Archipenko, Alexander Porfiryevich

Archipenko, Alexander Porfiryevich (1887-1964), American sculptor of Russian birth. He was born in Kiev and studied at the Kiev Art School and at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He made Paris the centre of his activities from 1908 to 1914; lived in Berlin from 1921 to 1923; and after 1923 made his home in the United States, where he taught and lectured at various colleges and universities. From 1939 to 1955 he ran a private school of fine arts in New York.

In his sculpture, Archipenko was an experimenter and innovator. Deriving abstract forms from the human figure, as in Medrano, (1915, Guggenheim Museum, New York), he produced some of the earliest cubist sculptures. He developed a style that relies for its effect on the emphasis given to concavities and negative spaces, or voids.