Alexander Archipenko (1887-1964)

The Archipenko Foundation will include this bronze in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of sculptures by Alexander Archipenko.

King Solomon was the last sculpture that Archipenko created and was the only one in his oeuvre conceived for a monumental scale. The original version measures 26 inches in height, the intermediate version measures 53 inches and a monumental version (of which only one was realized, circa 1963) measures 673 inches. In his 1967 Art in America article "Retrospective for Archipenko," Frederick Wright described the smaller version: "Archipenko's King Solomon is horned like Moses, spiky, august. One must remind oneself when viewing this small sculpture that its architectonics--Archipenko has fused his Cubist and organic shapes into symbolic architecture--were designed for monumental scale, sixty feet high. The idea of this colossus, seen with its diagonal shafts reflecting the atmosphere as no ancient colossus could, is, perhaps, for the artist's last sculpture, his most fitting legacy" (in Karshan, 1985, op. cit., p. 159).