Gaudier’s genius

When Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in 1915 while fighting for the French, he was only 24. It’s hard to believe that so young a sculptor could have done as much or left as large an imprint on art history. When Gaudier’s partner, the mercurial Zofia Brzeska, died intestate in 1925, it was indeed fortunate for his posthumous reputation that his entire estate arrived for assessment at the office of Jim Ede, then working at the Tate Gallery. Ede bought most of it himself, and eventually bequeathed it, the rest of his extended collection of Modern British art, and the building which housed it, to the University of Cambridge. This is the museum we know today as Kettle’s Yard, which maintains not only a fascinating permanent collection, but also mounts an ambitious programme of temporary exhibitions. The first in this, the museum’s 50th anniversary year, is dedicated to Gaudier-Brzeska, and to re-establishing him in a European context.

For although he was French, Gaudier lived in London from 1911, and it was there that his youthful genius developed. He associated with the avant-garde writers and artists of the day (the similarly exiled Ezra Pound became an early champion), and was drawn into the Vorticism of Wyndham Lewis. In fact, the title of this excellent exhibition is taken from Gaudier’s own contribution to the first edition of Blast, subtitled the ‘Review of the Great English Vortex’, and the manifesto of the movement. In his statement, which ricochets with upper-case vehemence, Gaudier praises the vortex as energy and lists Epstein, Brancusi, Archipenko, Dunikowski (not exactly well-known today, a Polish sculptor of restrained but expressive modernist tendencies) and Modigliani as the fellow-moderns who will revolutionise three-dimensional art. The exhibition takes that list, excludes Dunikowski —which is a pity, as he’s so unknown here — and adds a few more, interspersing examples of their work with Gaudier’s own.