Jeune fille à la tresse

The idea for Jeune fille à la tresse came to Jacques Lipchitz while on holiday with Diego Rivera and a group of artist friends in Spain during the summer of 1914. The sculptor had met Rivera the previous year through the avant-garde circles of Paris, and the revolutionary Mexican painter had, in turn, introduced Lipchitz to Pablo Picasso. This encounter became a crucial turning-point for Lipchitz, marking the beginning of a fertile friendship with Picasso that would push him to break away from a classical conception of form and space, and begin to explore a new, Cubist-inspired idiom in his sculptures. This bold language was solidified during the artist’s extended sojourn in Spain that summer: ‘We visited Madrid, where I was immediately excited by the revelation of the great paintings in the Prado, particularly those of El Greco and Goya,’ Lipchitz recalled in his memoir. ‘I could see at once the relations of El Greco’s powerful expressive, angular paintings to cubism. In a different but equally forceful manner I reacted to Goya... It was the trip to Spain and all the impressions I gathered there which made me take the final step toward cubism’ (My Life in Sculpture, New York, 1972, p. 18).

The group spent several weeks at Cala de San Vicente, a small fishing village on the island of Majorca, during which time Lipchitz made numerous drawings of the locals, from a sailor serenading a young girl with his guitar, to the hardy fishermen returning from days at sea, and the scores of elegant local women in their traditional costumes, as they gracefully moved through the beautiful, austere landscape. Upon his return to Madrid, Lipchitz set to work on a sequence of plaster sculptures inspired by these sketches, creating a quartet of important transitional works that reflect his growing understanding of Cubism. The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 prevented Lipchitz, Rivera and their companions from returning to France at the end of the summer as they had planned. Instead, they remained in Spain until December, during which time Lipchitz finished the plasters for Marin à la guitare, in which the sailor attempts to woo his beloved, Le Toréador, inspired by a meeting with the renowned bullfighter Joselito, Danseuse Espagnole, depicting an elegant flamenco dancer in full costume, and the present Jeune fille à la tresse, a statuesque vision of a nude female bather.

According to the artist, Jeune fille à la tresse was directly inspired by his memories of the daughter of a local fisherman in Majorca, who ‘always wore her hair in a long braid with a cloth sewn over half of it, perhaps to protect her clothes from the oil she used in her hair’ (ibid., p. 19). While the woman never formally posed for the artist, he recalled the way the architecture of her body was revealed by the flow of her voluminous skirts and the lace blouse she wore. As Lipchitz noted, Jeune fille à la tresse was perhaps the most daring of his Spanish works, presenting a more fragmented depiction of the body that pivots around a contrasting play of full, rounded curves and sharp, angular planes. ‘I was finally building up the figure from its abstract forms,’ he explained, ‘not merely simplifying and geometrizing a realistic figure’ (ibid., p. 18). There is an intriguing dynamism to her pose, as she turns her head to look at something over her shoulder, creating a twisting motion that runs through her torso. This is counterbalanced by the extreme rigidity and verticality of her long braid, which anchors her form, falling in a thin, straight line from her crown to her hip.