The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (22 page)

(1887–1964).
Russian-born sculptor who took American nationality in 1928. In 1908 he moved from his native Kiev to Paris and played a part in the development of the
Cubist
movement. In sculptures such as
Walking Woman
(Denver Art Mus., 1912), he analysed the human figure into geometrical forms and opened parts of it up with holes and concavities to create a contrast of solid and void, issuing in a new idiom in modern sculpture. He had a one-man exhibition at the
Sturm
Gallery, Berlin, in 1913, and he taught in that city between 1921 and 1923, when he settled in the USA. He taught in various places, but principally in New York, where he opened his own school of sculpture in 1939. Archipenko pursued an independent course, and was inventive in technique. He created sculpto-painting, in which forms project from and develop a painted background, and he was a pioneer in the revival of
polychromy
in sculpture. In 1924 he invented the
Archipentura
, an attempt to make movable paintings, and from
c.
1946 he experimented with ‘light’ sculpture, making structures of Plexiglas lit from within. Archipenko had a considerable influence on the course of sculpture both in Europe and in America, particularly in the use of new materials and in pointing a course away from the sculpture of solid form towards one of space and light.

 
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(1527–93).
Milanese painter, famous for his
grotesque
symbolical compositions of fruits or animals, landscapes or implements arranged into human forms. He began his career as a designer of stained-glass windows for Milan Cathedral, but from 1562 to 1587 he worked successively for the emperors Ferdinand I, Maximilian II, and Rudolf II, first in Vienna and then in Prague. A typical work is
Rudolph II as Vertumnus
(National-museum, Stockholm), showing the emperor as the Roman god of orchards, his head composed of fruit, flowers, and so on. Arcimboldo returned to Milan in 1587. His paintings, though much imitated, were generally regarded as curiosities in very poor taste until the
Surrealists
revived interest in ‘visual punning’.

 
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(1928– ).
French-born artist who became an American citizen in 1972. In 1957, with his friend Yves
Klein
, he decided to be known by his first name only, and the form ‘Arman’ was adopted in 1958 as a result of a printer's error on the cover of a catalogue. He moved to New York in 1963. Arman is best known for his assemblages of junk material, ranging from modest collections of household debris (
Accumulation of Sliced Teapots
, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1964) to towers of crushed automobiles encased in concrete.

 
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armature
.

A framework or skeleton round which a figure of clay, plaster, or other similar material can be modelled. The term is also applied to the iron framework of
stained-glass
windows.

 
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(1916– ).
British sculptor. He first exhibited in 1952, and very rapidly established an international reputation. His characteristic work began in the mid 1940s, when he destroyed his pre-war carvings and began to model in plaster round an
armature
. Though not naturalistic, his sculpture was figurative and humanistic, capturing typical gesture and attitude, as for example in
People in the Wind
(Tate, London, 1951). At the same time all his work gave great prominence to the qualities of the material—usually at this period bronze—in which the sculptures were cast. From the mid 1950s his figures became more impersonal in character and often larger in scale, and a new phase began in 1969, when he began to combine sculpture and drawing in figures of wood, plaster, and paper. In the 1970s he returned to bronze and began to explore non-human subject-matter.

 
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