Expelled from the Kiev Academy of Fine Arts for criticising the overly academic teaching of its professors, this American of Ukrainian origin settled in Paris in 1908. Quickly disappointed by classical French teaching, he studied the relics in the Louvre on his own. A year later he met Modigliani, Léger, Apollinaire, Cendrars and others at La Ruche. The year 1910 saw his first Cubist exhibition with the Duchamp-Villon brothers, Gleizes, Léger, Le Fauconnier, Metzinger, etc. Then he opened an art school in Paris and participated in the Section d’Or in 1912 along with numbers of other Cubist artists.
The Cubist influence of painters such as Picasso or Braque is visible in his sculptures: like the papier collé techniques that he used, his work adheres itself to the goal of illustrating the interpenetration that exists between painting and sculpture, colour emphasising the difference of material, revolutionising the genre from then on (Medrano II). After all, didn’t Archipenko declare, “My painting and sculpture represent a reciprocal connection between the form and colour. The one stresses or diminishes the other. They are unified or contrasted on the visual and spiritual plan. All depends on the aim sought after”?
Shortly before World War I, he participated in the Armory Show in 1913, and his first independent exhibition opened its doors in Berlin. He spent the conflict years in the South of France, along with Cimiez, Matisse, Foujita, Modigliani, etc. In 1923, he settled down with his wife in New York and established another art school. He founded another art school in 1935 in Los Angeles before teaching at the Bauhaus in Chicago upon the urgent request of Maholy-Nagy. Throughout the United States, land of favourable promise in his imagination, he gave many lectures, and his art was the centre of many exhibitions. His wife died in 1957. His last independent exhibition took place in 1964; he died the same year, immediately after having completed his final sculpture: King Solomon.
His Cubist period, the most fertile and innovative of his career, lasted from 1909 to 1921. Not without a certain amount of elegance, Archipenko knew how to introduce geometry into his sculpture, giving the human figure, his favourite subject, a revolutionary aspect in sculpture. In addition to his geometric tendencies, Archipenko revived, with his Medrano II, polychromic hues in sculpture, forgotten for too long in the mysteries of the Middle Ages. The explosion of the Cubist pictorial surface was redemptive for him, and he devoted himself to giving a rhythm to space. Alternating hollowness and convexity in his work (Marching Soldier), this sculptor of space actually knew how to master emptiness and make the void his matter of predilection, transforming emptiness into figuration.