Baigneuse assise

In the winter of 1916 Lipchitz signed a contract with Léonce Rosenberg, the brother of the dealer Paul Rosenberg and a former specialist in antiquities who had acquired an interest in cubism and had recently founded his Galerie de l'Effort Moderne. He sought to represent those artists who were formerly affiliated with the dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who, as a German national, was forced to leave France at outbreak of the First World War and was then living in exile in Switzerland. Rosenberg arranged to pay Lipchitz three hundred francs a month and cover his expenses, in exchange for his output of sculptures. While Lipchitz remained in debt, he now had some measure of financial security for the first time in his life. He could now afford to work in stone, and in 1917 he began to cast in bronze as well. Now expressing himself in absolutely durable and permanent materials, Lipchitz undertook an important series of seated and standing figures, concentrating on the theme of the bather.

The earliest figures, such as the present lot, are seated, and have a powerful and static aspect which Lipchitz associated with Egyptian art. In addition to drawing on a formal vocabulary pioneered by the cubist painters Picasso, Braque, and Léger, Lipchitz now drew his inspiration from a wider range of sources. Lipchitz wrote,

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 [the present sculpture] 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 (in My Life in Sculpture, New York, 1972, p. 49).