Jacques Lipchitz

Tree of Life

1971

Biography: Jacques Lipchitz was a celebrated Lithuanian-born French sculptor best known for his Cubist works depicting figures, portraits, and still lifes made of bronze or stone. Born Chaim Jacob Lipchitz on August 22, 1891 in Druskinikai, Lithuania to a Litvak (Lithuanian Jewish) family. To please his parents, Lipchitz studied engineering as a young man. But around 1909, he decided to pursue art instead and moved to Paris to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and the Académie Julian in Paris. Lipichitz was a part of the artistic milieu in the famed Montmarte neighborhood of Paris, which included Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, and Juan Gris. He became especially influenced with work by Pablo Picasso, who had pioneered a style of art called Cubism. Cubism was an art movement in which images were fractured and broken into simultaneous fragmented shards of perspective. It was strongly geometric and not based on traditional representational art like portraits or landscapes. At the beginning of his career, Lipchitz created figural sculptures, but by around 1913 he'd shifted direction toward Cubism. At the time, most Cubist artists were painters, but Lipchitz had met Russian sculptor Alexander Archipenko, who was experimenting with Cubist sculpture. However he always retained recognizable figural elements in his work. When faced with the Nazi occupation, he fled to the United States during World War II. Lipchitz went on to have a retrospective exhibition in 1954 which travelled from The Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and finally to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Today, his works are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among others. Lipchitz died on May 16, 1973 in Capri, Italy.