Gaudier-Brzeska

Ezra Pound's book on the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was first published in 1916. The memoir is valuable both for the history of modern art and for what it shows us of Pound himself, his ability to recognize genius in others and then to publicize it effectively. An enlarged edition, including thirty pages of illustrations (sculpture and drawings) as well as Pound's later pieces on Gaudier, was brought out in 1970, and is now re-issued as an ND Paperbook.

Gaudier's talent was impressive and his Vorticist aesthetic important as theory, but he was killed in World War I at the age of twenty-three, leaving only a small body of work. Would there today be a Salle Gaudier-Brzeska in the Musee de L'Art Moderne in Paris if Pound had not championed him? Pound knew Gaudier in London, where the young artist had come with his companion, the Polish-born Sophie Brzeska.

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