New Rhythms: Henri Gaudier Brzeska: Art, Dance, and Movement in London, 1911–15 ed. by Jennifer Powell (review)
- New Rhythms: Henri Gaudier Brzeska: Art, Dance, and Movement in London, 1911–15 ed. by Jennifer Powell
(Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard, 2015), 126 pp.
It is hard to believe that the remarkable French sculptor Henri Gaudier was only twenty-three when, in the first year of World War I, he was killed in action at Neuville-Saint-Vaast, France. Between 1911, when he moved to London with his Polish sweetheart, Sophie Brzeska (whose surname he added to his own), and his death in June 1915, he produced the range of brilliant semiabstract sculptures first singled out by his friend Ezra Pound, who claimed Gaudier for his own Vorticist movement and wrote the striking memoir Gaudier Brzeska (1918), a key statement of Pound’s own avant-garde poetics. Fortunately, a fellow infantryman at the [End Page 313] Front, H. S. (“Jim”) Ede, who inherited the Gaudier-Brzeska estate and placed a number of the sculptures at the Tate Gallery, gave the bulk of his own collection, housed at Kettle’s Yard, his Cambridge home, to the university. In honor of the centenary of Gaudier-Brzeska’s death, Kettle’s Yard mounted a delightful exhibition of his sculptures and drawings under the rubric “New Rhythms,” which refers to the relation of Gaudier’s sculpture not only to dance but also to wrestling, a keen interest of the sculptor’s, allowing him to study the human body in motion. The thematic rubric is slightly arbitrary—many of the same sculptures (for instance, Red Stone Dancer of 1913–14) have been shown over the years at exhibitions of Cubist or primitivist or early abstract art—but curator Jennifer Powell shows that such early works as the still semirealistic Firebird were surely influenced by the Diaghilev Ballets Russes, which was the rage at Covent Garden in 1912. Powell’s essay, along with Sarah Victoria Turner’s on Gaudier-Brzeska’s Wrestlers and Doina Lemny’s on the relation of Gaudier’s work to the choreography of Loie Fuller and Isadora Duncan, provides much new information, but the real pleasure of this catalog lies in the truly gorgeous plates and figures, especially of such drawings as a green wash sketch for the Red Stone Dancer and a black-and-white linocut of The Wrestlers, both of which can hold their own very well with, say, the drawings of Matisse. Gaudier was not only a boy wonder; he was one of a handful of great modernist sculptors.
Marjorie Perloff, Sadie Dernham Patek Professor emerita of the humanities at Stanford University, is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former president of the Modern Language Association. Her book Differentials received the Robert Penn Warren Prize for Literary Criticism, and she is also the author of Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire; The Vienna Paradox; Wittgenstein’s Ladder; Unoriginal Genius; Radical Artifice; The Futurist Moment; The Dance of the Intellect; The Poetics of Indeterminacy; Poetry on and off the Page; and Twenty-First Century Modernism.
