The sculptor Alexander Archipenko, born in Kiev in 1887, studied painting and sculpture in Russia. In 1908 he moved to Paris, where he became acquainted with the artists of the French avant-garde. In 1912 he opened his own art school there – the beginning of his lifelong activity as a teacher. In Paris Archipenko met Picasso, and in 1910 he developed a method for transposing Cubism into sculpture: in his “sculpto-paintings” he broke down the boundaries between sculpture and painting. He used altogether unsculptural materials such as glass, cardboard, metal and wood, and worked with collage and polychrome. In 1928, under the influence of Constructivism, he invented the Archipentura, a mechanical apparatus with which the production of pictures could by activated by a motor. From 1923 on Archipenko lived in the United States, where he founded art schools in New York and Los Angeles. There he developed the idea of combining light and sculpture; so-called “light modulators” were the result. Archipenko died in New York in 1964.
