This work on paper is recorded in the Archipenko Foundation, New York, with the archive no. 5893 and will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the works on paper.

“My will is to reconstruct the world through the cylinder, the sphere”... “We must not be pleased with reality itself, we must give structure to reality, rearranging it through a process of re-composition. We must readapt it to our rules of composition” (Paul Cézanne).

Léger and Archipenko enthusiastically took up Cézanne’s depiction of the world through the cylinder and sphere, advancing beyond the Cubism of Picasso and Braque, to find their own interpretations. Léger through his contraste de forms and Archipenko, through applying Cubism and negative space to sculpture, his works on paper were research to this end. Archipenko had established a close friendship with Fernand Léger, when they both had studios in La Ruche, Paris. Without a sou in their pockets, they would wander Paris together, from rue de Vaugirard to boulevard de Belleville. Jacques Chapiro remembers that Léger played a musical instrument and Archipenko sang with his “deep and warm” baritone. From time to time, Léopold Survage accompanied him on the guitar. (Jacques Chapiro, La Ruche (Paris: Flammarion, 1960), 55–56, 100).