Sculptor. Born and raised in Druskininkai, Lithuania, son of a Jewish building contractor. He went to Paris in 1909, where he studied at the École des Beaux Arts and the Académie Julian. In contact with Picasso and Juan Gris, Lipchitz’s sculpture evolved, after 1913, from an ornamental and playful style anticipating art deco, towards cubism. In 1916 he experimented with figures constructed from flat boards, and arrived at an extreme of architectonic abstraction in such works as Standing Personage (limestone, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York). From this point on his cubism became more representational and pictorial. In 1925, Lipchitz worked on the series of open-work metal sculptures, which he described as his Transparents, and which influenced Picasso and Gonzales. From the late 1920s he became increasingly preoccupied with biblical and mythological themes, and stylistically his work took on a baroque and expressionistic character. A massive group of Prometheus and the Vulture, for the Science Pavilion of the 1937 Paris International Exhibition, frankly expressed his opposition to totalitarianism. Lipchitz fled to Toulouse when Paris was occupied by the Germans, and in 1941 he emigrated to America. In the post-war period he continued to experiment on a small scale, with mixed-media assemblages and with spontaneous modelling in wax. At the same time, he was increasingly busy with such large public commissions as the figure of The Virgin for the church of Notre Dame de Liesse at Assy (1947-55), and The Spirit of Enterprise (1951-4) for Fairmount Park, Philadelphia. From 1963, he began to spend his summers in Pietrasanta in Italy, where his bronzes were cast by the Tommasi foundry. His Bellerephon Taming Pegasus at Broadgate, City of London (1964–66), was cast by Tommasi, as, possibly, was the portrait bust on his Memorial to John F. Kennedy, unveiled on a site overlooking Marylebone Road, in front of the International Students House, in 1965, but relocated within the lobby of the building in 2019, following its vandalising in 2017. Lipchitz came to look on Israel as his spiritual home, and was buried there.
Bibliography: Dictionary of Art (ed. J.S. Turner), London and New York (34 vols; distrib. by Macmillan), 1996; J. Lipchitz (with H.H. Arnason), My Life in Sculpture, London, 1972; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London, Liverpool, 2003, pp. 49–51; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 154–55; A.G. Wilkinson, The Sculpture of Jacques Lipchitz (2 vols), London, 2000.
Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011; updated, Terry Cavanagh, November 2024