Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts

Provenance:

The estate of the artist

Exhibited:

Lipchitz: The Cubist Period 1913-1930, Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York, March - April 1968, no. 6, illus.

Jacques Lipchitz – Skulturen und Zeichnungen 1911-1969, National Galerie, Germany, September 18 - November 9, 1970, no. 5, p. 64, illus.

Jacques Lipchitz – Sculptures and Drawings 1911-1971, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel, April 1971, no. 5, illus., traveled to the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, August – September 1971

Jacques Lipchitz – Sculptures and Drawings from the Cubist Epoch, Marlborough Gallery, New York, February 12 - March 12, 1977, no. 6, illus.

Jacques Lipchitz Sculptures and Drawings from the Cubist Epoch, Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., London, October - November 1978, no. 4, illus.

Jacques Lipchitz: A Survey 1911-1973, Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., Tokyo, October 16 - December 7, 1985, p. 15, illus.

Jacques Lipchitz Selected Sculpture, Reliefs & Drawings 1911-72, Marlborough Gallery, New York, November 7 - December 3, 1985, no. 5, illus.

Jacques Lipchitz: The Cubist Period (1913-1930), Marlborough Gallery, New York, October 15 - November 14, 1987, no. 4, p. 14, illus.

Jacques Lipchitz from Sketch to Sculpture, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel, December 10 - February 29, 1992, (plaster cast), illus. no. 2, p. 166

Jacques Lipchitz Esculturas, 1913-1972, Galeria Marlborough, Madrid, March 17 - April 30, 1993, (another cast), no. 2, illus.

Paris in New York: French Jewish Artists in Private Collections, The Jewish Museum, New York, March 5 - June 25, 2000

Recorded:

Wilkinson, Alan G. The Sculpture of Jacques Lipchitz - A Catalogue Raisonné, Volume One, The Paris Years 1910-1940, London and New York: Thames and Hudson, no. 18, illus.

Mendelson, Jordana, et al. Lipchitz and the Avant-Garde, From Paris to New York, Champaign, IL: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, p. 21, illus.

Jacques Lipchitz moved from Vilnius, Lithuania to Paris in October 1909. Encouraged by his mother and his uncle, he was intent on pursuing a career in art. Lipchitz’s move was bold for numerous reasons. As a Jew, leaving Lithuania (then a part of Imperial Russia) was difficult, requiring authorization from the Tsarist government. Lipchitz left the country illegally, against the wishes of his father, who envisioned his son’s future in engineering. He arrived in Paris an artistic naïf, with no formal art training (again due to anti-Semitic government restrictions), exposed only to a severely provincial culture and no knowledge of recent developments in art.

But Lipchitz’ innate talent helped him to learn quickly. He initially studied carving at the École des Beaux-Arts, but he was unfulfilled with his studies there, and left to enroll simultaneously at the Académie Julien for sculpture and at the Académie Collarossi for drawing.

From his first year in Paris, Lipchitz immersed himself completely in the art world, making frequent trips to both the Louvre and the leading contemporary art galleries in the city. He became friends with Diego Rivera in 1913; who subsequently introduced Lipchitz to Pablo Picasso. Over the next five years Lipchitz would become an important figure in the contemporary art world of Paris, counting amongst his friends Juan Gris, Jean Cocteau and Amadeo Modigliani.

Lipchitz was initially unimpressed by Picasso’s Cubist works, especially his sculpture. At the time of their first meeting, Lipchitz’s work retained a great deal of traditional classicism. While Picasso showed his revolutionary Cubist work at the Salon d’Automne in 1913, Lipchitz offered his beautiful, but much more traditional, Woman with Gazelles, sculpted in 1911-12.

In 1914 Lipchitz made an extended trip to Spain with Diego Rivera. The trip had a revolutionary impact on the course of the artist’s career. He was awed by the paintings of Bosch, Goya, Tintoretto and most importantly, El Greco. Spanish Dancer is one of several pivotal works that evolved from the Spanish trip. That trip, and his exposure to the Cubists, resulted in radical changes in Lipchitz’ technique and provided him with a mature working vocabulary that he kept and developed throughout his life.

The influence of El Greco is evident in Spanish Dancer, especially in the elongation of the figure’s torso, neck and head, and the distortions and varying balance of the dancer’s posture. With his works of 1914, Lipchitz abandoned his earlier, sumptuous fluidity for a much more sophisticated compositional technique. But he did not simply adapt the two-dimensional work of the Cubist painters; his methods were unique to his practice; they could not have developed in anything less than three dimensions. And while taking some cues from the Cubist movement, the style remains distinctively Lipchitz’ own.

Spanish Dancer is an accretion of numerous hard-edged, geometric forms, at times adjoined with a rhythmic smoothness, at others combined abruptly and discordantly. For Lipchitz—as well as for sculpture in general—this was a new way of working. The figure is not composed with geometric details affixed after conception, but rather takes shape organically with the intuitive accumulation of forms.

The dancer’s skirt consists of three layers; the first is a series of highly articulated, nearly square pleats. Above is another set of pleats, triangular in shape (the triangle motif is flipped and repeated in the dancer’s fan). Both sets of angular pleats are somewhat softened by Lipchitz’ arrangement of them in a fluid curve which continues fully around the dancer. Above the second set of pleats comes the first discordant joining of elements—the top of the figure’s skirt is a smooth, gently articulated, five-sided mass, at bottom following the line of the skirt below, and at top shifting the balance of the figure to the right. This shift continues with the abrupt segue into the long torso, which swells as it travels from a thin waist to the shoulders. The balance of line continues quite subtly with the gentle surge of the dancer’s left breast, contrapuntal to the dancer’s right hip.

The extended neck and elongated head (the latter aligned with the left foot at bottom) add stature and dignity to the dancer. And Lipchitz’ choice of details is integral to the sculpture and the subject’s character: the strong rectangular sculpting of the dancer’s drape, the geometric articulation of her dress top and headdress. Lipchitz’ semi-Cubist, strongly geometric technique suits his subject matter well: here he has found the perfect means to convey the passionate, determined and regal aura that defines the dancer.