Csaky, Joseph [Jozsef]
(b Szeged, 18 March 1888; d Paris, 1 May 1971).

French sculptor of Hungarian birth. He studied at the school of Decorative Arts in Budapest from 1904 to 1905. In 1908 he went to Paris and settled in the block of studios La Ruche, where he was a neighbour of Fernand Leger, Alexander Archipenko, Henri Laurens, Marc Chagall and Chaim Soutine. He joined the Cubist movement in 1911, and he was included by Marcel Duchamp in the Salon de la Section d'Or in 1912. Only three of his pre-1914 sculptures survive, two Heads (e.g. 1914; Saint-Etienne, Mus. A. & Indust.) and a Clothed Figure (1913; Paris, Pompidou), which show a progression from a style still influenced by Rodin to a blocklike simplification and Cubist faceting. Volunteering for the French Army in 1914, he was unable to make any more sculptures until his return to Paris in 1919, when he acquired French citizenship; his immediate post-war work was much more abstract. After making in 1919 several columnar sculptures with a Leger-like dynamic, tumbling accumulation of pure cylinders, cones, spheres and discs, he began to make a series of bas-reliefs, heads and figures of an almost crystalline structure, sometimes completely symmetrical; smooth, flat planes and straight edges are contrasted with meandering curves. This phase, related to Art Deco and to ancient Egyptian and Assyrian art, lasted until the late 1920s; his later sculptures, partly under the influence of Laurens, were of figures and animals in a more figurative, curvilinear and rhythmical style.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
D. Karshan: Csaky (Paris, 1973)

RONALD ALLEY

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