LIPCHITZ, INNOVATIVE SCULPTOR

LIPCHITZ, INNOVATIVE SCULPTOR

by Joan K. Yanni

Most art enthusiasts would name Pablo Picasso as the most innovative sculptor of the 20^th century. But though Picasso might have been best known, he was surpassed in quantity--and often quality--by Jacques Lipchitz. MAG has two works by Lipchitz: Study for Hagar (55.15) and Study for Benediction (55.16). Both are in the case of sculptures in the 20^th-century European gallery on the second floor.

Chaim Jacob Lipchitz was born to Russian-Jewish parents in Lithuania in 1891. His father, a building contractor, opposed his son’s wish to study art, but his mother encouraged him and arranged for him to go to Paris in 1909. He studied for a short time at the École des Beaux-Arts before transferring to the Académie Julian. He spent his mornings drawing and modeling from life, the rest of the day in museums. He was talented and eager to learn, fascinated by art from all periods in time and all parts of the world.

In 1909 the Paris art world was in ferment, with new ideas and unique forms abounding. Lipchitz joined a group of artists living in Montmartre and Montparnasse and became friends with Amedeo Modigliani, Juan Gris, and Diego Rivera and was a neighbor of Constantin Brancusi. Lipchitz’s first works (1910-12) had their source in Greek and Roman classical art and resembled those of Aristide Maillol (MAG’s Torso, 60.16). In 1913, through Rivera, he met Picasso and became immersed in Cubism.

 He saw immediately the sculptural possibilities in Cubism and turned to a geometric, cubist style. His relationship with Picasso was one of mutual respect: he derived many of his motifs from Picasso’s canvases while Picasso respected Lipchitz’s views on his own sculpture. Lipchitz’s first purely cubist works, composed of abstract, overlapping planes, appeared in 1915-16. Between 1915 and 1930 he was the most widely recognized and admired cubist sculptor, and his work was acclaimed. In 1922 the American collector Albert Barnes acquired a number of his sculptures and commissioned relief sculptures for the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania.

In the 1920s Lipchitz began experimenting with abstract forms he called “transparents,” which were formed by using a series of planes to break up volume and giving equal space to volumes and the voids that separate them, sometimes with edges spiraling around a central axis. Much of his work from the late twenties onward combines Cubism with the lyrical quality of his transparents.

With the Nazi invasion of France, Lipchitz was forced to flee to the United States. He arrived in 1941, and found an America not ready for his advanced modernism, but open to new ideas and techniques. The Abstract Expressionist movement had become prominent and the emotional expression of ideas was an influence that changed his work. It became more emotional,  with rounded forms and muscular shapes, often in agitated arrangements. His subjects changed from harlequins and musicians to themes from myths and heroic legends and even religious symbolism.

“I felt young and strong, as though I were just beginning my career once more," he said. Lipchitz was 50 and was recognized as one of the premier cubist sculptors, but in the second phase of his long career he turned out a prodigious body of emotional sculpture that was profoundly different from his detached, elegant Cubism.

His experimentation never stopped. In 1955 he began to make “semi-automatics,” in which he would squeeze clay or plasticine under water, creating by touch alone, then bring the work to completion out of the water, a method acclaimed for its innovation and one which suggested original new forms.

Once established in America, Lipchitz married and settled in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. He became a father at age 60, and this experience prompted his emotional sculptures of mothers and children.

One of the Biblical themes in which he was vitally interested was the story of Hagar, the subject of one of the works in the Gallery collection. His experiences with the Nazis had led him to become passionate about Jewish causes and concerned over the conflict between Jews and Arabs in the new state of Israel. His large sculpture of Hagar, done in 1948, was “a prayer for brotherhood between the Arabs and the Jews.”

Hagar was a young Egyptian girl, handmaiden of Sarah, wife of Abraham. When Sarah and Abraham reached advanced years without children, Sarah told her husband to take Hagar as his concubine and produce issue through her--an accepted practice at the time. Hagar gave birth to Ishmael, regarded in Muslim tradition as the father of Arab tribes. But though Sarah was long past childbearing years, the Lord granted her a child, and Isaac was born to her.  Sarah demanded that Abraham banish Hagar from their household, and he sent Hagar and Ishmael into the desert.  As they were dying of thirst, an angel appeared to them and showed Hagar where a spring of water was, thus saving them from death. The story substantiated Lipchitz’s strong feeling that Jews and Arabs are brothers and must find a way to be at peace with one another. The Hagar theme appears twice in 1948 and was  carved in magnificent stone sculptures 1969 and 1971 by the aging artist.

Beginning in 1963 he returned to Europe for several months each year, working in Italy, where many of his large bronzes were cast. He died in Capri, Italy, in 1973 and was buried in Jerusalem, as he had requested.  His works, ranging from small models to huge monuments, are in all major collections and can be seen throughout America and Europe.

Source: Grove Encyclopedia of Art;, New York Times art review, 3/17/2000; John L McKenzie, Dictionary of the Bible; files of docent .Susan Feinstein.