Jacques Lipchitz

Estate of the artist

Marlborough Gallery, New York (acquired from the above)

Acquired from the above in 2008

Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, Jacques Lipchitz, A Life in Sculpture, 1989, no. 3, illustrated in the catalogue

Jacques Lipchitz (exhibition catalogue), Musée National d'art Moderne, Paris, 1959, another cast illustrated pl. 1

Lipchitz, The Cubist Period, 1913-1930 (exhibition catalogue), Marlborough-Gerson Gallery Inc., New York, 1968, another cast illustrated n.p.

Abraham Marie Hammacher, Jacques Lipchitz, His Sculpture, New York, 1975, no. 14, illustrated n.p.

Jacques Lipchitz, Skulpturen und Zeichnungen, 1911-1969 (exhibition catalogue), Stiftung Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, 1971, another cast illustrated p. 64

Jacques Lipchitz, Sculptures and Drawing from the Cubist Epoch (exhibition catalogue), Marlborough Gallery, New York, 1977, another cast illustrated p. 5

Nicole Barbier, Lipchitz, Oeuvres de Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973), Paris, 1978, another cast illustrated p. 14

Alan G. Wilkinson, The Sculpture of Jacques Lipchitz, A Catalogue Riasonné, Volume One, The Paris Years, 1910-1940, New York, 1996, no. 12, illustrated p. 38

Lipchitz's dramatically-posed female horsewoman is among his most elegant compositions from the Cubist period. With her fan splayed and her attenuated limbs flexed beautifully, this figure from 1913 presages the Spanish Dancer that the artist would conceive the following year.  Lipchitz's Chevalier à l'eventail is modeled after an acrobatic performer astride a horse in the Cirque Medrano, a spectacle that attracted the attention of many avant-garde artists of the era including Chagall, Picasso and Archipenko. Standing in contrapposto like the Botticelli Venus, Lipchitz's horsewoman bears similarities to the African tribal carvings and masks that had also inspired Picasso around this time.  Another significant aesthetic resource were the Cubist portraits of Mexican-born artist Diego Rivera, whom Lipchitz befriended the same year he created this form.

According to Alan G. Wilkinson, Chevalier à l'eventail was cast in a bronze edition of 7.  The present bronze is one of the rare works that the artist cast in Paris, before immigrating to the United States during the Second World War.  Wilkinson provides a synopsis of the stylistic genesis of this sculpture and its impact on Lipchitz's future work: "In Horsewoman with Fan, the various elements of the body are rendered in a simplified, schematic manner.  For example, the head and the neck appear to have been made as a separate unit to be fitted onto the shoulders.  Similarly the legs, like those of a mannequin, seem to lock onto the torso. The anecdotal attention to the woman's costume anticipates The Matador of 1914" (A. G. Wilkinson, Jacques Lipchitz, A Life in Sculpture, op. cit., p. 67).