Shortly after the end of World War I, the aristocratic-sounding name Tour d'Onasky popped up in numerous avant-garde periodicals. This mysterious and genderless name was the pseudonym of a young Antwerp artist: Marthe Donas. In the early 1920s, her colourful cubist and abstract paintings and collages were exhibited across Europe, and as far away as the United States and Japan.
The exhibition is the first to focus on the significant position that Donas then occupied on the circuit of the international avant-garde, alongside her then partner, Ukrainian sculptor Alexander Archipenko and together with the artists' collective La Section d'Or.
In 1917, Donas met the already famous Archipenko on the French Riviera. The intense collaboration and artistic exchange resulted not only in a romantic relationship, but also in a series of masterpieces. Donas managed to translate the play of space and the void in Archipenko's revolutionary sculptures. Like no other, she knew how to further refine his dashing robotic humanoids and give them a character all their own. It was the start of a quest that led her further and further into abstraction.
On their return to Paris, Archipenko and Donas played a key role in the revived art circle La Section d'Or. This cosmopolitan group united artists such as Albert Gleizes, Frantisek Kupka, Fernand Léger, Léopold Survage, Thorvald Hellesen. Besides Donas, it also brought together numerous female artists including Natalia Goncharova, Marie Vassilieff and Baroness d'Oettingen. Touring exhibitions featured paintings by De Stijl artists Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, whom the couple knew personally.
Important loans from internationally renowned museums and rarely shown works from private collections situate Archipenko and Donas within a network that sought to create a new, better world through art, after a horrific war. Just over a hundred years after their sparkling work enchanted the critics, they assume their place as one of the important artist couples of last century, to be rediscovered.
Artists: Alexander Archipenko, Marthe Donas
