Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
1891 – 1915

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was born in France in 1891 and killed in action in 1915 at just twenty-three years old. Yet in the three and a half years preceding his departure for the trenches he managed to create a remarkable and innovative body of work.

The son of a French craftsman-carpenter, Gaudier grew up near Orléans. His restless, searching nature led him to London on a travelling scholarship in 1906, followed by study periods in Bristol, Cardiff, Nuremberg, and Munich. In 1911 he returned to London accompanied by the Polish writer Sophie Brzeska, who was twenty years his senior, adding her surname to his own.

His early work was informed by the figurative sculpture of Auguste Rodin, but the early carvings of Jacob Epstein encouraged Gaudier to experiment with abstraction and to draw upon the art of non-Western cultures on view at the British Museum. By 1913 he was part of a progressive circle which included T.E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, and Jacob Epstein, becoming a founder member of the London Group as well as a member of the Vorticists, publishing work in their journal Blast.

Gaudier developed with astonishing rapidity toward a highly personal manner of carving in which shapes are radically simplified, recalling Brancusi. In England, only Epstein was producing sculpture as stylistically advanced. His tragic death came on June 5, 1915, killed by a machine-gun bullet during a charge near La Targette. His friend Ezra Pound declared that “the volume and scope of the work is, for so young a man, wholly amazing.”