Jacques Lipchitz was a Cubist sculptor. He was the son of a building contractor in Lithuania, then within the Russian Empire. At first he studied engineering, but soon moved to Paris (1909) to study at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian. It was there, in the artistic communities of Montmartre and Montparnasse that he joined a group of artists that included Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso as well as where his friend, Amedeo Modigliani, painted The Sculptor Jacques Lipchitz and His Wife Berthe Lipchitz. Living in this environment, Lipchitz soon began to create Cubist sculptures. In 1912 he exhibited at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and the Salon d'Automne with his first solo show held in Paris in 1920. In 1922 he was commissioned by the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania to execute five bas-reliefs. With artistic innovation at its height, in the 1920s he experimented with abstract forms he called transparent sculptures. Later he developed a more dynamic style, which he applied with telling effect to bronze figure and animal compositions. With the German occupation of France during World War II Lipchitz had to flee France. With the assistance of the American journalist Varian Fry he escaped to the United States. There, he eventually settled in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. He was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the Third Sculpture International Exhibition held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the summer of 1949. In 1954 a Lipchitz retrospective traveled from The Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and The Cleveland Museum of Art. In 1959, his series of small bronzes To the Limit of the Possible was shown at Fine Arts Associates in New York. Birth of the Muses, bronze, 1944-1950, In memory of Jerome Wiesner - in the permanent collection of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1972 his autobiography was published on the occasion of an exhibition of his sculpture at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Picasso’s monumental cubist sculpture was regarded as radical in its early years as most public art in large cities were calm and stoic and mainly depicted historical figures.
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DETAILS Artist Jacques Lipchitz (Lithuanian-American, 1891-1973) TITLE Jacques Lipchitz: Sketches in Bronze PUBLISHER Frederick A. Praeger (New York, NY) BINDING Hardcover. No dust jacket. ILLUSTRATED Black and white photographs SUBJECT(S) Art history; Cubism AUTHOR(S) Hjorvardur Harvard Arnason (American, 1909-86) | Photographer: James Moore ISBN ISBN 10: 0269025804, ISBN 13: 9780269025808 PERIOD Late 20th century DATE Copyright 1969 DIMENSIONS Width 9 Depth 0.5 Height 10.5 inches
Jacques Lipchitz, 1919
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A blog about visual culture and contemporary art.
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