Author(s): Paul O'Keeffe

Biography/Memoir

'Gaudier was the most absolute case of genius I've ever run into, and they killed off an awful lot of sculpture when they shot him' Ezra Pound The death of the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska on the Western Front in 1915 aged twenty-three turned him into a legend. Like John Keats or Rupert Brooke he epitomizes youthful brilliance prematurely extinguished. Gaudier was one of the leading figures of early Modernism, a founder of the Vorticist movement, and part of the circle of artists and writers in Edwardian London that included Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, T. E. Hulme, Jacob Epstein and Edward Wadsworth. When barely an adult, he exchanged a life in rural France and a career in commerce for a series of squalid flats in metropolitan Paris and London. Conventional values, regular meals, conformist manners and personal hygiene were thrown out of his studios with the remnants of representational sculpture and drawing. He was uncompromising in his devotion both to his art and to the Polish woman who shared his life