LIPCHITZ, JACQUES

born Aug. 10 [Aug. 22, New Style], 1891, Druskininkai, Lithuania, Russian Empire died May 26, 1973, Capri, Italy Figure, bronze sculpture by Jacques Lipchitz, 192630. In the Museum of Modern original name Chaim Jacob Lipchitz Russian-born French sculptor whose style was based on the principles of Cubism; he was a pioneer of nonrepresentational sculpture. As a youth Lipchitz studied engineering in Vilnius, Lithuania. When he moved to Paris in 1909, however, he was wonder struck by French avant-garde art, especially Cubism, and began to study sculpture as an avenue to understanding modern art. After a brief term of service (191213) in the Imperial Russian Army, he returned to Paris and soon began to translate the pictorial experiments of Cubist painters into three-dimensional sculpture, as, for example, in Sailor with a Guitar (1914; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y., U.S.). Lipchitz worked exclusively in solid blocks of material or in low-relief still lifes to simulate the polychromatic prisms of Cubist paintings. About 1925, however, Lipchitz began to produce a series of sculptures collectively known as transparents. These open-spaced, curvilinear bronzes, such as Harpist (1928; Mrs. T. Catesby Jones Collection, New York City), greatly influenced the course of sculpture in the following quarter century. Such transparents as The Couple (192829; Rijksmuseum Krller-Mller, Otterlo, The Netherlands) attempt to express emotion instead of merely solving a sculptural problem as had his earlier works. By 1941, when he moved to New York City, Lipchitz had established an international reputation. His new obsession with spiritual questions coincided with a revived desire to give his pieces solidity, notably in such massive works as The Prayer (1943) and Prometheus Strangling the Vulture II (194453; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minn., U.S.). His last large work, Bellerophon Taming Pegasus, was completed in 1966 and was installed at Columbia University, New York City, in 1977.