Alexander Archipenko was born on May 30, 1887, in Kiev, Ukraine. In 1902, he entered the Kiev Art School, where he studied painting and sculpture until 1905. During this time, he was impressed by the city's Byzantine icons, frescoes, and mosaics. After a sojourn in Moscow, Archipenko moved to Paris in 1908. He attended the École des Beaux-Arts for a brief period and then continued to study independently at the Musée du Louvre, where he was drawn to Egyptian, Assyrian, archaic Greek, and early Gothic sculpture.

In 1910, he began exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendants, Paris, and the following year showed for the first time at the Salon d’Automne. In 1912, Archipenko was given his first solo show in Germany at the Museum Folkwang Hagen. That same year, in Paris, he opened the first of his many art schools, joined the Section d’Or group, which included Georges Braque, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, and Pablo Picasso, among others, and produced his first painted reliefs, the Sculpto-Peintures. In 1913, Archipenko exhibited at the Armory Show in New York and made his first prints, which were reproduced in the Italian Futurist publication, Lacerba, in 1914. He participated in the Salon des Indépendants in 1914 and the Venice Biennale in 1920. From 1919 to 1921, he traveled to Geneva, Zurich, Paris, London, Brussels, Athens, and other European cities to exhibit his work. Archipenko’s first solo show in the United States was held at the Société Anonyme, New York, in 1921.

In 1923, he moved from Berlin to the United States, where over the years he opened art schools in New York City, Woodstock, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. In 1924, Archipenko created his first kinetic work, Archipentura. For the next 30 years, he taught throughout the United States at art schools and universities, including the short-lived New Bauhaus. He became a U.S. citizen in 1928. Most of Archipenko’s work in German museums was confiscated by the Nazis in their purge of “degenerate art.” In 1947, he produced his first inner-lit sculptures. He accompanied an exhibition of his work throughout Germany in 1955–56, and at this time began his book Archipenko: Fifty Creative Years 1908–1958, published in 1960. Archipenko died February 25, 1964, in New York.