In 1923, Archipenko and Angelica Forster (now Mrs Archipenko) moved to the United States where, for the next 40 years, Archipenko continued to innovate in his work and taught at art schools and universities, including the Chicago Bauhaus with László Moholy-Nagy, as well as at his own schools. It is from this later American period that the current set of works belong: large, rarely seen, white brush and ink drawings on black paper from c.1960, in which the artist pushed the depiction of the female form to the boundaries of abstraction. In these late drawings Archipenko reverses the conventional relationship between line and ground. Rather than describing the body through dark marks on a light surface, the figure emerges from the black paper through flashes and sweeping passages of white. Arcs, crescents and abbreviated contours suggest the body without fully describing it, so that positive and negative form continually exchange roles. The figure approaches abstraction while remaining recognisably human – a continuation, in drawing, of Archipenko’s lifelong exploration of the relationship between solid and void, presence and absence.

In 1960, when these drawings were made, Archipenko remained very active. He published his book ‘Archipenko: Fifty Creative Years, 1908–58’; presented a travelling exhibition in Germany at the Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum, Hagen; Saarland Museum, Saarbrücken; and Kunstmuseum der Stadt Düsseldorf; and married Frances Gray, an artist and former student. Frances Gray recalled Archipenko making these drawings from a black model in the New York studio.

At each step in his career Archipenko made drawings in which he explored new dimensions of space, light and form, pushing the boundaries of traditional artistic conventions and taking classical representations of the female figure, his principal subject, beyond the limits of realism. Throughout his working life, drawing remained a laboratory for his ideas and a direct means of transforming the human figure.

This work is recorded in the Archipenko Foundation with the work number 1847 and will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the two dimensional works.