Jacques Lipchitz - biography

Jacques Lipchitz (August 22 [O.S. August 10] 1891 – May 16, 1973) was a Cubist sculptor. Jacques Lipchitz was born Chaim Jacob Lipchitz, son of a building contractor in Druskininkai, Lithuania, then within the Russian Empire. At first, under the influence of his father, he studied engineering, but soon after, supported by his mother he 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 sculpture. 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 at Léonce Rosenberg's Galerie L’Effort Moderne 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, and the deportation of Jews to the Nazi death camps, Jacques Lipchitz had to flee France. With the assistance of the American journalist Varian Fry in Marseille, he escaped the Nazi regime and went 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. He has been identified among seventy of those sculptors in a photograph Life magazine published that was taken at the exhibition. 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.

Lipchitz taught one of the most famous contemporary artists, Marcel Mouly. Beginning in 1963 he returned to Europe for several months of each year and worked in Pietrasanta, Italy. In 1972 his autobiography was published on the occasion of an exhibition of his sculpture at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Jacques Lipchitz died in Capri, Italy. His body was flown to Jerusalem for burial.

Selected works

• "Sailor with Guitar" - 1914
• "Bather" - (1916–17)
• "Woman with Book" - (1918) at Carleton College
• "Bather, bronze" - 1923-25
• "Reclining Nude with Guitar" - (1928), a prime example of Cubism
• "Dancer with Veil" - (1928)
• "Dancer" - (1929)
• "The Song of the Vowels" - (Le Chant des Voyelles), - (1931) cast bronze sculptures at Cornell University, Princeton University, UCLA, Stanford University, Kykuit Estate Gardens, Paris
• "Bull and Condor" - (1932)
• "Bust of a Woman" - (1932)
• "David and Goliath" - (1933)
• "Embracing Figures" - (1941)
• "Prometheus Strangling the Vulture" - (1944)
• "Rescue II"- (1947)
• "Mother and Child" - (1949) at the Honolulu Academy of Arts
• "Bellerophon Taming Pegasus: Large Version" - (1964–66) at Columbia Law School
• "Peace on Earth" - (1967–1969)