamnett, Jacob Epstein and Wyndham Lewis among others.