Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, French Artist

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891 - 1915), Self-Portrait

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was a French painter and sculptor. He was killed in action in the First World War at the age of 24.

The U.S. poet, Ezra Pound (1885 - 1972) a genius himself, and a man who surrounded himself with geniuses, considered Gaudier-Brzeska the most authentic genius he had ever known. (A brief list of some of the artists Pound knew personally: Stravinsky, George Antheil, Henry James, Ford Maddox Ford, Yeats, Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Brancusi, e.e. cummings, Robert Frost, Wyndam Lewis, Basil Bunting, Louis Zukofsky, Noguchi, etc.)

In a very brief time, killed as young as he was, Gaudier-Brzeska created some of the most remarkable sculpture from the early 20th Century, and his drawings have a spareness and vitality that are extraordinary even among exceptional artists. He was a cubist sculptor and in his drawing very influenced by Chinese and Japanese art.

Most of Gaudier-Brzeska's sculptures are small, they can be held in the hand, because he could not afford blocks of marble. Even so, his few works show astounding talent, and it grieves one to think of what Gaudier-Brzeska might have accomplished. A vast, unprecedented wealth of talent disappeared into the mud and agony of the Great War, and Gaudier-Brzeska is one of the stand-outs of the geniuses lost.

Red Stone Dancer c. 1913

Here is a picture of one of Gaudier-Brzeska's sculptures, Red Stone Dancer from 1913.

Here is a reproduction of his most famous drawing, the magnificent portrait of the young Ezra Pound.

Ezra Pound wrote a memoir of his friend Henri Gaudier-Brzeska that was published in 1916, during the war. The title of Pound's book is  Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir by Ezra Pound. Please click on the link; it will take you to Amazon's page for the New Directions edition of the book. If you click on the image of the book, you can turn virtual pages and you'll see more reproductions of Gaudier-Brzeska's work.

The Tate has a little video of one of Gaudier-Brzeska's notebooks. Beautiful.