This is one of two portrait heads of painter and draughtsman Horace Brodzky (1885-1969), whose work is also represented in the Ben Uri Collection. The two artists met in 1913 and Brodzky sat for a bust portrait for which this is a study. Brodzky later published a biography of Gaudier-Brzeska in 1933.
French-born sculptor Henri Gaudier moved to England in 1911, accompanied by the Polish writer Sophie Brzeska, who was twenty years his senior, and whose surname he added to his own. By 1913 Gaudier-Brzeska was part of a progressive circle which included T E Hulme, Ezra Pound and Jacob Epstein, a founder member of The London Group, and a member of the Vorticists, publishing work in Wyndham Lewis’ little-magazine Blast. He had a close friendship with Brodzky and Wolmark, both of whom he sculpted. Increasingly, his sculptures, predominantly of the human head, figures and animals, closely based on observations from nature, became radically simplified and geometrical. In 1915 he volunteered for the French army and was killed in action at the age of 24.
Metzger first encountered the work of Gaudier-Brezska at Temple Newsam House, outside Leeds where he had moved in 1941 to study cabinetry before working in a furniture factory and workshop. Within the first three months of attending Bomberg’s evening life drawing classes, Metzger reflected, he ‘got me involved in drawing…in a way that was completely new to me....I gravitated towards ink in his class, nowhere else, I hadn’t used it before’, and ‘there the inspiration was Gaudier’. Describing this period as, ‘my Gaudier phase’, he remembers that Bomberg was ‘very intrigued by and encouraged’ such work which, although executed not ‘using Bomberg[‘s] technique, he could see I was doing fresh work, [that was] different to everybody else in the class’.
