Alexander ArchipenkoStill Life – Stilleben. 1922.

Original lithograph in black ink. 1922. Signed in pencil. From the issued edition of 100 on cream wove paper. (There were also 25 deluxe impressions on Japan paper. Total edition of 125). Issued in the portfolio ‘Die Schaffenden – The Creators’. With the publication drystamp upper left. Published by Gustav Kiepenheuer, Weimar, 1919-22.

Reference: Karshan – Archipenko The Graphic Art no 28.

Provenance: Private Collection, Germany.

Superb impression with very strong black tonality. Worked to the full sheet size, as printed and issued. Sheet: 305 x 405mm.

Archipenko was one of the greatest artists of Cubism.  Born in Kyiv the Ukraine he went to Paris in 1908. By 1910 he was exhibiting in the Salon des Indépendants alongside Malevich, Derain and Braque with increasingly cubist forms. In a 1914 photograph of the Salon his sculptures are a fully developed cubist expression. Over the following years, alongside Braque and Picasso, in painting and in graphic media, he continued to re-define his ideas of form and space.

This ‘Still Life’ composition dates from his important period at the beginning of the 1920’s. He was then continuing to develop his Cubist concepts but also to combine this with a use of arrangements of the shapes of everyday objects, a central idea of ‘Synthetic Cubism’ both in France and in Germany. It is one of only two works in lithography from 1921-22 in which these ideas are fully developed.