Arts and Letters

I would like to begin this tribute to Jacques Lipchitz by describing the meeting my wife and I had with him in 1966 at the Fonderia d'Arte in Pietrasanta, not far from Lucca in Italy. It was a foundry with a traditional reputation for skillful casting. Sculptors of various persuasions, from academic to avant-garde, and everything in between, brought their work to be cast there. It was one tremendous common studio, indoors as well as in the open. The man most respected by the sculptors and casters at that time was seventy-five-year-old Jacques Lipchitz.

We found him that morning in the yard working on one of his mythological compositions, a huge entanglement of figures, human and animal. In his beret and smock he looked the sculptor he was, vigorous, generous in body, full-faced, sun-tanned, his gray hair picturesquely untrimmed. His welcome was warm and friendly, his speech peculiarly his own, intermingled with French, English, Russian, Yiddish. I always liked the appearance of Jacques Lipchitz, his voice, the fusion of folksy intelligence and sophistication in him. He was most gracious that day, introduced us to the sculptors and casters and to the extraordinary proprietor of the foundry, Luigi Tomaso, whom everyone called "Mama Gigi" because he was so helpful and solicitous of everyone's needs. We had an excellent lunch with him and Lipchitz in a simple rustic setting.

After lunch we went to Lipchitz's studio where we saw the plaster model of his monument to Duluth, the French explorer and founder of the city in Minnesota that bears his name. I remember the imaginative quality and animation of that carnival-like figure, attired in an eighteenth-century costume, plumed hat, gauntlets, and all. Jacques Lipchitz told us that he had no likenesses to follow, but had to base his portrait only on verbal descriptions in old documents.

In the studio there was also a large unfinished plaster cast of Hagar and Ishmael. "I did this," Lipchitz said, gesturing vaguely, ''the idea is friendship between Arabs and Jews in Israel… an idea."

Lipchitz was one of those artists who are able to use mythological and Biblical themes for plastic interpretation of contemporary events and concerns. This tendency and ability to express himself through sculpture is further illustrated in his work after the defeat of Nazism: Happiness, Song of Songs, The Joy of Orpheus, which are full of hope for a better and peaceful world.

I am not an art historian and my intention is not to evaluate the career of Jacques Lipchitz as a sculptor. I am not capable of doing so. But I do know that he was one of that heroic group of artists: Modigliani, Soutine, Picasso, Juan Gris, Rivera, Zadkine, Archipenko, Chagall. Briefly, one may mention his early sculpture more or less in art-nouveau style, like The Woman and Gazelles, of 1912, his emerging soon after as the cubist sculptor with Sailor with Guitar, Girl with Braid, Man with Guitar of 1914-15, Harlequin with Mandolin of 1920. From the 1930s on he was the sculptor of the modern contemporary baroque familiar to us, the Lipchitz baroque. One must also mention the extraordinary portraits he did occasionally through his career, like the one of Cocteau, of Radiguet, and of our own Marsden Hartley.

It is difficult in this presentation to describe in depth this colorful personality, his tolerance of and kindness to young sculptors, his obsessive collecting of art and artifacts, his mysticism, his religious feelings. His religion was not narrow. It was ecumenical, for he believed deeply in the brotherhood of man. It is best expressed in his own words in the inscription on the sculpture of a Madonna and Child which he was commissioned to do:

Jacob Lipchitz, Jew, faithful to the religion of his ancestors, has made this Virgin to foster understanding between men on earth, that the life of the spirit may prevail.