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Lot Essay
As he recounted in My Life in Sculpture, Lipchitz experienced an emotional and creative crisis during the summer of 1915. By this time his assimilation of the cubist form was complete, and his sculpture displayed a rigorously architectural interpretation of synthetic cubist syntax, emphasizing extreme verticality and layered rectangular planes. The resultant figures almost had the appearance of mechanical devices, and their elongated, surging forms reminded some critics of Gothic cathedrals. "In certain pieces I carried my findings all the way to abstraction, but most of these abstract works I have destroyed since I felt that when I had lost the sense of the subject, of its humanity, I had gone too far" (J. Lipchitz and H.H. Arnason, My Life in Sculpture, New York, 1972, p. 26).
The sculptor's own material circumstances also improved at this time. Léonce Rosenberg, hitherto a dealer in antiquities, stepped into the vacuum left when cubist dealer Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, a German citizen, was forced to leave France for the duration of the First World War. Rosenberg made sales arrangements with as many of the cubist artists as he could for his own Galerie de l'Effort Moderne. Lipchitz signed a contract with Rosenberg in the winter of 1916. The sculptor received 300 francs each month and had his expenses covered; in turn he gave Rosenberg everything he made. Although Lipchitz was still in debt, his day-to-day financial worries were over.
The present work marks the fruition of these developments, and initiates the great series of mature cubist figures which preoccupied Lipchitz until the end of the decade. As Lipchitz wrote of a similiar sculpture:
The bathers, observed from different angles, are even reminiscent of traditional portraits of bathers as seen in the history of sculpture from ancient times through the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Bather [Wilkinson 64] is conceived as a bather stepping down to a pool or a river, holding her drapery as her head turns back over her shoulder. This is a pose suggestive of certain eighteenth-century bathers by Falconet and other sculptors of the time. (Ibid., p. 49)
The sculptor's own material circumstances also improved at this time. Léonce Rosenberg, hitherto a dealer in antiquities, stepped into the vacuum left when cubist dealer Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, a German citizen, was forced to leave France for the duration of the First World War. Rosenberg made sales arrangements with as many of the cubist artists as he could for his own Galerie de l'Effort Moderne. Lipchitz signed a contract with Rosenberg in the winter of 1916. The sculptor received 300 francs each month and had his expenses covered; in turn he gave Rosenberg everything he made. Although Lipchitz was still in debt, his day-to-day financial worries were over.
The present work marks the fruition of these developments, and initiates the great series of mature cubist figures which preoccupied Lipchitz until the end of the decade. As Lipchitz wrote of a similiar sculpture:
The bathers, observed from different angles, are even reminiscent of traditional portraits of bathers as seen in the history of sculpture from ancient times through the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Bather [Wilkinson 64] is conceived as a bather stepping down to a pool or a river, holding her drapery as her head turns back over her shoulder. This is a pose suggestive of certain eighteenth-century bathers by Falconet and other sculptors of the time. (Ibid., p. 49)