Among the foremost 20th-century Cubist sculptors, Jacques Lipchitz produced muscular, expressive works exploring biblical and mythological stories and such universal human themes as fidelity, love, and motherhood. He moved to Paris in 1909, where he began his career and became influenced by the nascent cubist style of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and the aesthetic of the machine. For Lipchitz, Cubism was a form of emancipation from preceding artistic movements, as his angular, vigorously modeled forms attest. Working principally in bronze (his favorite medium) and focused on the figure, he represented such allegories as The Rape of Europa, The Song of Songs, and the embrace of a mother and child, with emotion and sensitivity. “I never deserted the subject, even in my most abstract, cubist sculptures,” he once said, “because I have always believed that there must be communication between the artist and the spectator.”
Lithuanian-French, 1891–1973