From 1911 to 1914, the young Orleans sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-1915) carried out a prodigious plastic revolution in London, evolving from Rodin’s expressive naturalism to Vorticism, the avant-garde movement born in 1913 under the dual impetus of Cubism and Futurism. In the vast laboratory that the practice of drawing constitutes for him, the treatment of the portrait gives a particularly good account of its evolution. Making no concession to linear purity, his trait, whatever the technique employed, seeks to capture the life that animates the individual and the distinctive character of his physiognomy. The translation of the body’s mass, its plans and its lines of force takes precedence over mere imitation as the sculptor’s vocation is asserted.