From his earliest experiments in Paris, Alexander Archipenko sought to take the classical representation of the female figure beyond the limits of realism. After settling in the United States in 1923, he continued to explore the relationship between the body, form and surrounding space, while teaching, lecturing and experimenting with new materials and techniques.

During the mid-1930s this investigation produced Torso in Space (1935–36), an elongated, streamlined interpretation of the reclining female body that Archipenko realised in different scales and materials. The figure remains recognisably corporeal, yet anatomy is subordinated to continuous contour and movement. As Flavia Frigeri has argued, ‘Torso in Space should be understood not as a retreat from Archipenko’s earlier experimentation, but as an extension of his research into increasingly abstract forms of representation’. Versions of Torso in Space are today held in major museum collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Small Diagonal Torso (1938) and Lying Horizontal Figure (1957), conceived almost twenty years apart, reveal the longevity of this investigation. Their titles are significant. Diagonal and horizontal describe not simply the disposition of the body, but the spatial principle around which each sculpture is organised. In Small Diagonal Torso, the female body is compressed into an extraordinarily economical form, rising along an oblique axis. In Lying Horizontal Figure, it is stretched laterally into a long, fluid silhouette, countered by the upward turn of the head. Archipenko returned repeatedly to the female figure throughout his career, but in these works the body becomes almost a direction in space. Anatomy is radically abbreviated while remaining legible through contour, rhythm and movement: the diagonal generates an upward thrust; the horizontal produces extension and flow.

Lying Horizontal Figure evidently held particular importance for Archipenko, who illustrated it in his retrospective publication Archipenko: Fifty Creative Years 1908–1958 (1960). When a version of the work was first exhibited at Perls Galleries in New York in 1957, New Yorker’s art critic Robert M. Coates remarked on Archipenko’s apparently endless compositional variations in presenting the human figure abstractly, describing the “subtler but equally daring dislocations” of Lying Horizontal Figure.

The 1957 cast presented at Frieze Masters was more recently included in Paul Jaray – The Rationality of the Streamline at Kunsthaus Dahlem, Berlin, in 2023. Its inclusion is particularly apposite: the streamlined body that Archipenko began exploring in the 1930s has here become an almost aerodynamic form. Seen together, Small Diagonal Torso and Lying Horizontal Figure demonstrate the remarkable continuity of an idea that occupied Archipenko for decades: the transformation of the human body into sculptural movement through space.

This bronze is recorded in The Archipenko Foundation with the Work ID1377.