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Ad Code: 1
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from Auction House Records.
Sailor with Guitar
Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
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Biography from AskART:
| Jacques Lipchitz, the eldest son of a wealthy Jewish contractor, was born in Druskieniki,
Lithuania in 1891. His interest in modeling and drawing was evident
when he was in grade school. At the age of 18, and against the wishes
of his father to become an engineer, he departed for Paris to enroll in
anatomy and stone carving classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts - at the
encouragement of his mother and uncle. He also studied at the Academie
Julian and the Academie Colarossi.
In 1914, Lipchitz traveled
with Diego Rivera to Madrid and Majorca, where he was introduced to
Picasso, Max Jacob, Juan Gris, Modigliani, and other artists in the
Cubist circle. However, his greatest influence came from his interest
in art history, providing him with an unlimited source of imagery.
Lipchitz
applied theories of mathematics and proportion to the concepts of
Braque and Picasso, as did many second generation Cubists. A relatively
new movement in art was being created, where curves, planes, lines, and
their intersections and overlapping would form new relationships. His
works display a lifetime of continuous growth and exploration, spanning
the Cubism style to Mannerism, and subjects from non-committal to those
that carry profound visual symbolism. Although he was a leader in
innovation and experimentation, his work never embraced total
abstraction and never tried to escape from the reality of art as
symbolic expression.
In the mid-1920s, Lipchitz began making
sculptures in a distinctively new style. His sculptures were frequently
constructed from bronze and engaged new ways of exploring light and
space. These new works, called transparents, provided a greater
emphasis on utilizing negative space. Although unpopular at the time,
the works and ideas behind the transparents became popular with Picasso
and Juan Gris.
After 1925, Lipchitz departed from the Cubist manner and began to soften the geometric
angularity of his pieces into curvilinear, openwork sculptures whose
expressive subjects were drawn from ancient mythology and the Bible. He
achieved naturalism in these works that can be seen in Woman Leaning on
Elbow.
In 1941, Varian Fry was instrumental in facilitating
Lipchitz to flee Vichy, France, to the United States -- during the
German invasion of France. Lipchitz relocated in New York where he
continued to fill commissions from all over the world including The
Spirit of Enterprise, Fairmount Park, Philadelphia; Notre Dame de
Liesse, Assy in Haute-Savoie; and his most famous work commissioned for
the 1937 Paris Exposition Universelle entitled "Prometheus". (In the
myth, the gods punish Prometheus for bringing fire to humans by turning
him into stone and allowing a vulture to peck at his liver. In the
piece, however, Prometheus is shown unchained, strangling the vulture,
used as a symbol of ignorance.) In 1951, he presented Fry with his
completed Embracing Figures. In 1952, a fire destroyed and claimed
most of Lipchitz' work.
In 1955, he began producing his
celebrated semi-automatics-masses of clay or plasticine, which he would
first mold underwater using only his sense of touch.
Examples of his work can be seen in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, and the Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania.
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Biography from AskART:
| A sculptor who adapted Cubism to sculpture, Jacques Lipchitz was one of
the leading sculptors of the 20th century. He was born in
Druskieniki, Lithuania and fled from Paris, where he had lived from his
youth, to the United States in 1941 when the war was getting heavy.
He
had studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris from 1909 to 1911 and
at the Academy Julian. He arrived in America when the Abstract
Expressionist movement was beginning to take hold, and this likely
influenced the much more emotional expression of the later part of his
career. His work was much more emotional and rounded in form than
the earlier cubist work, and his subject matter was epic, reflecting
his interest in myths, heroic tales and religious symbolism. His
largest work is Bellerophon Taming Pegasus, completed in 1964 for the Columbia University Law School and measuring 30 feet.
His sculpture, Bather,
is in the sculpture garden of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in
Lincoln, Nebraska, and following is the Gallery's website description
of the work:
..."he presents multiple views of the figure in the
conceptual realism style of the Cubist movement. This was the largest
figure attempted by Lipchitz at this point in his career. He says of
this work: 'I was returning to the problem of creating a cubist figure,
free-standing in surrounding space, creating that space by its axial
pivot. The legs are placed firmly at right angles to each other, and
the circular movement is suggested by curvilinear forms of drapery
enclosing the arm, actually enclosing space . . . It was in a sense my
farewell to literal cubism, the record of the movement when it was no
longer necessary for me to concentrate on the vocabulary of forms, when
I could move onto a sculpture of themes and ideas.'
Source:
(sheldon.unl.edu/HTML/ARTIST/Lipchitz_J/SG.html)
"Dictionary of American Sculptors," edited by Glenn Opitz
"Lipchitz, an Ocean Away From His Cubist Years," The New York Times on the Web, 3/17/2000.
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Jacques Lipchitz is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Sculptors
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