Henri Gaudier-Brzeska: Torpedo Fish

Torpedo Fish by sculptor and artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska will be offered for sale in the Modern and Contemporary Art Sale on 5^th October with an estimate of £18,000-25,000 plus buyer’s premium.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-1915) was born in France, but in 1910 set out to become an artist in London without any formal training. He travelled to England with Sophie Brzeska, a Polish writer he had met when he was eighteen and she was twice his age; he would later take her surname, but the pair never married. In London, he fell in with the Vorticist movement, led by Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, and was also influenced by Jacob Epstein to move away from the highly finished classical style of sculpture to a more earthy, direct form of working that left visible the fingerprint of the artist and his tools. Formative to his work, too, was Cubism, and the non-European visual culture he studied at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum.

Ideologically, Gaudier-Brzeska was fascinated by the natural world and felt alienated from urban culture, although he never strayed from city life. The tension between his desire to represent nature and the driving force of modernity and city life - electricity - as espoused by Vorticism, is reflected in Torpedo Fish. Inspired by an electric ray, which can produce their own electrical discharge, Torpedo Fish or “Ornament torpille bronze cisele” was originally made in 1914 as a cut brass sculpture, as listed in Gaudier-Brzeska’s List of Works that he compiled before leaving to fight in the First World War. He also lists a plaster model of the sculpture. The cut brass version was sold to T.E. Hulme, one of the theorists of Vorticism, and was one of a number of small sculptures he made to amuse close friends and associates that he referred to as ‘toys’.

After Gaudier-Brzeska’s died in the First World War, his estate passed to Sophie Brzeska, much of which in turn was purchased by Harold Stanley ‘Jim’ Ede in the 1920s after Sophie, too, died.  Jim Ede was an art collector, champion of Modern Art and friend of a great many avant-garde artists, whose home and collections now form the museum Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge.

Between 1960 and 1962 Ede commissioned Michael Gillespie, an artist and master bronze caster, to make two casts of Torpedo Fish. The present example was purchased from Ede by Roger Cole in 1962, the other was kept by Ede. In 1968, he commissioned a further nine bronze casts from Gillespie, each numbered on the lower edge. Again, Ede kept two, and the rest were sold to dealers and galleries, and one of which is now held in the Tate.

From the same vendor is “Kitty Smith” or “Kate in the Hall”, a pen and ink drawing by the artist (estimate; £2,000-3,000). As a teenager Gaudier-Brzeska had moved to the South West of England to study English business methods, and stayed with the Smith family in Bristol. Having moved to Cardiff in 1908, on a return visit to the Smiths the following year he drew Kitty in her new best dress and presented her with the picture.

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