Ninety years after his tragic death in the First World War, the young French sculptor, Henri Gaudier Brzeska, remains an enigmatic figure, personified in popular myth as 'The Savage Messiah'. In this biography, Roger Cole uses previosuly unpublished material to show how our perceptins of Gaudier's brief life were moulded and to throw new light on his ambiguous relationship with Sophie Brzeska, the Polish woman be chanced to meet while studying in a Paris library. He outlines Gaudier's career and astonishing output, his struggle to secure recognition in the London art world and his crucial friendships with Horace Brodzky, Middleton Murry, Epstein, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. Gaudier had willed his life's work to Sophie shortly before his death, and the book documents her often fraught efforts to secure recognition for her genius. Sophie blamed herself for Gaudier's death, and through her diaries and letters, the author plots her increasing isolation and, eventually, her harrowing decline into madness. When Sophie herself died intestate in a mental hospital in 1925, the bulk of Gaudier's work - including sculptures and 1,600 drawings - was acquired 'for a song' by H.S. 'Jim' Ede, then a young assistant at the Tate Gallery

Ninety years after his tragic death in the First World War, the young French sculptor, Henri Gaudier Brzeska, remains an enigmatic figure, personified in popular myth as 'The Savage Messiah'. In this biography, Roger Cole uses previosuly unpublished material to show how our perceptins of Gaudier's brief life were moulded and to throw new light on his ambiguous relationship with Sophie Brzeska, the Polish woman be chanced to meet while studying in a Paris library. He outlines Gaudier's career and astonishing output, his struggle to secure recognition in the London art world and his crucial friendships with Horace Brodzky, Middleton Murry, Epstein, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. Gaudier had willed his life's work to Sophie shortly before his death, and the book documents her often fraught efforts to secure recognition for her genius. Sophie blamed herself for Gaudier's death, and through her diaries and letters, the author plots her increasing isolation and, eventually, her harrowing decline into madness. When Sophie herself died intestate in a mental hospital in 1925, the bulk of Gaudier's work - including sculptures and 1,600 drawings - was acquired 'for a song' by H.S. 'Jim' Ede, then a young assistant at the Tate Gallery