On the occasion of the 140th anniversary of her birth, we went to the KMSKA as a symbolic gesture of congratulations to the artist Marthe Donas, born in Antwerp on 26 October 1885, visiting the exhibition dedicated to her and to her great love, the sculptor Alexander Archipenko. Only the blind could fail to notice the mutual influence within this creative couple, as well as the remarkable talent of both artists. Comparing the measure of talent granted to them would be futile: fate, or God, was generous to each in equal measure.

It is difficult for young women today to imagine that Marthe entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp against her father’s wishes. Hers was a wealthy family; the issue was not money, nor the need to earn a living. It was simply not considered appropriate for a young woman from a respectable family to soil her fingers with paint. At the outbreak of the First World War, she left with her family for the Netherlands, a neutral country at the time. From there, she travelled alone to Ireland to study stained glass, an experience clearly reflected in her later work, where stained-glass principles are deconstructed in a manner close to the cubism for which she would become known. The Easter Rising of 1916 forced her to move once again. Yet instead of returning to her family in the Netherlands, she was drawn to Paris, to its artistic scene, battered by war but still vibrant and pulsating with life. It was there that she began to experiment with cubism, the artistic language of the city itself.

At one point, Donas moved to the south of France, accompanying a wealthy woman and giving her drawing lessons, along with much of the Parisian art world, which had temporarily relocated there. In Nice, her fateful meeting with Alexander Archipenko took place. At the Château de Valrose, overlooking the hills above the city, a mutual affection and a profound artistic exchange were born. Marthe began to experiment boldly with colour, seeking harmony between vivid accents and sensual chromatic effects. The lush nature of Nice, love, and immersion in the southern artistic milieu left a clear imprint on her work. She also explored tactility, introducing texture into her paintings: mixing cement with paint, attaching fabrics to canvas, and creating astonishingly delicate collages and assemblages. To my eye, these works feel deeply feminine, especially when contrasted with the brutal force of a Pablo Picasso.

Women were rare within the rational, intellectual world of cubism, where they were often expected to produce something more romantic, and until 1923 Donas signed her works with the male pseudonym Tour d’Onasky, her tiny signature still visible on the canvases. The couple eventually returned to Paris, and not long afterwards their paths diverged. Yet their artistic legacy remains a compelling testimony to their love. Until 11 January 2026, this legacy can be admired in Antwerp, in an exhibition that brings together an exceptional collection of works from around the world.

I have encountered individual sculptures by Alexander Archipenko at many European exhibitions, and no matter how Wikipedia labels him an American artist, his artistic formation took place in Paris in the 1910s. His talent took shape in the famous La Ruche, and throughout his life he carried with him the ideas and impulses developed in Europe, including Germany, where he lived from 1922 with his beloved Augusta. He is, in essence, a European artist. An artist marked by a southern, Ukrainian love of colour; by early visual impressions of the Scythian stone figures standing at Kyiv University, where his engineer father worked in the physics laboratories and passed on his inventive spirit to his son; by Ukrainian masculine strength and vitality — so much so that at the age of 68 he married his 19-year-old student.

At the exhibition “Donas, Archipenko & La Section d’Or” at the KMSKA, works from museum and private collections around the world present Archipenko’s key creations from the period of the avant-garde movement founded in 1911 by artists well known to us — artists who sought to give cubism a mathematical and harmonious foundation inspired by the golden ratio, the Renaissance and classical art. Archipenko’s sculptural and pictorial experiments are shown within the context of the Parisian melting pot, from whose furnace emerged works such as Gondolier, created for the Venice Biennale, Woman in a Hat, and, of course, his astonishing “sculpto-paintings”. Some of the finest examples of these hybrid works can now be seen at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp.