Anarchist anti-imperialism, modernist domesticity: Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s <i>Maquette for a Large Basin</i>

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s Maquette for a Large Basin (previously known as Maquette for a Bird Bath) has often escaped detailed art historical attention despite its positioning at a critical moment of the artist’s social and creative life within London’s early twentieth-century avant-garde. This article suggests an alteration of the object’s title and, in light of recent scholarship, orientates it in relation to its commissioning for the garden at Durbins, Roger Fry’s home in Surrey, and Gaudier-Brzeska’s anarchist and anti-imperialist circles. It argues that the Large Basin constructs a satirical mix of primitivism and classicism, drawing from an array of sources ranging from Michelangelo’s ‘Slaves’ to seventeenth-century ‘blackamoor’ ornaments in the process. This satirical capacity is shared by the artist’s other work from the period, such as the Red Stone Dancer, the Coffer for W.S. Blunt and the Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound. However, the Large Basin’s combination of labouring bodies and formal and methodological experiment also dramatizes key realist–modernist debates between content and form. It shows Gaudier-Brzeska attempting to synthesize these positions in search of a sculptural programme that could accord with his politics of class solidarity and anti-imperial anarchism, and in this context the article demonstrates how Gaudier-Brzeska’s approach to primitivism and direct carving provided an apparatus for his combination anarchist and anti-imperialist activism.