Jacques Lipchitz

Sculptor

• Born: August 22, 1891
• Birthplace: Druskieniki, Lithuania
• Died: May 26, 1973
• Place of death: Capri, Italy

Lithuanian sculptor

Throughout his long career, Lipchitz made immeasurable contributions to the development of twentieth century sculpture. Beginning with his works of 1913-1930, he was one of the most inventive of the cubist sculptors, creating the sculptural equivalent of the ambiguous spaces and volumes in cubist painting. In his later works, he was less concerned with theory, searching instead for a more personal, expressive formal language.

Area of achievement Art

Early Life

When eighteen-year-old Jacques Lipchitz (zhahk LIHP-shihts) arrived in Paris in 1909 from his native Lithuania, he had received little if any formal artistic training and knew very little of the history of art. He later recalled that, although there were no sculptors in the small town of Druskieniki, where he was born, and he had no idea what sculpture was, he had begun on his own to model in clay. When he went to school in nearby Vilna, he encountered the usual art instruction of copying from plaster casts of classical Greek and Roman statues. Having been convinced by this experience that real sculpture had to be white, he whitewashed his own clay sculpture.

In Paris, anxious to begin his studies, Lipchitz first was enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts, under the tutelage of Jean-Antoine Ingalbert, but soon transferred to the smaller, more informal Académie Julian, where he worked with Raoul Verlet. These two schools shared many of the same faculty, and methods of instruction were similar: life drawing and modeling classes; assigned compositions on themes taken from history, the Bible, and classical antiquity; and copying from the works of the masters.

One of the most important things Lipchitz learned from Verlet was the traditional concept of the sculpture sketch the clay or wax model that allows a sculptor to fix an idea immediately and to change it rapidly. Although many contemporary sculptors abandoned the preliminary sketch in favor of a direct and immediate experience in the final work, Lipchitz continued the practice throughout his career. More than 150 of his sketches have survived and are a significant part of his total work.

Verlet also introduced Lipchitz to François Rude’s idea that sculpture involved the contrast of planes and round volumes. This elementary theory had a profound effect on Lipchitz’s own work as, in his sketches, he not only recorded the idea and outlines of a subject but also began to explore fundamental forms and relationships. A typical work of this period, Woman and Gazelles (1912), was very favorably received when exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in 1913. Additionally, Lipchitz was exhibiting in several small galleries and at the Salon National des Beaux-Arts.

Life’s Work

In 1913, dissatisfied with the academic tradition in which he had been working, Lipchitz began to move seriously into what he called his “protocubist” phase. He was already aware of the more recent stylistic and theoretical developments in painting as a result of the Section d’Or Exhibition at the Galerie de la Boétie, featuring the works of Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, and Aleksandr Archipenko, and the publication by Gleizes and Metzinger of a treatise on cubism. Then Diego Rivera, who was himself painting in the cubist style, introduced Lipchitz to Pablo Picasso, and the two became good friends. Lipchitz, however, had seen almost no sculpture that could be considered cubist. He later recalled having seen several of Picasso’s experiments with translating collage into three dimensions, but for the most part, he began working toward cubism in sculpture entirely on his own.

Lipchitz’s first tentative steps in the direction of cubism are seen in Encounter (1913), in which he experimented with an angular geometry, and in Woman with Serpent (1913), a combinaton of the intricate interaction of masses with an implied, almost baroque, sense of linear movement. His interest in the opening up of the voids predicted his later “transparent” sculpture. Another important move in the direction of pure cubism was Dancer (1913). Completed after Woman with Serpent, this perfectly balanced figure, pivoting around an axis to emphasize its existence in the surrounding space, is composed of simple, massive, and geometric forms. Mother and Children (1914-1915) and Sailor with Guitar (1914) are further examples of Lipchitz’s progression from the curvilinear to a more geometric style and then to cubism. Departing from the circular movement in space of works such as Woman with Serpent or Dancer, he was now thinking in terms of absolute frontality and strong geometric, architectural, and vertical-horizontal forms. Light had also become important in his work, his having realized (as he later stated) that volume in sculpture is created by light and shadow.

The detachable figures of 1915 (such as Bather, Dancer, and Pierrot) illustrate that he now had a more complete understanding of the cubist vocabulary as it applied to sculpture. These works, originally made of different materials such as wood, metal, and even glass, were important milestones in the development of modern sculpture because they were some of the first examples of sculpture as construction. These figures also contain evidence of the “machine influence” that occupied so many painters at this time, that is, an interest in the relationship of machine forms to natural forms.

One of the best examples of Lipchitz’s early cubist works is Head of 1915, consisting of interlocking, opposing planes that create the mass of the head while to counter the verticality and horizontality of these planes the eyebrows curve upward in graceful arcs. The powerful simplicity of this work led to the architectural cubist structures in stone or bronze, each of which he titled simply Sculpture to indicate his emphasis on sculptural form rather than on subject. The austere, vertical, rectangular purity of these forms, so reminiscent of Gothic cathedrals or modern skyscrapers, led Lipchitz to be concerned that he had pushed cubism all the way to abstraction a direction he did not want to take since, for him, sculpture must always remain rooted in nature.

