Joseph Csaky

Joseph Csaky (18 March 1888, Szeged – 1 May 1971, Paris) was a Hungarian avant-garde artist, sculptor, and graphic artist, best known for his early participation as a sculptor in the Cubist movement. Joseph Csaky was one of the first sculptors in Paris to apply the principles of pictorial Cubism to his art. A pioneer of modern sculpture,Csaky is among the most important sculptors of early 20th-century. He was an active member of the Section d'Or group between 1911 and 1914, and closely associated with De Stijl and Purism throughout the 1920s.

 Csaky fought alongside French soldiers during World War I and in 1922 became a naturalized French citizen. He was a founding member of l'Union des Artistes modernes (UAM) in 1929. During World War II, Csaky joined forces with the French underground movement (la Résistance) in Valençay. In the late 1920s, he collaborated with some other artists in designing furniture and other decorative pieces, including elements of the Studio House for the designer Jacques Doucet.

 

 After 1928, Csaky moved away from Cubism into a more figurative or representational style for nearly thirty years. He exhibited internationally across Europe, but some of his pioneering artistic innovation was forgotten. His work today is primarily held by French and Hungarian institutions, as well as galleries and private collections both in France and abroad.Joseph Csaky contributed substantially to the development of modern sculpture, both as a pioneer in applying Cubism to sculpture, and as a leading figure in nonrepresentational art of the 1920s.Wikipedia

Rico Lebrun

Rico (Frederico) Lebrun (December 10, 1900 – May 9, 1964) was an Italy-born, Italian-American painter and sculptor.
Lebrun served in the Italian army during  the last year of  World War I (1917-1918) after which he spent two years  in the Italian navy and studied at the Industrial Institute and the Naples Academy  of Fine Arts. He worked with fresco painters Cambi and Albino in Naples.
As  a designer for a stained glass factory  in Naples, Lebrun was sent to the factory's new branch in Springfield, Illinois, in 1924  as  foreman and instructor in stained-glass technique.
By 1925, Lebrun moved to New York where  he became a highly successful commerical artist for such publications as Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and the New Yorker. During this time, he married and together with his wife made  several trips to Italy, where he studied fresco painting with Galimberti in Rome, and  researched  the Signorelli frescoes in Orvieto, Italy. 

Returning to New York in 1933, Lebrun  worked with Louis Rubenstein on a mural at Harvard University's Fogg Museum (the  mural was later walled over).  He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935/36 for a  proposed mural project "Story of the Mines" (which was never executed) and  worked on a WPA mural "River Flood" at the Pennsylvania Station Post Office  Annex in New York.
Two California artists Gridley Barrows (who  later became an architect) and Santa Barbara painter Channing Peake assisted Lebrun on the  WPA project and were instrumental in persuading Lebrun to leave New York and go west to  California, which he did after conflict with the WPA caused the abandonment of the  mural  and the breakup of his marriage.

 

 Moving to Santa Barbara, CA,  in  1938, Lebrun accepted a teaching  job at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, met  and married Elaine Leonard in 1940, and taught animation at Walt Disney Studios. Donald Bear, director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art organized the first  exhibition of  Lebrun's work at the Faulkner Memorial Art Gallery in Santa Barbara.
During the 1940's Lebrun's work  was  shown in New York at  the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art,  the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which  purchased his painting  "The Bull Ring") and the Julian Levy Gallery gave Lebrun his first one man show.  During  this period of escalating artistic recognition,  Lebrun suffered a personal loss as  his wife Elaine died. Continuing to live and work in Southern California, Lebrun was  appointed  artist-in-residence at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and became an  instructor, and later director,  at the newly formed Jepson Art Institute in Los  Angeles.

In the years before his death of cancer in 1963, Rico Lebrun    received many honors and awards for his work, such as the Temple Gold Medal from  the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Award of Merit from the American Academy in  Arts and Letters and was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. 
Lebrun enjoyed communication not only as  an artist, but as a teacher and as a friend. He  found time to teach at the Instituto  Allende in Mexico (1953), as Visitng Professor at Yale University (1958), and as  artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome (1959).(annexgalleries.com)

Alexander Archipenko

Alexander Archipenko was born in 1887 in Russia. He left Russia in 1908 and moved to Paris where he associated with avant-garde artists like Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Amedeo Modigliani. After first exhibitions at the Salon d'Automne and with the Indépendants, at the age of twenty-four, he founded his own art school.
His life was determined not only by his incessant creativity as a sculptor but also by fervent art educational activities. In art history Alexander Archipenko is referred to as the "Picasso of sculpture" as he played a crucial role in introducing Cubism to sculpture. As early as 1910 he produced expressive forms, still figurative, but with a tendency towards abstraction. After 1910 Archipenkos forms show sharp, broken contours and are clearly influenced by Cubism. Later, the Italian Futurism inspired him to kinetic compositions with organic or technical forms. At the same time Archipenko also developed his so-called "sculpture-painting", reliefs made of wood, cardboard, metal and glass.

 Archipenko moved to the United States in 1923. After concentrating on the decorative effects of sculpture during the 1930s he attempted an approach to the immaterial in the middle of the 1940s: He began "modelling light" and created plastic sculptures illuminated from the inside.
Alexander Archipenko died in 1964 in New York.(Art Directory)