Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

Born 1891 – Died 1915

Henri Gaudier was born in Saint-Jean-de-Braye, near Orléans, in France. He first came to Britain in 1908. He met Sophie Brzeska while working as a student in the evenings at Sainte-Geneviève Library in Paris in 1910. In the same year he left France under a cloud of social hostility and settled in England, adding the name Brzeska to his own soon after. He worked in isolation until he met the writer John Middleton Murry in 1912, whereafter he built up a circle of Modernist artists and intellectuals which included Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and T. E. Hulme. He became involved in Pound’s and Lewis’ Vorticist group, contributing to the two issues of their magazine, Blast. Gaudier-Brzeska worked prolifically, creating most of his work in the early 1910s, before his tragic death at the age of 23 in 1915, when he was killed in action fighting in the First World War.