This late work by Ukrainian-born artist Alexander Archipenko is an exemplary ‘sculpto-painting’, three-dimensional painted reliefs which the artist produced throughout his career. The work reflects his lifelong commitment to investigating the cross-over between painting and sculpture, creating works that combine elements of both mediums. His first experiments into three-dimensional constructions date to the early 1910s, working in Paris alongside the likes of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, as well as pioneers of Cubist sculpture, Henri Laurens and Jacques Lipchitz; Archipenko refined and championed this sculptural technique, arriving at a method of imposing multiple layers of wood or other materials to create his semi-abstract reliefs.

Through its unique form, Objects on a table displays the key tenets of the Cubist idiom, representing an assemblage of objects seen from multiple perspectives simultaneously. Reconfigured into three dimensions, the forms are distorted and almost unrecognisable in relation to their real-world referent: we might deduce a red tray and white plate, an hour-glass or glass goblet, and various forms in green and light brown. The artist allows the grain of the wood to convey the materiality of the table on which the still life is arranged, yet that is where the naturalism of the piece ends. The objects’ colours are bold and flat, and the alternation between concave and convex forms – a signature approach of Archipenko – further complicate the spatial presence of the work.

The importance of this late work is in part due to its reflection of Archipenko’s enduring dedication to the ideas of Cubism and his early breakthroughs in sculpto-painting; Objects on a table was made over 40 years after the first examples of this type of work. Comparable earlier examples include Deux verres sur une table (1919-20, Centre Pompidou, Paris; fig. 1) and Glass on a table (1920, MoMA, New York; fig. 2). Believing that the materials of his original designs would deteriorate over time, the artist also cast certain sculpto-paintings in bronze, including the present work (cast in 1959, collection of the artist’s wife, Frances Archipenko Gray).

Fig. 1 – Alexander Archipenko, Deux verres sur une table, 1919-20, painted papier-mache pasted on wood, 56 x 46 x 4.5 cm. Paris, Centre Pompidou, AM 1428 S.

Fig. 2 – Alexander Archipenko, Glass on a table, 1920, painted wood and plaster, 41 x 33 x 3.2 cm. New York, Museum of Modern Art, 141.1953