Artist of the Day, June 4, 2025: Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, a French artist, and sculptor (#2296)

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891 – 1915) was a French artist and sculptor who developed a rough-hewn, primitive style of direct carving.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska  was born in Saint-Jean-de-Braye near Orléans. In 1910, he moved to London to become an artist, even though he had no formal training. With him came Sophie Brzeska, a Polish writer over twice his age whom he had met at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, and with whom he began an intense relationship, annexing her surname although they never married. 

He resolved reservations by taking up sculpture, having been inspired by his carpenter father. Once in England Gaudier-Brzeska fell in with the Vorticism movement of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, becoming a founding member of the London Group. After coming under the influence of Jacob Epstein in 1912, he began to believe that sculpture should leave behind the highly finished, polished style of ancient Greece and embrace a more earthy direct carving, in which the tool marks are left visible on the final work as a fingerprint of the artist. Abandoning his early fascination for Auguste Rodin, he began to study instead extra-European artworks located in the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. As he was unable to afford the raw materials necessary to attempt projects on the scale of Epstein's Indian and Assyrian influenced pieces, he concentrated initially on miniaturist sculpture genres such as Japanese netsuke before developing an interest in work from West Africa and the Pacific Islands.

Gaudier-Brzeska's drawing style was influenced by the Chinese calligraphy and poetry which he discovered at the "Ezuversity", Ezra Pound's unofficial locus of teaching. Pound's interaction with Ernest Fenollosa's work on the Chinese brought the young sculptor to the galleries of Eastern art, where he studied the ideogram and applied it to his art. Gaudier-Brzeska had the ability to imply, with a few deft strokes, the being of a subject. His drawings also show the influence of Cubism.

At the start of the First World War, Gaudier-Brzeska enlisted with the French army. He appears to have fought with little regard for his own safety, receiving a decoration for bravery before being killed in the trenches at Neuville-St.-Vaast. During his time in the army, he sculpted a figure out of the butt of a rifle taken from a German soldier, "to express a gentler order of feeling". He was killed in action during the war.

Gaudier met Sophie Brzeska, a Polish ex-governess twice his age, when he was only 18. Gaudier was an artist and Brzeska a novelist. Several books about Gaudier's work have been produced, but only the 1931 book Savage Messiah by H. S. Ede (Jim Ede) focuses on the relationship. A 1985 play by Una Flett, entitled Zosienka, explored their relationship and age differences.

Jim Ede bought a sizeable portion of Gaudier-Brzeska's work from Sophie Brzeska's estate after she died intestate. Her estate included numerous letters sent between Henri and Sophie. Ede used these as the basis for his book Savage Messiah on the life and work of Gaudier-Brzeska, which in turn became the basis of Ken Russell's film of the same name. The conclusion of the film peruses many of his sculptures and fully demonstrates what great art he produced in his short lifetime.

Despite the fact that he had only four years to develop his art, Gaudier-Brzeska has had a surprisingly strong influence on 20th-century modernist sculpture in England and France. His work is in the permanent collections at the Tate Gallery, Kettle's Yard, the Princeton University Art Museum, the Harvard Art Museums, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Huntington Library, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Orléans, among others.

© 2025. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Sophie Brzeska's estate or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

Self-portrait, 1909

Standing Female Figure, circa 1910-15

Male Dancing Figure, circa 1910 -15

Torso, 1912

Major R.H. Raymond Smythies, circa 1912

Madonna, circa 1912

L'Oiseau de feu [The Firebird], circa 1912

Head of a Child, circa 1912-13

Crouching Fawn, circa 1913

Horace Brodzky, circa 1913

Maternity, circa 1913

Mermaid, circa 1913

Red stone dancer, circa 1913 2

Red Stone Dancer, circa 1913

Sepulchral Figure, circa 1913

Singer, circa 1913

Sleeping Fawn, circa 1913

Bird Swallowing a Fish, circa 1914

Birds Erect, circa 1914

Boy with a Coney (Boy with a rabbit), circa 1914

Dog, circa 1914

Doorknocker, circa 1914

Fish, circa 1914

Garden Ornament, circa 1914 

Garden Ornament, circa 1914 

Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, circa 1914 

Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, circa 1914

Ornament, circa 1914

Seated Woman, circa 1914

The Imp, circa 1914

Wrestlers, circa 1914

Seated woman