Human-machine

Gaudier-Brzeska's involvement with the London avant-garde from 1913 onwards - the cultural revolution of Vorticism, as Roger Secrétain writes - opened up multiple avenues for his graphic creation. The poet Ezra Pound inspired him to invent ideographic drawing; Oceanic art strongly influenced his projects for Roger Fry's Omega workshops; a series of drawings linked to some of his sculptures pushed the search for geometric purity to the point of abstraction; the pictoriality of pastels was also explored in a non-figurative sense. These parallel experiments are complemented by a series of drawings combining primitivism and machinismo: humanoid forms with ovoid heads adorned with a triangle for a face mimic human life.

While Marinetti is credited with introducing the machine into aesthetic discourse at the turn of 1910 with his text L'homme multiplié et le Règne de la machine, the English Rebels, who proclaimed Vorticism in reaction to Futurism, appropriated this object by projecting their own vision of modern art onto it. The Italians' plastic exaltation of speed - be it mechanical - was merely an avatar of Impressionism in their eyes. In their rambling, plural and willingly sententious theory, formulated by Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, T.S. Hulme and Gaudier-Brzeska, the idea of an art of density anchored in the present, devoid of any spiritual dimension, "organized according to principles unconsciously concretized by machines", was imposed.

Gaudier-Brzeska offers a plastic translation of these ideas with his machine men and women, of which the Danseuse en pierre rouge (1913, London, Tate Gallery) and Caritas (Musée d'Orléans) are three-dimensional transpositions. The composition in the Musée d'Orléans is known in two other versions, one in charcoal, of larger size and thicker proportions, in the Musée National d'Art Moderne; the other, in brown ink, in a private collection, is an intermediate variation: its canon is identical to the Paris version, while its format, technique and the additional right-hand detail bring it closer to the Orléans drawing. The latter, however, is distinguished by its vertical stretching and the impeccable sharpness of its pen stroke, which echoes Hume's statement that his work would be inspired "by the drawings of engineers, with clean lines and geometric curves".

The figure, perched diagonally in an unstable balance on an irregular base, embraces an inorganic-looking object with its left arm. While the latter's lesser proportions may have justified seeing a woman and child in the group, the fact that this object lacks the plastic codes characterizing Gaudier's machine-like beings - ovoid head, comb-like hands - tends to invalidate such an interpretation. But it's also true that, since vorticism does away with naturalistic imitation, any interpretation is possible. Above all, the composition is characteristic of an art that revokes all affect from its universe.