|
My interest and association
with the work and story of Henri
Gaudier-Brzeska began in 1965 when I
purchased five small Zoo drawings. Over the
years there have been 10 Mercury Gallery
selling exhibitions; loan exhibitions to
British museums, commercial galleries in
Toronto, Edinburgh and Henley, and a Mercury
Gallery exhibition of Gaudier’s Sculpture
and Works on paper at the Chicago Art Expo
in 1993. Further, important works have been
lent to exhibitions at museums in France and
Germany.
In 2005 I was offered some
original manuscript papers written between
1915 and 1918 by Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska.
These were some 50 double-sided sheets
which had lain forgotten
and unpublished. They
included a version of Sophie Brzeska’s
autobiography ‘Matka’; accounts of her
meeting with Henri Gaudier in Paris; of
their life together in France and England
and of the events following his death. She
recounts the ‘troubles’ she had with T. E.
Hulme, Ezra Pound, Robert Bevan and others
trying to agree about the arrangements for
the Memorial exhibition of Gaudier’s work
and she also describes evenings in the
studio with Horace Brodzky. Included are a
group of letters from her to the artist Nina
Hamnett. The original manuscript was
written partly in French and partly in
English and vividly evokes her emotional
state.
This offer of the manuscript
writings resulted in my translating and
publishing these otherwise unedited in 2008
in a limited hand-bound edition of 125
copies. Although she has been frequently
cited elsewhere this is the first time her
actual words have been published. |
