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Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
Henri Gaudier, dit Gaudier-Brzeska, né en 1891 près d’Orléans, quitte la France en 1911 et devient, en trois années d’une prodigieuse activité, l’un des premiers sculpteurs modernes.Toute la sensualité et la puissance de son œuvre méconnue se révèlent pour la première fois dans ce livre, au fil des superbes séquences photographiques réalisées par Christian Roger dans les collections du monde entier.Quand Gaudier meurt en 1915, à 23 ans, dans les combats de la Première Guerre mondiale, son ami Ezra Pound rédige sur leurs années londoniennes un témoignage bouleversant, qui est aussi l’une des plus passionnantes contributions à l’histoire de l’art du XXe siècle. Et dans un post-scriptum de 1934, il ajoute : « Gaudier est irremplaçable. Personne n’est apparu capable de prendre sa succession. Brancusi continua seul la conquête du marbre. »« Ce livre est admirable, pour trois raisons simples, l’auteur, le sujet et leur connivence. Sur Henri Gaudier, sculpteur, Pound avait écrit un livre fulgurant et épique. Il est enfin traduit. Le début d’une résurrection, aujourd’hui, par nos temps de conformisme dictatorial ? Ce serait trop beau pour qu’on ose y croire. » - Philippe Dagen ― Le Monde
302 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1916
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About the author
Ezra Pound
517 books1,029 followersEzra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist movement in early-to-mid 20th century poetry.
Pound's The Cantos contains music and bears a title that could be translated as The Songs—although it never is. Pound's ear was tuned to the motz et sons of troubadour poetry where, as musicologist John Stevens has noted, "melody and poem existed in a state of the closest symbiosis, obeying the same laws and striving in their different media for the same sound-ideal - armonia."
In his essays, Pound wrote of rhythm as "the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit." He challenged young poets to train their ear with translation work to learn how the choice of words and the movement of the words combined. But having translated texts from 10 different languages into English, Pound found that translation did not always serve the poetry: "The grand bogies for young men who want really to learn strophe writing are Catullus and François Villon. I personally have been reduced to setting them to music as I cannot translate them." While he habitually wrote out verse rhythms as musical lines, Pound did not set his own poetry to music.
Pound's The Cantos contains music and bears a title that could be translated as The Songs—although it never is. Pound's ear was tuned to the motz et sons of troubadour poetry where, as musicologist John Stevens has noted, "melody and poem existed in a state of the closest symbiosis, obeying the same laws and striving in their different media for the same sound-ideal - armonia."
In his essays, Pound wrote of rhythm as "the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit." He challenged young poets to train their ear with translation work to learn how the choice of words and the movement of the words combined. But having translated texts from 10 different languages into English, Pound found that translation did not always serve the poetry: "The grand bogies for young men who want really to learn strophe writing are Catullus and François Villon. I personally have been reduced to setting them to music as I cannot translate them." While he habitually wrote out verse rhythms as musical lines, Pound did not set his own poetry to music.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
June 27, 2008
A wonderful and even touching memoir from Ezra Pound regarding his friend and the artist Gaudier-Brzeska. I read this book many years ago, and i am a huge fan of Pound's work that is not actual poetry. For instance his critical writings - and i would love to read his (racist, and pro-Italian) rants during the war years. Hard to find.
August 29, 2023
I finished this about a week ago and let things percolate before writing the review.
Ezra Pound does not disappoint - he is a truly marvellous and stimulating writer. This volume is a kaleidoscopic memoir, made up of a ragbag of essays on the sculpture and art of his former Vorticist artist-friend, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who tragically died during WWI, as well as some letters from Brzeska (including from the trenches in his final days) to both Pound and Mrs. Shakespear (Pound's mother-in-law) and Edward Wadsworth (another painter), and also contains some beautiful reproductions, mostly photos, of Brzeska's most famous sculptures and drawings.
I obtained a rare 1st edition copy of this book (1916) which was bound later in the 1920s. I heard that the 2nd edition did not have the same quality or number of prints in the book, which I assume would detract from the enjoyment, hence the comments from other reviewers on goodreads on that aspect.
Reading this book will give you not only a better idea of who Gaudier-Brzeska was and how important and talented an artist he was (and hence what a great loss his life was both to loved ones and to the art world), but also you will come away with a slightly better understanding of Pound's vision of his vorticist aesthetics. In fact, this collection includes Pound's famous "Vorticism" essay, which is an early manifesto from the legendary poet, and one which would more-or-less form the core of his literary aesthetics for the rest of his career, with minor changes and adaptations (and revisions) along the way.
This is highly recommended for all lovers of modernist writers (especially Pound) and for all lovers of art and sculpture in particular (Brzeska's real strength was his highly singular sculptures, including a sculpture of Pound himself).
Ezra Pound does not disappoint - he is a truly marvellous and stimulating writer. This volume is a kaleidoscopic memoir, made up of a ragbag of essays on the sculpture and art of his former Vorticist artist-friend, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who tragically died during WWI, as well as some letters from Brzeska (including from the trenches in his final days) to both Pound and Mrs. Shakespear (Pound's mother-in-law) and Edward Wadsworth (another painter), and also contains some beautiful reproductions, mostly photos, of Brzeska's most famous sculptures and drawings.
I obtained a rare 1st edition copy of this book (1916) which was bound later in the 1920s. I heard that the 2nd edition did not have the same quality or number of prints in the book, which I assume would detract from the enjoyment, hence the comments from other reviewers on goodreads on that aspect.
Reading this book will give you not only a better idea of who Gaudier-Brzeska was and how important and talented an artist he was (and hence what a great loss his life was both to loved ones and to the art world), but also you will come away with a slightly better understanding of Pound's vision of his vorticist aesthetics. In fact, this collection includes Pound's famous "Vorticism" essay, which is an early manifesto from the legendary poet, and one which would more-or-less form the core of his literary aesthetics for the rest of his career, with minor changes and adaptations (and revisions) along the way.
