Word: lipchitz
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Three times in his 62 years Jacques Lipchitz has had to rise from the ashes of disaster to pursue his career as a sculptor. When he was a youthful art student in Paris, his father, a Lithuanian contractor, lost all his money, told Jacques to give up and come home; Lipchitz got a part-time job, kept on with his studies. In 1941 the Nazis forced Lipchitz to flee from France; with only $20 to his name and some of his drawings, the sculptor had to begin all over again in the U.S. In 1952, just as he had recovered...
Last week the results of all this phoenixlike determination-and more than 40 years of dedicated sculpting-were on view at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, which was staging the biggest Lipchitz retrospective show ever held in the U.S. The 98 pieces of sculpture and 15 drawings covered the entire work span of Lipchitz' life-from 1911, when he modeled conservative academic pieces, through his first experiments with cubism, and down to his current, free-swinging style...
...most of Lipchitz' work, there is evidence of a force and virility possessed by few contemporary sculptors, but, except for his earliest sculpture, there is very little conventional beauty in anything Lipchitz has done. Prometheus Strangling the Vulture II is typically powerful, but it is also unnecessarily cluttered. Mother and Child II shows a baby-burdened mother with stubby, handless arms outstretched in supplication for peace; there is a belly-blow force in the conception of the statue, but the emotion it produces is something like that evoked by the sight of open sores on a crippled, shuffling beggar...
...Ritchie finds his back-to-the-body trend. There are two recent statues by old Cubist Pablo Picasso. One is a touching figure of a Shepherd Holding a Lamb, the other a small Owl sitting wise and silent. There are some late sculpture by such militant moderns as Jacques Lipchitz and Henri Laurens, and they too seem to be getting more natural-even Henry Moore's recent lumps and holes look more like people. Finally, Ritchie shows statues by two Italians who have worked from the beginning in the tradition of Rodin: Marino Marini, who does spraddle-legged horses...
...Temple Medal (no cash) for the best oil, awarded in the past to such masters as Whistler, Winslow Homer and George Bellows, went to Louis Guglielmi of Manhattan for his New York 21, an expert semi-abstraction. Lithuanian-born Sculptor Jacques Lipchitz admitted that he was bucked up when his Prometheus Strangling the Vulture, a powerful, aggressively ugly study in plaster, won the top sculpture award. A few days after he sent Prometheus off to Philadelphia for the academy show, fire destroyed his Manhattan studio, along with ten years of work in models, sketches and drawings. "Part of my life...