This drawing is related to Head of a Young Man, sandstone sculpted in 1912. Henri Gaudier was born at St Jean de Braye, Loiret in France. In June 1906 he won a travelling scholarship to visit London for two months and a second one in July 1907 to study English business methods at Bristol. In 1909 he won a further bursary to Germany in Nurnberg to study business methods and he stayed with Dr Uhlemayr. On his return to Paris the following year, Henri made up his mind to pursue his career as an artist in spite of his parents’ wishes and his training as a commercial businessman. In January 1910 Henri met Sophie Brzeska, a Polish woman 20 years his senior, while studying at the St Genevieve Library in France. By the beginning of 1911 they had settled in London and although they never married, Henri decided to adopt her last surname thereby becoming Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Henri studied ancient and modern art and spent much time in museums and libraries, as well as in parks and zoos. Apart from his favourite masters, Michelangelo and Rodin, which he copied while at the British Museum, he held a deep fascination for animals and devoted his time to making hundreds of sketches. He analyzed their anatomy, learnt about animal morphology, and studied the structural dynamics of their bodies. It was a passion which he translated into a three dimensional language. Correspondence between Dr Uhlemayr in May 1910 reveals his adamant decision to devote himself to the plastic: I am not going to do any more colour work but will restrict myself entirely to the plastic. I have never been able to see colour detached from form, and this year, after doing a few studies in painting, I noticed that the drawing and the modelling were all I have been concerned with... You will have noticed that civilizations begin with sculpture and end with it... paint sticks well to the hairs of the brush and sings on the canvas, one appreciates its fertile texture, but the sensuous enjoyment is far greater when the clay slips through your hands, when you can feel how plastic it is, how thick, how well bound together, and when you see it constantly bringing forth.(1) In 1911 London underwent a radical transformation. Political uncertainty and cultural and economic unrest gave way to a general feeling of protest. This protest expressed itself vigorously through artistic and literary forms and according to Herbert Read, it signalled the birth of Modern Art in Britain. Gaudier soon began to exhibit at the Allied Artists Association where he met the young and rebellious members of the Slade School. Later he met Epstein, Wyndham Lewis, T E Hulme, and by 1913 he befriended Ezra Pound, his life-long friend and mentor. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was a lone pioneer in establishing new values to the process of carving. In 1913 he began a gradual process of formal geometric reductions in his work, such as the heads of his friends Horace Brodzky and Alfred Wolmark and by 1914 his style matured and he concentrated on complete and abstracted animal and human figures. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s language must be regarded as one of his most significant contributions to the development of modern Sculpture, an expression of a unique ...perception of energy and power within nature, a motivating force in itself.(2) In Blast, the first issue of the Vorticist revolutionary artistic magazine, edited by Wyndham Lewis, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska stated: Sculptural energy is the mountain Sculptural feeling is the appreciation of masses in relation Sculptural ability is the defining of these masses by planes. 1. Roger Cole, Burning to Speak, Phaidon Press Limited 1978 2. Roger Cole, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Mercury Graphics 1977
Gift from the artist, 1912, to; Major Haldane Macfall, West kensington, London W14
Bradford, Corporation Art Gallery, Cartwright Memorial Hall, 1977, catalogue number 96
John Middleton Murry & Katherine Mansfield, Rythm Magazine, volume II, number 9, St Catherine Press, London, October 1912, illustrated