Jacques Lipchitz

Jacques Lipchitz: Cubism Made Solid

In 1941, with Paris under German occupation, a Jewish sculptor from the Lithuanian spa town of Druskininkai got himself to Toulouse and then, with the intervention of Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art, onto a boat to New York. He was fifty, he had already done the work that would define twentieth-century sculpture's relationship to Cubism, and he had more than thirty years left. Jacques Lipchitz died on Capri in 1973 and was buried in Jerusalem — a route through the century that reads like an argument in itself.

From Druskininkai to Montparnasse

He was born Chaim Jacob Lipchitz on 22 August 1891 into a Jewish family in Druskininkai, then in the Russian Empire. His first schooling pointed him at practical things: technical college in Bialystok, and by Britannica's account engineering study in Vilnius. In 1909 he went to Paris, where the practical training was quietly abandoned. He enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts and continued at the Académie Julian and the Académie Colarossi, but the more consequential education happened at the Louvre, where he worked through what he called primitive art alongside archaic Greek, Egyptian and Roman sculpture. That combination — a technician's hands and an archaeologist's appetite — never really left him.

A stretch of Russian military service in 1912–13 interrupted the Paris years. By 1912 he had begun exhibiting; in 1913 Diego Rivera introduced him to Pablo Picasso, and the direction of his life changed.

The Problem of Cubist Sculpture

Cubist painting had an obvious point: it broke the tyranny of a single viewpoint on a flat canvas. Cubist sculpture had no such obvious point, because a sculpture already offers every viewpoint to anyone willing to walk around it. Lipchitz's achievement was to find a genuine problem inside that apparent redundancy and then solve it.

His answer, worked out from about 1915, was to treat the sculpture not as an object to be walked around but as a construction of faceted planes, solid blocks and low reliefs that fused several readings into one built form. *The Head* is among the first mature Cubist works of that period; *Man with Guitar* (1916) is the canonical example, a stack of interlocked geometry in which the guitar and the man are simultaneously present and neither is described. The Whitney characterises the shift as a move into Crystal Cubism, naturalistic detail subordinated to abstract structure.

He did not do it alone. Léonce Rosenberg put him under contract in 1916 and gave him his first solo show at the Galerie de L'Effort Moderne in 1920. And from roughly 1916 to 1920 he worked closely with the painter Juan Gris, the pair investigating — as the Metropolitan Museum records — how mathematical formulas and proportional systems could extend the Cubist language. It was Cubism approached as a discipline rather than a mood.

Transparents: Drawing in Air

Around 1925 Lipchitz walked away from it. What replaced Cubism was the series he called the *transparents*: small, open, linear constructions in which void carried as much weight as bronze, and the eye read through the sculpture rather than off it. The themes turned to the circus and to music — *Harpist* (1928), *The Couple* (1928–29), *Figure* (1926–30) — and, as Britannica notes, feeling began to share the work with form. In 1927 a commission for the gardens of the Vicomte de Noailles produced *Joy of Life*, his first major outdoor sculpture, and the beginning of a monumental instinct that would govern the rest of his career.

Myth, Patrons, and the Thirties

Through the 1930s his subject matter broadened into biblical and mythological narrative and into the recurring figure of mother and son. The Museum of Modern Art acquired work; he made monumental pieces for the 1937 Universal Exhibition in Paris; his first retrospective came at the Galerie de la Renaissance in 1930. His dealers tracked his rise — Paul Guillaume early on, Rosenberg, then Jeanne Bucher from 1926 to 1941 — and his patrons included Coco Chanel and the Philadelphia collector Albert C. Barnes, both of whom pushed his work internationally.

The American Monuments

He landed in New York in 1941, showed at the Buchholz Gallery, signed with Curt Valentin in 1942 and stayed with him until Valentin's death in 1954, and settled at Hastings-on-Hudson. Exile did not soften him; it made him heavier. The spiritual and mythological pressure that had been building since the thirties produced *The Prayer* (1943), *Prometheus Strangling the Vulture II* (1944–53) and *Sacrifice, II* (1948–52), works of dense, muscular, deliberately unbeautiful mass. Public commissions followed: *The Song of the Vowels*, *Birth of the Muses*, and *Bellerophon Taming Pegasus*, begun in 1966 and installed at Columbia University in 1977, four years after his death. The Museum of Modern Art gave him a major retrospective in 1954.

Honours accumulated — knight of the French Legion of Honour in 1946, the Gold Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1966. He kept collecting, too: Picasso, Géricault, and an African collection of some eighty pieces shown at the Museum of Primitive Art in 1960. In 1962 he found the bronze foundries of Pietrasanta in Tuscany, and out of that discovery came *Images of Italy*, a series of twenty-five sculptures made in the last decade of his life.

Why Jacques Is Called a Genius

The specific faculty is structural translation: the ability to take a theory built for two dimensions and find out what it could honestly mean in three. That is harder than it sounds, and most of his contemporaries who tried it produced Cubist-looking objects rather than Cubist sculpture. Lipchitz built forms whose logic could not be paraphrased in paint — faceted, load-bearing constructions that had to be solved as engineering as much as imagined as art, which is where the abandoned Vilnius training quietly reasserts itself. The *transparents* are the second act of the same intelligence, and arguably the more original one: making absence structural, so that a bronze reads like a line drawn in the air.

It should be said plainly that the sources do not record critics reaching for the word genius. Museums call him a pioneer — Britannica credits him with pioneering the adaptation of Cubist principles to three-dimensional media, the Whitney with bridging figuration and abstraction. That is praise of a different temperature, and the counter-case supports the cooler reading. He was not first: Picasso, Archipenko, Duchamp-Villon and Laurens were pressing at the same door, and priority in Cubist sculpture is genuinely contested. His method with Gris — formulas, proportional systems — belongs to a systematiser rather than a visionary. And the later monumental work, the writhing bronzes of the American decades, has never commanded the consensus his 1915–1930 output does; many find it rhetorical where the early work was rigorous. The strongest honest claim is that for about fifteen years Lipchitz thought more clearly about sculptural space than almost anyone alive.

Legacy

He died on Capri on 26 May 1973 and was buried in Jerusalem. His will created the Jacques and Yulla Lipchitz Foundation to preserve the plasters and terracottas — the working evidence, not just the finished bronzes — and the Marlborough Gallery took on the estate. His sculptures sit in the Whitney, the Modern, the Guggenheim Bilbao and on the Columbia campus, but the durable inheritance is conceptual. After the *transparents*, empty space was available to sculptors as a material rather than an absence, and the century took him up on it.

Achievements

• Notable work: John F. Kennedy Memorial
• Movement: abstract art