A well-made young wolf

Published 15 March 2004

Gaudier-Brzeska: an absolute case of genius Paul O'Keeffe Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 336pp, £29 ISBN 0713993278

When Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in the Great War at the age of 23, the loss to modern sculpture seemed incalculable. Back in London, where the young Frenchman had settled in 1911, his many admirers mourned the loss of an astonishingly precocious talent. Just before the war broke out, Gaudier had played a vital role in the birth of vorticism, England's most impressive contribution to the modernist upheaval in early 20th-century Europe. Ezra Pound, his friend, patron and critical champion, quickly wrote an eloquent, heartfelt memoir of the slaughtered sculptor. By 1918 he had decided that Gaudier's death was "the gravest individual loss which the arts have sustained during the war". And the legend of a brilliant young man tragically cut down soon took hold.

Paul O'Keeffe, the author of a well-researched life of Wyndham Lewis, resists the temptation to indulge in myth-making. His style is coolly factual, bordering at times on the clinical. He begins by comparing the action of a stone-carver's tools with the impact of a bullet. And the text concludes with a stark, black-and-white photograph, taken by the author, of Gaudier's glacial gravestone in a French military cemetery.

The son of an angry and violent joiner, Gaudier was intelligent enough to be enrolled as a scholarship candidate at his school in Orleans. He was given government bursaries to study commerce in England, including a two-year sojourn in Bristol. There, at the age of 16, he incessantly drew landscapes, buildings and people in sketchbooks. His command of line was outstanding, and Gaudier continued to draw for the rest of his life. But the urgent need to earn a living prevented him, at this stage, from making much sculpture. In Paris, where he met the neurotic Zofia Brzeska while sketching fellow readers in a library, Gaudier spent his days bookkeeping at an office that he hated.

Zofia agreed to live with him only on condition that they avoid sex. Scarred by previous relationships, and possibly suffering from gonorrhoea, she became a surrogate mother to the excitable adolescent. Gaudier's frustration increased when he tried, unsuccessfully, to sell caricatures to the Paris newspapers. And his disenchantment with France became terminal when Zofia was accused of prostitution by a hysterical man writing anonymously to the public prosecutor at Orleans.

But life in London was no easier. Pretending to landlords that they were brother and sister, the unlikely couple moved from one gruesome set of lodgings to another. He called her "Mamus"; she nicknamed him "pickaninny", or "Pik". For a year he worked full-time as a clerk for a City shipbroker and timber importer. Then, quite suddenly, he made contact with the writer Haldane Macfall, who introduced both Henri and Zofia to artists, dramatists and designers.

Hugely energetic and ambitious, he started modelling portrait busts of his new friends. They were apprentice works, but the emboldened Gaudier soon ensured that he paid a visit to the most exciting young sculptor in London, Jacob Epstein, who had just finished carving his controversial Tomb of Oscar Wilde for the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. And so Gaudier started experimenting with small blocks of stone, pilfered for the purpose. Within an amazingly short time he made a reputation. The London avant-garde was alive with debate about the impact of cubism, expressionism and futurism. Gaudier's fierce intelligence quickly absorbed the new ideas. He introduced himself to Brancusi at an exhibition at the Albert Hall in London, where Gaudier impressed the critics with his own vigorously modelled busts. And there he met Pound, who described him as "a well-made young wolf or some soft-moving, bright-eyed wild thing".

Pound and his equally rebellious ally Wyndham Lewis were impressed by the dynamic, defiantly unwashed and bohemian Frenchman. Having begun as a wildly eclectic sculptor attracted to a bewildering range of styles, Gaudier now concentrated on the lean, hard and audacious form-language favoured by the vorticists. He contributed a typically belligerent manifesto to the movement's eruptive magazine Blast, launched in the summer of 1914. He carved, in his freezing studio under a railway arch in Putney, a severe yet shamelessly phallic bust of Pound. And he modelled the aggressive Bird Swallowing Fish, a bronze masterpiece where the ferocity and stalemate of the Great War were prophesied with uncanny conviction.

When military hostilities broke out, they overshadowed the aesthetic pugnacity of Blast. But Gaudier was not cowed. He could not wait to join the French army and "avenge all the brutalities committed by the Germans against his family in the Franco-Prussian conflict of 1870". Although an early excursion to France was short-lived, the shelling of Rheims Cathedral soon persuaded him to cross the Channel once more. He always proudly claimed that his medieval ancestors had been masons and stone-carvers on Chartres Cathedral, and Ezra Pound described how Gaudier's "disgust with the Boches was too great to let him stay idle". His final departure, attended by Epstein, Lewis and the poet T E Hulme, mortified all his friends.

In the French army, Gaudier's abundant vitality and courage would prove his undoing. Although he found time to compose a short essay for Blast and carve several pieces from enemy rifle butts or soft stone, most of his formidable energy was consumed by active service. He wrote that the unburied German corpses, blackened and rotting, gave him "fine ideas to sculpt war demons in black stone once the fight's over".

But he never had the chance. Although we can only speculate about what Gaudier might have gone on to achieve had he survived, Ezra Pound was undoubtedly right to claim that the Germans "killed off an awful lot of sculpture when they shot him".

Four volumes of Richard Cork's critical writings on modern art were recently published by Yale University Press

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