Lipchitz and the Avant-Garde: From Paris to New York
edited by Joseph Helferstein and Jordana Mendelson.
Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2001.
Distributed by the University of Washington Press. 152 pp., 124 illus.
Paperbound, $35.00. ISBN 0-295-98187-3.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
2022 X Avenue, Dysart, Iowa
USA.
ballast@netins.net
Majorca, the largest of the Balearic Islands, is off the eastern coast
of Spain. In 1838, it was the winter getaway of the composer Frederic
Chopin and the writer George Sand (the pen name of Amandine Dupin).
Seventy-five years later, Gertrude Stein was vacationing there when
she ran into William Cook, the Iowa-born painter who later taught her
how to drive. Through Stein, Cook became friends with Lithuanian sculptor
Jacques Lipchitz (pronounced Leap-sheets), who, with Diego Rivera, toured
Majorca the following year. In 1923, Lipchitz commissioned the architect
Le Corbusier to design an innovative villa on the outskirts of Paris,
the results of which persuaded Cook and Steins brother Michael
to do the same. These three now-famous houses are early examples of
Cubism applied to architecture, while Lipchitz is commonly said to have
been one of the first to apply Cubism to sculpture. This book contains
a photograph of the Lipchitz villa, but says almost nothing about it.
Instead, it features essays on various other aspects of the sculptors
life and work, among them his connections with Juan Gris, Alfred Barnes,
Spanish bullfighting, his interest in the work of Gericault, the evolution
of his artistic style, his emigration to New York in 1941, and so on.
While these and other subjects are of interest, the best account of
Lipchitzs life continues to be his autobiography, My Life in Sculpture
(1972), which, in keeping with his colorful personality, is far more
amusing and gossipy than this humorless exhibition catalog. It was made
for the public unveiling at the University of Illinois Krannert
Art Museum in 2001-02 of 15 sculptural maquettes, a set of prints, and
a drawing by Lipchitz, given by the Lipchitz Foundation. As the title
indicates, it also included various works by his avant-garde friends
and contemporaries, among them Rivera, Gris, Amedeo Modigliani and Pablo
Picasso.
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 18, No.
2, Winter 2002-03.)