In Lipchitz’s next several pieces of 1915-1916 (Half-Standing Figure, Standing Personage, and Man with Guitar), he achieved the balance between the nonfigurative form and figuration for which he had been looking. In these works, he composed the idea of a human figure from the abstract sculptural elements of line, plane, volume, and the contrast of mass with void. In his cubist sculptures from 1916 through the 1920’s, Lipchitz explored many different trends, ranging from the highly abstract to a complication of rotating forms and an emphasis on strict frontality, plus some experiments with color. A series of stone reliefs of the early 1920’s established Lipchitz’s potential for leadership in the field of abstract, architectural sculpture, but he chose not to continue in this direction. Still convinced that sculpture must retain some ties with nature, he looked for new subject matter and for ways in which to humanize his figures to an even greater extent.

Although elements of cubism persisted in Lipchitz’s work through the 1930’s he always declared that he had never ceased to be a cubist he was now increasingly concerned with a recognizably human emotional response in his figures, emphasizing specific moods such as happiness, weariness, repose, and even mystery. He also experimented with actual motion as a part of the aesthetic statement in works such as Joy of Life (1927), a monumental figure that rotates on its base at four-minute intervals.

In 1925, Lipchitz made the first of his “transparents” works based on the premise that the actual core of a sculpture can be a void, as opposed to the traditional concept of sculpture composed of an integral mass. Liberated from the customary ideas of mass and volume, Lipchitz created a kind of three-dimensional drawing in space. He remained tied to traditional materials, however, casting his transparents in bronze rather than constructing them in cardboard and wire as Picasso and others did later.

Throughout the rest of his career, Lipchitz continued his search for human subject and content in a wide variety of works based on themes as diverse as portraiture, the mother and child, dancers, the embrace, musicians, and characters from the Old and New Testaments and from classical mythology, as well as a group of sculptural “beings” of his own creation, such as Chimene (1930) and Pilgrim(1942).

In 1941, the German invasion having forced him to leave Paris, Lipchitz arrived in New York. During his years in the United States, he gained even greater recognition, receiving many important commissions from both private and public sources. In 1954, a major retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art. When fire destroyed his studio and its contents in 1952, Lipchitz moved to Hastings-on-Hudson. In the early 1960’s, he made the first of several visits to Italy and Israel. In 1970-1971, there were important exhibitions of his work in Berlin and other European centers, in Tel Aviv, and in Jerusalem, and he began work on several monumental commissions, such as Bellerophon Taming Pegasus at Columbia University Law School, Government of the People at Municipal Plaza, Philadelphia, and Our Tree of Life at Hebrew University, Jerusalem. The year 1972 saw a major exhibition of his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the publication of his autobiography, both entitled My Life in Sculpture. The following year, Lipchitz died at the age of eighty-one on the island of Capri and was buried in Jerusalem.

Significance

In assessing the total work of Jacques Lipchitz, one fact becomes immediately apparent he was a sculptor who worked with a seemingly infinite variety of themes and who changed his style and approaches to sculpture at a pace that is potentially confusing to the casual viewer. As several historians have pointed out, most early twentieth century sculptors were “one-image” artists that is, they chose to make continual variations on a single or limited number of themes, such as the nude (Aristide Maillol), the elongated figure (Alberto Giacometti), or the ovoid (Constantin Brancuşi).

Lipchitz, however, like Picasso, often worked simultaneously in different styles. His last cubist sculptures and his transparents both date from the mid-1920’s. A close examination of both style and theme reveals that there was a consistency in Lipchitz’s work from beginning to end. What seems at first glance to have been random experimentation with different forms, images, and concepts was actually dictated by his own personality, his own philosophical and religious beliefs, and his own strong sense of discipline.

Bibliography

Hammacher, A. M. Jacques Lipchitz: His Sculpture. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1961. This monograph includes an introductory statement by Lipchitz, quotations from conversations in which he expresses some of his views on art, and excerpts from reviews on his work between 1917 and 1958. Also contains excellent black-and-white reproductions of major works.

Hope, Henry R. The Sculpture of Jacques Lipchitz. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1954. A monograph and also a catalog of the retrospective exhibition of Lipchitz’s works at the Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Fully illustrated, with a chronology, a listing of exhibitions of Lipchitz’s work, and excerpts from reviews.

Lipchitz, Jacques. Jacques Lipchitz: Sketches in Bronze. Text by H. H. Arnason. New York: Praeger, 1969. A complete cataloging of Lipchitz’s sculptural sketches, along with Arnason’s text, which emphasizes their importance to Lipchitz’s total work, and to the tracing of his stylistic development. Includes black-and-white reproductions of the 161 surviving sketches. Also contains a foreword written by Lipchitz.

Lipchitz, Jacques, and H. H. Arnason. My Life in Sculpture. New York: Viking Press, 1972. Based on a lengthy series of taped interviews with the artist, this book is the most complete documentation of Lipchitz’s life and career and is illustrated throughout with black-and-white reproductions of his major works. Also includes an extensive bibliography compiled by Bernard Karpel, chief librarian of the Museum of Modern Art.

Patai, Irene. Encounters: The Life of Jacques Lipchitz. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1961. One of the first biographies of Lipchitz published in English, it is now considered to be a somewhat romanticized account of the artist’s life and career. As the author states, this is not a critical appraisal of Lipchitz’s art but rather an account of the “joys and tragedies” of his life.

Pütz, Cathy. Jacques Lipchitz: The First Cubist Sculptor. London: Paul Holberton, 2002. Accessible and detailed introduction to Lipchitz and his art, describing his place within twentieth century sculpture. Includes numerous photographs and illustrations of his work.