Jacques Lipchitz

Acquired from the artist

Jacques Lipchitz & H. Harvard Arnason, My Life in Sculpture, New York, 1972, illustration of the stone version p. 37 & pls. 16-18
Alan G. Wilkinson, Jacques Lipchitz, A Life in Sculpture, (exhibition catalogue), Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1989, no. 23, illustration of another cast p. 82
Alan G. Wilkinson, The Sculpture of Jacques Lipchitz, a Catalogue Raisonné, the Paris Years, 1910-1940, vol. I, New York, 1996, no. 62, illustration of another cast p. 111

The bronze is in excellent condition. Features a textured dark red, brown and gold patina. The surface is a little dirty, particularly in the deeper crevices.
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In 1916 Lipchitz was freed from economic constraints as he entered into a contract with Léonce Rosenberg that provided extra funds for labor and material. With this money, Lipchitz was able to focus his attention on bold cubic forms in his sequences of seated and standing figures.

“In the sculpture which followed, Lipchitz began to show his grasp of the cubists’ analysis and penetration of form. His figures were represented as if seen from many angles and perspectives, often with a richly broken up surface of deep and shallow facets. Yet the subordination of parts to the whole, and the overall effect of agitated movement, conflicting with the sheer, static mass of stone gives these sculptures a quality that is unique in cubist art” (Henry R. Hope, The Sculpture of Jacques Lipchitz (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1954, p. 11).

The sculpture that he created between 1917 and 1919 has much more freedom of movement than his earlier sculpture which was infused with a dynamic geometric rhythm. His close association with Juan Gris brought new ideas to his art.

“Lipchitz said that after his realization that Cubism meant construction rather than simplification or abstraction, he changed his approach. Instead of paring down from nature, he began by imagining some forms, some movement, and then from these made a figure…In other words, rather than reducing from life, he was thinking first about a construction, an abstract idea, and trying to give it life” (Deborah A. Scott, Jacques Lipchitz and Cubism, New York, 1978, p. 10). His integrated network of flat planes and bulging forms, curves and angles and convex and concave surfaces are based in abstraction yet the form is recognizable. The anatomical components of Baigneuse III are clearly defined; they are based on human proportion and then given a new life.