page_title: Joseph Csaky
section_title: 1918–1928
hierarchical_section_title: Joseph Csaky / Biography / 1918–1928
caption_attribution_description: English: Jacques Doucet's hôtel particulier staircase, 33 rue Saint-James, Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1929 photograph by Pierre Legrain. Staircase design by Joseph Csaky
context_page_description: Joseph Csaky was a Hungarian avant-garde artist, sculptor, and graphic artist, best known for his early participation in the Cubist movement as a sculptor. 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 the early 20th century. He was an active member of the Section d'Or group between 1911 and 1914, and closely associated with Crystal Cubism, Purism, De Stijl, Abstract art, and Art Deco throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
  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 in 1929. During World War II, Csaky joined forces with the French underground movement 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 of the fashion designer Jacques Doucet.
  After 1928, Csaky moved away from Cubism into a more figurative or representational style for nearly thirty years.
context_section_description: Returning to Paris after the war, Csaky began a series of works derived in part from the machine aesthetic; streamlined with geometric and mechanical affinities. By this time Csaky's artistic vocabulary had evolved: it was distinctly mature, showing a new, refined sculptural quality. Nothing in early modern sculpture in comparable to the revolutionary work Csaky produced in the years directly succeeding World War I. These were nonrepresentational free-standing objects, i.e., abstract three-dimensional constructions combining organic and geometric elements. 
  "Csaky derived from nature forms which were in concordance with his passion for architecture, simple, pure, and psychologically convincing." (Maurice Raynal, 1929)
  The scholar Edith Balas writes of Csaky's sculpture following the war years:
  "Csáky, more than anyone else working in sculpture, took Pierre Reverdy's theoretical writings on art and cubist doctrine to heart. "Cubism is an eminently plastic art; but an art of creation, not of reproduction and interpretation." The artist was to take no more than "elements" from the external world, and intuitively arrive at the "idea" of objects made up of what for him constant in value. Objects were not to be analyzed; neither were the experiences they evoked. They were to be re-created in the mind, and thereby purified. By some unexplained miracle the "pure" forms of the mind, an entirely autonomous vocabulary, of (usual geometric) forms, would make contact with the external world." (Balas, 1998, p. 27)
  These 1919 works (e.g., Cones and Spheres, Abstract Sculpture) are made of juxtaposing sequences of rhythmic geometric forms, where light and shadow, mass and the void, play a key role. They allude, occasionally, to the structure of the human body or modern machines, but the semblance functions only as "elements" (Reverdy) and are deprived of descriptive narrative. Csaky's polychrome reliefs of the early 1920s display an affinity with Purism—an extreme form of the Cubism aesthetic developing at the time—in their rigorous economy of architectonic symbols and the use of crystalline geometric structures.
  With this intense flurry of activity, Csaky was taken on by Léonce Rosenberg, owner of the Galerie de l'Effort Moderne, 19, rue de la Baume, Paris. By 1920 Rosenberg was the sponsor, dealer and publisher of Piet Mondrian, Léger, Lipchitz and Csaky. He had just published Le Néo-Plasticisme—a collection of writings by Mondrian—and Theo van Doesburg's Classique-Baroque-Moderne. Csaky's showed a series of works at Rosenberg's gallery in December 1920.
  For the following three years, Rosenberg purchased Csaky's entire artistic production. In 1921 Rosenberg organized an exhibit entitled Les maîtres du Cubisme, a group show that featured works by Csaky, Albert Gleizes, Metzinger, Mondrian, Gris, Léger, Picasso, Laurens, Georges Braque, Auguste Herbin, Gino Severini, Georges Valmier, Amédée Ozenfant and Léopold Survage.
  Csaky's works of the early 1920s reflect a collective spirit of the time, 
  "a puritanical denial of sensuousness that reduced the cubist vocabulary to rectangles, verticals, horizontals," writes Balas, "a Spartan alliance of discipline and strength" to which Csaky adhered in his Tower Figures. "In their aesthetic order, lucidity, classical precision, emotional neutrality, and remoteness from visible reality, they should be considered stylistically and historically as belonging to the De Stijl movement." (Balas, 1998)
  Joseph Csaky became a naturalized French citizen in 1922. He began to work with Marcel Coard, a dealer and gallery owner who from 1924 onward bought Csaky's sculptures in order to cast them in bronze. The two created furniture in the Art Deco style, within which sculpted elements of marble, wood and glass were integrated.
  In 1927 Csaky collaborated with other artists, including Miklos, Jacques Lipchitz and Marcoussis, on the decoration of Studio House, rue Saint-James, Neuilly, owned by the French fashion designer Jacques Doucet. Doucet was also collecting Post-Impressionist and Cubist paintings; he bought L
caption: Jacques Doucet's hôtel particulier, 33 rue Saint-James, Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1929. Joseph Csaky designed Doucet's staircase, Henri Laurens the fountain, Jacques Lipchitz the fireplace mantel, and Louis Marcoussis a Cubist rug. The sculptor Gustave Miklos and others collaborated in the decoration of the studio
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