1891 -1915 · France, London and Vorticist avant-garde

Dazzling line, cut volumes and primitive energy make Henri Gaudier-Brzeska one of the most intense voices of the British avant-garde before 1914.

Henri Gaudier was born near Orléans in 1891. After study stays in England and Germany, he moved to Paris then moved to London in 1911 with Sophie Brzeska, a Polish writer whose name he adopted. Without long academic training, he learned through observation of collections, continuous drawing and direct cutting. London offers him a decisive network: Jacob Epstein, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and the artists associated with Vorticism recognize new energy in his work. Gaudier-Brzeska simplifies the human body and the animal into readable masses, refuses descriptive modeling and seeks the contained force of the material. Stone, bronze, plaster, ink and pencil become the means of the same thought of rhythm. The Wrestlers belong to a series of drawings nourished by the observation of fights in a London club. The two bodies are not described muscle by muscle: they become a mobile architecture made of supports, curves, tensions and counterweights. The void between the figures counts as much as their members. This graphic economy joins Vorticist principles, which want to condense modern speed into a stable and energetic form. When the First World War broke out, Gaudier-Brzeska joined the French army. He continued to draw at the front and received a promotion for bravery. He was killed in Neuville-Saint-Vaast in June 1915, at twenty-three. Despite a career of only a few years, his sculptures and thousands of drawings profoundly influenced modern British sculpture. Their strength comes less from the unfinished than from an exceptional ability to grasp, in a few lines or a few shots, the impulse of a living body. The "Henri Gaudier-Brzeska" selection notably compares Les Lutteurs. His reading favors composition.

Gaudier-Brzeska does not draw the external contour of the movement: he grasps its knot, the support and the thrust until it makes the body a construction of energy.