Totemic Abstraction
Christine Cavallomagno
When I first moved to New York, a friend took me to the Odessa Café on Avenue A in the East Village. At the time, I saw the rundown café through the lens of sardonic hipsterdom–as a self-consciously authentically grubby hangout to wet the palates of bobos searching for a genuine experience. I assumed that "Little Ukraine" was no more than another Little Italy. It was not until recently that I realized that Little Ukraine was different, that Odessa and other cafés like it are the heart of what remains one of the most thriving ethnic communities in Manhattan. And the Ukranian Museum, which was founded in 1976 but recently opened in its new facility on 6th street, is a vital part of this community.
The culmination of ten years of planning and fundraising, the newly built museum, designed by George Sawicki, includes gallery spaces, classrooms, and a research library. The new space not only nurtures the culture of the many Ukrainian-Americans who call the East Village home, but also serves the larger New York arts community, particularly with its inaugural exhibition of one of modernism’s pivotal, but under-acknowledged, artists, Alexander Archipenko.
Though Archipenko’s work can be found in many major collections, he is not usually at the center of dialogue regarding Cubism. This exhibition, curated by Jaroslaw Leshko, gives this oft-overlooked genius a well-deserved place in the spotlight. Archipenko, born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1887, was not merely an innovator of Cubist sculpture. His oeuvre, ranging from paintings to sculpto-paintings to sculpture, is a fossil record of his wide range of experiences and influences that spanned the first half of the 20th century. He studied in Kiev and Moscow before emigrating to Paris in 1908, where he exhibited at the salons. His early iconic works used a variety of materials, incorporating sculptural qualities into his two-dimensional works in the form of three-dimensional abstract paintings.
As his career progressed, he became increasingly liberated in his sculpture, and his freestanding pieces beautifully capture the relationship between solid and void. His obsession with vacuity became evident in Walking, one of his most pioneering works. The concreteness of the bronze wrapped around empty space creates an almost spiritual dualism between body and soul, or presence and absence. Perhaps most striking in the exhibition are Archipenko’s works from the 1940s, specifically Vertical and Ascension. These minimal figurative sculptures of his later career recall Byzantine icons of Ukrainian Orthodoxy. The translucent figures are lit from below, giving an otherworldly feeling in the dimly lit room. There seems to be an appearance of a body within a body. Archipenko continues his treatment of the sublime through his late career with his 1963 work, King Solomon. In it he merely suggests a body and instead conjures up images of power and wisdom through totemic abstraction.
I left the museum feeling rather elated. Archipenko’s work somehow managed to extricate itself for a moment from its rather neglected position in art history: although some of the innovative qualities of his work are lost in our contemporary context, its beauty and weight remains. Looking at the work through present-day eyes, we know what followed; we can see where he would place on the art historical scale. His newness would eventually be made quaint by subsequent movements of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. But by simply looking at the work itself, it’s possible to understand the raw effect of Archipenko’s sensitive treatment of the human form and the honest beauty and authenticity of his work.