This is highly recommended for all lovers of modernist writers (especially Pound) and for all lovers of art and sculpture in particular (Brzeska's real strength was his highly singular sculptures, including a sculpture of Pound himself).
August 19, 2023
"It is part of the war waste...I have known many artists. I am not writing in a momentary fit of grief or of enthusiasm. I am not making phrases. I am not adding in any way to statements aI had made and printed during Gaudier's lifetime. A great spirt has been among us, and a great artist is gone..." (Pound, 17).
So begins Ezra Pound's 'memoir' of this friend and artistic associate, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, a victim of the Great War and, as the brief book points out, an artistic innovator of some renown. Cut down at an extremely young age, Gaudier-Brzeska actually had a very limited artistic output in the years that he was active, creating only a few major sculptures and drawings. Among his greatest works? A "hieratic" head of poet Ezra Pound, a picture of which is included in the all-too-necessary appendix found in the back of this work. The book itself, however, can be seen as a foray into the artistic theory of "Vorticism," of which both Pound and Gaudier-Brzeska were proponents, which sought to reduce artistic objects to their 'essential' elements, the image in poetry and the intersection of planes in sculpture. We also get, in this shaggy dog of a book, letters from the object of the book to select individuals in the literary and artistic world (including to Pound himself), as well as the 'manifesto' Gaudier-Brzeska offered up in the pages of "Blast," a Vorticist journal sponsored by Pound and other artists (Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska, etc.). This manifesto speaks well of the subject of the tome's knowledge of all sculpture, from Sumer to the Greeks, and is a fine example of the artistic synthesis present at the entry into the 20th century. And while this may be seen as more than slightly out of date, and thus only interesting as a historical artifact, it is still a record of great artistic aspirations at key moment in the history of the arts. Thus it should be still valued and valid today, a century later.
Finally, this work can be seen as a portrait of Pound, no mean genius himself, embracing and promoting a fellow 'genius' artist. Like his work with Eliot on the masterpiece poem "The Wasteland," Pound's embrace of Gaudier-Brzeska is a sure sign of the sculptor's preternatural ability, which was so cruelly cut down by WWI, and this makes this 'memoir' special in terms of influence and ambiance.
For the above reasons, this book should be recommended to all readers, but especially those concerned and obsessed with the birth of modernism out of the crucible of the Great War, whose 'terrible beauty,' to use a Yeatsian phrase, created much of what is seen today as making up the modern world.
So begins Ezra Pound's 'memoir' of this friend and artistic associate, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, a victim of the Great War and, as the brief book points out, an artistic innovator of some renown. Cut down at an extremely young age, Gaudier-Brzeska actually had a very limited artistic output in the years that he was active, creating only a few major sculptures and drawings. Among his greatest works? A "hieratic" head of poet Ezra Pound, a picture of which is included in the all-too-necessary appendix found in the back of this work. The book itself, however, can be seen as a foray into the artistic theory of "Vorticism," of which both Pound and Gaudier-Brzeska were proponents, which sought to reduce artistic objects to their 'essential' elements, the image in poetry and the intersection of planes in sculpture. We also get, in this shaggy dog of a book, letters from the object of the book to select individuals in the literary and artistic world (including to Pound himself), as well as the 'manifesto' Gaudier-Brzeska offered up in the pages of "Blast," a Vorticist journal sponsored by Pound and other artists (Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska, etc.). This manifesto speaks well of the subject of the tome's knowledge of all sculpture, from Sumer to the Greeks, and is a fine example of the artistic synthesis present at the entry into the 20th century. And while this may be seen as more than slightly out of date, and thus only interesting as a historical artifact, it is still a record of great artistic aspirations at key moment in the history of the arts. Thus it should be still valued and valid today, a century later.
Finally, this work can be seen as a portrait of Pound, no mean genius himself, embracing and promoting a fellow 'genius' artist. Like his work with Eliot on the masterpiece poem "The Wasteland," Pound's embrace of Gaudier-Brzeska is a sure sign of the sculptor's preternatural ability, which was so cruelly cut down by WWI, and this makes this 'memoir' special in terms of influence and ambiance.
For the above reasons, this book should be recommended to all readers, but especially those concerned and obsessed with the birth of modernism out of the crucible of the Great War, whose 'terrible beauty,' to use a Yeatsian phrase, created much of what is seen today as making up the modern world.
July 27, 2007
Pretty good writing on Gaudier-Brzeska, could use plates!!!
September 3, 2008
I recommend the 1916 ed. with its big chunky type and variant punctuation of "In a Station of the Metro."
June 13, 2016
Pound as critic of art and culture. Includes some great drawings by Gaudier and photos of his sculpture.
March 8, 2026
This is the best book I have read so far this year and will likely hold that title for a while. I began reading this book for my term paper on Brzeska and his vortex and the origins of art by way of sculpture, and there is so much essential primary and near primary (poundian analysis) that perhaps no paper would be possible without it. But also the insights I have gained both into the period and about art and poetry in general are innumerable and infinitely valuable, and far too many to spell out here (though I have photographed nearly half the book in an effort to recall important thoughts). In its function as a memoir it provides a visceral glimpse into Brzeska and his environs, but of course this book is so much more. Difficult (it took me quite a while longer than most 160 page books would) but well worth reading slowly and dwelling upon
May 14, 2025
Very interesting! Read this for my Sculpture class in uni. Have to say that Pound started rambling a bit there at the end and I skimmed over the stuff about Renaissance but otherwise a very interesting memoir. Gaudier was a genius and it is a shame that he died so young.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews