Archipenko studied in his home city of Kiev and in Moscow before moving to Paris in 1908. There he shared a studio with Modigliani and Gaudier-Brzeska. He lived in Berlin in 1921-23 before emigrating to the United States. This cast is one of an edition of six bronzes from an original plaster (Museum of Modern Art, New York) which once belonged to Fernand Leger. One of Archipenko's most powerful early works, it fuses figures and base in a machine-like structure of interlocking geometric shapes.