Standing Woman Combing Her Hair

In 1918, the influential German dealer Herwarth Walden mounted an exhibition of Alexander Archipenko in Berlin. That year, Walden published a small pamphlet in which he described the expressive yet abstract style of sculpture that would gain popularity in early 1920s Germany:

Expressionist sculpture…attempts no longer to imitate forms in nature, but instead to create abstract images. Just as painting uses the surface as material for artistic representation, sculpture has the body shape as prerequisite. This shape, however, lies not in the imitation of nature, but in the relationship between the individual sculptural forms.

Archipenko lived in Berlin from 1921 to 1923, and during this period his reputation for this form of Expressionist sculpture in Germany was at its peak. In 1937, the Nazi's removed his works from German museums as "degenerate" art.