Drawing influence from Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, Alexander Archipenko developed a sculptural form of Cubism using interlocking and overlapping solids and sculptural voids to show various views of the figure simultaneously. Works like Woman Combing Her Hair (1918) demonstrate his continuous exploration of the female form and its relation to space. Considered the first Cubist sculptor, Archipenko furthered his legacy of experimentation throughout his career, introducing sculptural collage and mixed-media sculpture that integrated multicolored glass, acrylic, and terra cotta into single objects he called “sculpto-paintings”. Archipenko later moved away from capturing perspective in order to attempt to sculpt movement itself.

French painter, collagist and sculptor Georges Braque is, along with Pablo Picasso, renowned as the co-founder of Cubism, which revolutionized 20th-century painting. In his work, objects are fragmented and reconstructed into geometric forms, fracturing the picture plane in order to explore a variety of viewpoints. “The hard-and-fast rules of perspective … were a ghastly mistake which…has taken four centuries to redress,” he said in 1957. Merging aspects of the sculptural with the pictorial, Braque was also an innovator in the use of collage, inventing a technique known as papier collé, which he first explored in one early work Fruit Dish and Glass (1912) by attaching pieces of wallpaper to a charcoal drawing. This approach deeply influenced not only his contemporaries but generations of artists from Modernism to the present.