New York’s Ukrainian Museum opened a fabulous new building in the East Village this spring with an appropriately groundbreaking exhibition. Audaciously but intelligently installed, this first comprehensive overview of Alexander Archipenko since his centennial exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in 1986 is a stunner. It will force many to reconsider a man who is often cited as a pioneer of Modern sculpture, but whose individual works are less memorable.

Born in 1887, Archipenko was steeped in the culture of his hometown, Kiev, where his grandfather had been an icon painter. He was thrown out of the conservative art academy because of his subversive tastes; instead he learned about sculpture from the city’s museums and churches. The turn of the century in Ukraine was a period of major archaeological discoveries, and Archipenko’s excitement about the unearthed Neolithic and Scythian artifacts shows in his early, primitive works. He was especially turned on by the Baba, the ancient fertility goddess on the grounds of the university where his father was engineering professor.

Archipenko spent two vital years in Moscow from 1906 to 1908 before heading off for Paris, where he made his mark as an avant-garde pioneer. You can sense in his early work that he swallowed any positive influence or style, ancient or contemporary. He absorbed Egyptian and Gothic styles at the Louvre, which he described as his true university in Paris, but he was equally attuned to the latest currents. He lived in La Ruche, the “beehive” building in Montparnasse that was home to such impecunious artists as Chagall, Soutine, and Leger. Through Leger, an especially close friend, he had firsthand contact with the Cubists, whose new perspective accorded perfectly with his own primitivism.

Archipenko made several formally significant sculptural leaps in the years just before World War I. Most famously, it was he – not Henry Moore – who put the holes into Modern sculpture. He was also at the forefront of a revival of polychromy, virtually absent from sculpture since the Renaissance. And he was a fearless explorer of concave and convex forms, and of countless funky new materials.

Yet for all the boxes that can be checked for Archipenko the innovator, and for all the elegance, appeal, and sumptuousness of the works gathered at the Ukrainian Museum, these are not sculptures of the first order. You have to look at the dates to remind yourself that, yes, he was ahead of his times, that he was indeed the first one there. Otherwise, the works often seem period pieces.

The problem has partly to do with his unremitting stylishness: His work is more resolved, accessible, and easygoing than seems appropriate for an explorer of unknown forms. He may have been too much the craftsman for his own good. Because he was open to such a variety of styles and rarely held back from elegant sensuality in his depiction of the female form, it often looks as if he had forced elements of a given style onto what would otherwise be a solid, respectable sculpture.

In the 1915 bronze “Woman Combing Her Hair,” the scooped-out faceting of her lap and the punctured absence of her head seem to be Modernist afterthoughts in what is an otherwise business-as-usual, sinuous, voluptuous statue. “Walking” (1914-15) seems, similarly, more an application of Cubist principles to a solid sculptural object than a sculptural exploration of Cubist form. The guitar-like, opened-up belly, the cupped-hands head, the funnel like leg are all very moderne, but they are all in the right place, anatomically.

The Brancusi-like “Flat Tor so” (1914) is exquisitely truncated, but leaves enough in to avoid the kind of ambiguities Brancusi himself would engender. We get a pert little knee to ensure that, for all its abstraction, the eroticism of the figure is nicely grounded.

Perhaps this is looking the gift horse in the mouth. It is telling, however, that when you get past the arthistorical sense of “importance,” the most satisfying works are actually the more conservative ones from the post-World War I period when Archipenko, like many in his generation (including Picasso and Matisse, who are his mainstay influences), retrenched to a lyrical classicism with a Modernist accent.

Among his best “retro” is the floating “Torso in Space” (1935), of which there are three versions, in different materials. There are hints of Arp and Brancusi in the way she is abstracted, but this biomorph bereft of arms, head, and feet nonetheless feels more like a streamlined Maillol.

Archipenko was given a solo exhibition at the 1920 Venice Biennale, and then settled in Berlin for a few years before immigrating to the United States. Almost immediately upon arrival, he opened the first of his art schools in this country, and with typical aplomb entered the art life of his new home. He was a tireless instigator, educator, and polemicist, patenting machines for making moving sculpture and pioneering the use of new materials.

He was probably closer in spirit to the engineer father who disapproved of his artistic career than his icon painting grandfather. Many of his schemes and manifestos have a faint whiff of Dada or Futurist absurdity about them, but it is never quite possible to tell: He may well have been deadly earnest. Whatever his intentions, his Plexiglas totems in the 1940s, sinuous, seamless, at once transparent and mysterious forms, are among his most exquisite creations, a genuinely fecund meeting of modernity and timelessness.

Until September 4 (222 E. 6th Street, between Second and Third Avenues, 212-228-0110).