Book Description

Jacques Lipchitz was one of the giants of twentieth-century sculpture. He drew his themes from the mythologies of many lands, from the Bible, and from personal experiences which his fertile imagination transformed into metaphors for universal human experiences. Love, pathos, violence, death, and above all, struggle, are the subjects of Lipchit'z work from the thirties onward, reflecting his eloquent response to the great events of the time: the scourge of Nazism, the holocaust of World War II, the birth of Israel. Arriving in Paris from his native Lithuania in 1909, Lipchitz at the age of eighteen found himself in the midst of what Gertrude Stein called "the heroic age of Cubism." Within a few years he became not only an accomplished sculptor, but the first artist to succeed in translating Cubist principles into three-dimensional form. Lipchitz's innovative Cubist sculptures of 1913-15 alone entitle him to a lasting place in modern art. Yet, with indefatigable energy and invention, he went on to forge a continually evolving and intensely personal style. From the 1920s on, his oeuvre manifests a dual nature, improvisational on the one hand, and heroic on the other. Like many European artists and intellectuals, Lipchitz took refuge in the United States during World War II. The freedom and energy of the New World had a liberating effect on this veteran of the Parisian avant-garde, and it was in America, during the postwar decades, that his mature style reached its final definition. The author, Dr A M Hammacher, is former director of the Kroller-Muller Museum in the Netherlands. He re-creates the intellectual milieu which the young Lipchitz found in Paris and examines in detail the sculptor's encounters with Cubists, Futurists, Surrealists, Dadaists, the Russian avant-garde, and the circle of experimental poets whose influence on Lipchitz has hitherto been unappreciated. With discerning scholarship, he reveals Lipchitz not only as a prime exponent of modernism but as an artist whose baroque sensibilities link him with the older traditions of Western European art. His close personal friendship with the artist has enabled him to write with deep understanding of the creative procedures of this master of modern sculpture. A biographical outline, a list of major exhibitions, and a bibliography complement the text. The broad selection of illustrations includes not only all of Lipchitz's major sculptures, but also a group of representative drawings and paintings, documentary photographs, and a number of Cubist sculptures by other artists.