During the winter of 1916, Lipchitz agreed to a contract with Léonce Rosenberg, who had hitherto dealt in ancient art, and during World War I moved to fill the void left by David Henry Kahnweiler when the latter was declared an enemy alien by the French government. For the first time in his career Lipchitz did not have to worry about money, and because of a nagging case of bursitis, he employed a stone carver to assist him in transforming his conceptions from clay to stone.
This group of works represents the period of greatest concentra-
tion and personal discovery in Lipchitz's development of Cubist sculpture. In the years of his friendship with Gris, between 1916 and 1919, Lipchitz's work reflects a different approach to Cubist sculpture. That is to say, he made his subjects -- bathers, sailors, a pierrot playing a clarinet, men playing guitars -- less abstract and more legible (as Gris was doing), while emphasizing their mass. In these figures, Lipchitz used chunky, geometricized forms, which he articulated, in order to evoke volume, with some analytical faceting, a counter-lay of protruding and receding planes, and some curves. (D. Cooper, op. cit., pp. 250 and 252)