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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 Stein‚s 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 sculptor‚s 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 Lipchitz‚s 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.)


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