Lippy Lipshitz

Biography

Lipshitz opened his first exhibition in Cape Town on 16 May 1932 at the Martin Melck House. The critic Bernard Lewis, who wrote for the magazine The Cape, received modern art with hostility, and the sculptor had to defend himself.

He was born on 8 May 1903 in Plungė (Plungian in Yiddish), into a Jewish family. His father, Shlomeh Josef Lipshitz of Dvinsk, left for Cape Town in February 1904 to look for work. He left his wife and child with her father, Yankeh Faktor. The grandfather had built the local synagogue, and the boy, according to his biographers, first felt the pull of art while looking at its decoration. He learned to draw, to carve wood and to model in dough and candle grease. In 1908 his mother and he travelled to Cape Town by way of Bremen, and by 30 April they had arrived.

At school he was taught drawing by the painter Ruth Prowse. He finished school in 1920 and briefly thought of becoming a writer. In April 1922 he enrolled at the Cape Town Art School, where British academic discipline prevailed. There he made friends with the painter Russel Harvey and the sculptor Moses Kottler. Kottler had studied in Jerusalem, at the Bezalel School, and in Germany, and through him Lipshitz first saw modern art. In 1925 the sculptor Herbert Vladimir Meyerowitz arrived in Cape Town from Berlin as a lecturer at the Michaelis School of Fine Art. He took Lipshitz on as his assistant, taught him woodcarving and lent him Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik (1915), a study of West African sculpture. At the end of 1926 they quarrelled and parted.

In 1928, with a grant from Ernest Oppenheimer, Lipshitz went to Paris. He settled in Montparnasse and worked at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière under Bourdelle, a former assistant of Rodin. There he came to know Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism and Constructivism. In May 1929, when his wife was expecting their first child, he had to leave the academy and live by sculpture. His work was accepted for the Salon d’Automne of 1929. That same year he visited the studios of Ossip Zadkine and Constantin Brâncuși, and through a friend he met the circle of Jewish artists of the School of Paris: Chaïm Soutine, Jules Pascin, Moïse Kisling and Amedeo Modigliani. His wife went back to Cape Town in February 1930; he stayed on for two more years, lived as a bohemian and began to sign himself “Lippy” so as not to be confused with the Cubist Jacques Lipchitz.

He returned to Cape Town in March 1932. Lewis attacked his exhibitions at Asbey’s Galleries in 1934 and 1937 once more, while younger critics defended Lipshitz, among them the sculptor René Graetz. He took part in the first exhibition of the New Group (Cape Town, May 1938), organised by Gregoire Boonzaier in opposition to the conservative South African Society of Artists. In November 1940 Edward Roworth, director of the Michaelis School and of the South African National Gallery, publicly supported Hitler’s suppression of modern art. Lipshitz spoke against him at the People’s Club, and the magazine Trek printed the speech in full on 7 November 1940.

From 1932 he was friends with the Expressionist painter Wolf Kibel. Together they leased a building at 18 Roeland Street, named it Palm Studios and gave classes there for young artists. They developed a technique of monotype printing, and these prints were the first in South Africa to attract wide attention. Because of money troubles they were evicted in May 1937, and Kibel, who was ill with tuberculosis, died on 29 June 1938.

In May 1947 Lipshitz left for London. In April 1948 he showed 25 carvings at the Galerie Apollinaire, and critics received them warmly. He met Henry Moore, spent time in Jacob Epstein’s studio and travelled to Paris with Jankel Adler to see Jean Arp. He returned home in November 1948.

In 1950 Lipshitz’s works were sent to the Venice Biennale. The South African press, above all the newspaper Die Burger, raised an uproar, and the works went on private funds. The South African National Gallery bought his “Tree of Life” (1950) and “Jacob Wrestling with the Angel” (1946). In 1950 he began teaching at the Michaelis School. In June 1964 the South African Academy of Science and Art awarded him its medal for sculpture, and in October of that year he became an associate professor. In 1978 he emigrated to Israel and died there in 1980.