Jacques Lipchitz

Biography

In the autumn of 1909 the eighteen-year-old Chaim Jacob Lipschitz arrived in Paris, so the story goes, with money his mother had given him. His father wanted him to be an engineer, but the son chose sculpture.

He was born on 22 August 1891 (10 August, Old Style) in Druskininkai, then called Druskieniki, in the Grodno Governorate of the Russian Empire. His father, Abram Lipschitz, was a building contractor; his mother was Leah Rachel Krinsky. He attended a cheder, a traditional Jewish primary school, then a commercial school in Białystok, and in 1905–1909 the Vilnius Realschule, a secondary school with a modern curriculum. According to some accounts, he also studied drawing in Vilnius in those years.

In Paris he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and at the Académie Julian; by some accounts he also attended drawing classes at the Académie Colarossi. He soon found himself among the artists of Montmartre and Montparnasse, becoming friends with Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani and Juan Gris. Modigliani later painted a double portrait of Lipchitz and his wife, Berthe. In 1911 his father went bankrupt, the support from home stopped, and Lipchitz had to earn money: he delivered fruit and worked as an assistant to other sculptors. In 1912 he was summoned to Russia for military service but was exempted and returned to Paris. That same year he exhibited for the first time at the Paris Salons.

In 1913–1914 geometric forms appeared in his work (Sailor with Guitar, Acrobat on Horseback), and in 1914–1918 he made Cubist figures out of overlapping planes. From 1915 he was under contract to the dealer Léonce Rosenberg; in 1920 his first solo exhibition was held at Rosenberg’s gallery, L’Effort Moderne. He later broke the contract in order to make what he wanted himself, and lived in want for several years. In 1924–1925 he became a French citizen and married the poet Berthe Kitrosser, whom he had known since 1914–1915.

In 1922 the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, commissioned seven bas-reliefs and two sculptures from him. In the 1920s he experimented with abstract forms, which he himself called transparent sculptures. By the end of the decade his work was among the most sought after in France. Later the hard forms softened, and in the early 1930s he moved to a more expressive, dynamic sculpture: Mother and Child (1930) and Return of the Prodigal Son (1931). He also worked as a decorator and furniture designer.

After the Nazis came to power, biblical and mythological subjects appeared in Lipchitz’s work: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (1932) and The Rape of Europa (1938). His nine-metre Prometheus was shown at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. It seems to me that these works show best how he stopped being simply a Cubist.

After the occupation of France, Lipchitz fled. The American journalist Varian Fry helped him in Marseille. In 1941 he arrived in New York, and later settled in Hastings-on-Hudson. In 1946 he returned to Paris but soon went back to the United States; he received American citizenship in 1958. There he made The Song of the Vowels, Birth of the Muses (1944–1950, on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Bellerophon Taming Pegasus for Columbia Law School, completed after his death. In 1954 a retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and then travelled to Minneapolis and Cleveland. In 1965 the John F. Kennedy Memorial was installed in London; in 2019 it was moved to the lobby of International Students House. In 1972 his autobiography, written with Harvard Arnason, an art historian, appeared on the occasion of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

From 1963 he spent several months of each year in Europe and worked in Pietrasanta, Italy. In his later years he grew noticeably closer to the Jewish religious tradition.

Lipchitz died on 26 May 1973 on Capri. He was buried in Jerusalem.