Until January 11, 2026: Donas, Archipenko & La Section d’Or. Enchanting Modernism At KMSKA in Antwerp

Photo by Claudia

By CLAUDIA December 18, 2025

I had the opportunity to view the exhibition at KMSKA in Antwerp, and if you are able it is truly worth the trip, whether from nearby, or from overseas. Running in parallel at KMSKA, is the equally extraordinary exhibition “Magritte. La Ligne De Vie,” which goes until February 22, 2026. I definitely recommend seeing both and also doing the guided tours.

Photo by Claudia

The exhibition centers on the Cubist Belgian artist Marthe Donas, the first internationally acclaimed Belgian female avant-garde artist and Ukrainian sculptor Alexander Archipenko, with whom she had a romantic and working partnership. Though only together for roughly 2.5 years, their time together produced many great works and in this exhibition you can truly see how much they influenced each other’s work. The exhibition includes over 130 works on display by Donas and Archipenko, as well as by their contemporaries and friends including Mondrian, Modigliani, Goncharova and Vassilieff.

Photo by Claudia

The exhibit is a retrospective on Marthe Donas and the international avant-garde of the interwar period. Although not as well known, Marthe Donas is considered to be one of the leading figures of Modernism. Donas (1885–1967) grew up in the Belgian bourgeoisie where there was little room for artistic ambitions, especially if you were a girl. After a near fatal accident in 1912 Donas decides to fully commit herself to art, consequences be damned. Against her family’s wishes, the conventional thought regarding female artists, and outright ignoring the outbreak of WW1, she travels alone from Dublin to Paris.

Photo by Claudia

There she paints under the mysterious, genderless pseudonym Tour Donas. She achieves success. Shortly after the First World War, her view of Cubism and her innovative compositions quickly earned her a key role in the international avant-garde. Her colourful cubist and abstract paintings are an international hit and shown at numerous exhibitions throughout Europe, as well as as far away as the United States and Japan.

By the middle of 1917, running out of money due to the effects of the war Donas learns that there is a community of avant-garde artists living in the south of France. She decides to join them and travels to Nice, where she meets the already well-known sculptor Alexander Archipenko. At the time Archipenko was already known as a pioneering sculptor; approaching volume and movement in a groundbreaking way.
 

Photo by Claudia

This exhibit celebrates her work and her contribution to the avant-garde movement, and delves into her collaboration with her lover and friend Alexander Archipenko Now at just over a hundred years after their work mesmerized critics, they now again take their place as one of the important artistic couples of the previous century.

Photo by Claudia

“The exhibition shows Donas as a pivotal figure in a distinctly male avant-garde world. Not only was she a visionary artist, she was also a cultural entrepreneur and networker who organised exhibitions and brought artists together. In this exhibition, we are showing her work alongside that of great names such as …Mondrian and Modigliani.”

Carmen Willems, general director of the KMSKA

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“Donas captures the light of the South of France in her work. These are paintings that seem to radiate from within, an energy that you also find in Archipenko.”
-Peter J.H. Pauwels, curator of Enchanting Modernism

They immediately connect and together they experiment with their work. Archipenko in sculptures and ‘sculpto-paintings’, and Donas with shaped paintings. Her unique combination of painting and sculpture.

Photo by Claudia

“One of Donas' most striking innovations are her shaped paintings. These are works that follow the contours of the subject and break away from the classic rectangular painting. This experimental approach may have arisen from her collaboration with Archipenko, who also explored the boundaries of form and consciously played with negative space.”

-Adriaan Gonnissen, curator of Enchanting Modernism and curator of modern art at the KMSKA

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“Donas succeeds in translating the interplay of space and void in Archipenko's revolutionary sculptures. Like no other, she knows how to refine his graceful, robot-like humanoids and endow them with a character all of their own. It is the beginning of a quest that would lead her further and further into abstraction.”

Photo by Claudia

Once back in Paris, together Donas and Archipenko lead to re-establishing La Section d'Or, an influential Cubist group that also includes major names such as Albert Gleizes, František Kupka, Fernand Léger, Léopold Survage and Thorvald Hellesen.
 

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In addition to Donas, the group also includes numerous other leading female artists, including Natalia Goncharova, Marie Vassilieff and Baroness d'Oettingen. Travelling exhibitions of La Section d'Or also feature paintings by De Stijl artists Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, whom the couple knew personally. These artists advocated a more inclusive and diverse definition of Cubism. Pared down geometrically abstract work was valued alongside more colourful and ornate Cubist styles.
 

Photo by Claudia

“In 1924 Paris saw the birth of Surrealism, a movement that strongly opposed the Cubism of La Section d’Or. Remarkably, the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte began his career within the Cubist tradition.

Photo by Claudia

An early Cubo-Futurist work by Magritte is on display in Enchanting Modernism, serving as a bridge to our second major autumn exhibition: Magritte. La ligne de vie. In this exhibition, Magritte himself narrates the story behind his iconic surrealist works, based on an actual lecture he gave at the KMSKA in 1938.” -KMSKA

Hardcover books of both exhibitions are also available for those unable to visit in person here: https://www.kmskashop.be/en/books/others/

Until January 11, 2026, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA) invites visitors to view the exhibition “Donas, Archipenko & La Section d’Or. Enchanting Modernism.”