Dog (Dachshund), conceived in 1914
Born in 1891 in France, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was a leading light in the Vorticist movement. A friend of T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound and Jacob Epstein, he was continually encouraged to simplify form while honing an ever-stronger sense of geometry in his sculpture.
Gaudier-Brzeska moved to London in 1911 with very little knowledge of his contemporaries and their art, accompanied by Sophie Brzeska, with whom he had a tumultuous personal relationship, and whose surname he added to his own. Gaudier-Brzeska had very little money at the time, and benefitted from the generous patronage of Pound who bought his carvings and commissioned a portrait sculpted from a specially sourced block of marble. Gaudier-Brzeska remained invested in the figurative tradition and some of his best works show an intriguing tension between the mechanical and the organic. The artist was killed in action not long after enlisting in the French army during the First World War.