La baigneuse

La Baigneuse is a late Cubist incarnation of one of Lipchitz's favorite tropes: the bather. One of the most successful Cubist sculptors, Lipchitz was endlessly fascinated with maintaining the harmony of abstract forms. This endeavor is beautifully manifest here. In less than eight years, Lipchitz graduated from the stylized naturalism of standing female nudes apparent in his Femmes et Gazelles of 1911-1912, to the richly complex faceting of La Baigneuse. Taming his nonobjective impulses of 1915-1916, a period when his work verged on abstraction, Lipchitz continued to strive to compromise and balance the abstract and figurative elements of his sculptures. The artist accordingly disavowed the severe frontality of his most radical Cubist compositions and reverted to complex, twisting poses that echoed the first developments of contrapposto in Classical figurative sculpture. Here physicality is articulated in the spiraling accumulation of angled and arching planes, meeting, covering and emerging from each other. Fixed referentially by feet set slightly askance and a circle with one eye as a head, La Baigneuse realizes the translation of symbol into subject, geometry into body, once considered inconceivable in three dimensions.