Art Chronicle
An Interview with Jacques lipchitz
A
SCULPTOR,
it has been said, is because of the nature of his materials
the least mobile of artists and the quickest to take roots in a new
environment. The latter statement certainly holds for Jacques Lipchitz.
Of all the artists who have come to this country since the Nazi invasion
of France, Lipchitz was the most prompt to make himself productively
at home. And during the three and one half years since his arrival he
has enjoyed one of the most fertile, creative periods of his career.
Lipchitz was born in Druskieniki, Polish Lithuania, in 1891. At the
age of eighteen he went to Paris. His early work was conventionally
naturalistic with a tendency to geometrical emphases as he matured.
About 1913 he became interested in the researches of the cubists and
by the close of the First World War had become one of the leading
sculptors of the movement. The forms of Ills work at this time were
clean-cut, massive, geometrical. About 1925 a revolution took place in
his approach. Instead of geometrical solids, he set a:bout exploring the
sculptural possibilities of transparent forms outlined in twisted cast
bronze strips. The dominant rectilinear character of his previous work
gradually gave way to free flowing lines more suited to his new material.
Soon the contours of his solid forms also reflected this freedom. In the
early thirties he began to combine all these interests-pierced volumes,
outlined forms, solids-in his compositions with a clearly renewed inter- ·
est in nature. And this approach has continued down to his latest work–
a monumental female figure.
Lipchitz is a connoisseur as well as an artist. In Paris he had an
unusual collection of African, Oceanian, Near-Eastern, Greek, Mediaeval
and Renaissance objects picked up for a pittance among the antique
shops of the city. He has a fine eye for quality in works of art of all
periods. And he sees contemporary art in this broad perspective.
Lipchitz:
"To begin with, I would like to make it clear that I,
too, am a partisan, a very violent partisan for the liberty of art, the
liberty of personality, the liberty of creative expression-for the broad
highway of art through the ages, the royal road of tradition in the true
sense, the Great Stream: the right of every artist to express himself and
his duty to pour his own small stream into the great river. The river is
never the same; it is constantly expanding and constantly in motion.
