Henri GAUDIER-BRZESKA

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was a hugely prolific draughtsman. As the artist’s friend and biographer Horace Brodzky wrote, ‘In his short working life as a sculptor, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska produced a great many drawings; in pastel, charcoal, wash and ink. In fact he exploited all the media available to an industrious draughtsman, but the great bulk of this work is either charcoal or ink. His pastels, very few in number, were usually done in strongly contrasted positive colours, something no doubt evolved from Gauguin, from ‘Les Fauves’ and the Cubists of Paris…In his charcoal drawings of the human figure, mostly made at an art class, he resorts to the simple flat planes introduced by the Cubists. These studies have a chopped-out wooden effect, very fashionable in 1912.’ The same author further noted of Gaudier-Brzeska that ‘As a draughtsman…he will remain among the élite, for his sinuous and vital contour. For as a draughtsman he was fully developed, but to reach his full stature as a stone-carver required more years than Brzeska was allowed to live.’

Two closely comparable watercolour and chalk studies of male nude torsos, both likely drawn in 1913 and of similar dimensions to the present sheet as well as sharing some of the same provenance, appeared on the London art market in 1984 and 2002. A study of a male torso drawn in red ink and black chalk, in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Orléans, may also be likened to the present sheet. In its powerful modelling, this drawing also bears a noticeable resemblance to a full-face Self-Portrait drawn in pencil, dated 1912, in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London.

The quick, caricature-like sketch of a man wearing a tricorne hat, at the lower left of the present sheet, is typical of Gaudier-Brzeska’s line drawings.

The present sheet once belonged to the English artist, theatre designer and writer Claud Lovat Fraser (1890-1921), a friend of Gaudier-Brzeska, to whom he had been introduced by the art critic Haldane MacFall. As Brodzky recalled, ‘Brzeska at this time saw quite a lot of Lovat Fraser, who had a studio in South Kensington, and showed a number of small pieces at Fraser’s studio when the latter held a one-man show of his pictures. Lovat Fraser and Brzeska at this time were much together and were often in each other’s studios… Brzeska was always busy; if not for himself, then for others. He found time to decorate Fraser’s studio, painting the staircase and other woodwork in primitive colours.’ Lovat Fraser acquired several drawings from Gaudier-Brzeska; one of these, a head of a Japanese woman in coloured chalks, is today in the British Museum.