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Lot Essay
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 in this group are seated, such as Baigneuse assise (Wilkinson, no. 59); these have a powerful and static aspect which Lipchitz associated with Egyptian art. In the subsequent standing figures, such as the present sculpture, Lipchitz introduced a sense of dynamism and movement. He later recounted:
In the next three pieces, two bathers [W. 61 and the present sculpture] and a singer with guitar [W. 66], all made in 1917, I am consolidating some of the ideas involved in this new phase. In all three there is the sense of twisting movement, of the figure spiraling around an axis. There is the massive monumentality I was now seeking... All three are intricate works, highly complex in the manner in which the figures are built up of many different are built up of many different interacting elements, but all still maintaining the rigid control of the block of stone. I was seeking effects that were both rich in their complexity and controlled in their simplicity. Once again I believe that these evoke the living human figure into which the forms were translated, while maintaining the purity of those forms.
(in My Life in Sculpture, New York, 1972, pp. 46 and 49).
In addition to drawing on a formal vocabulary pioneered by the cubist painters Picasso, Braque, and Léger, with whom he maintained in contact through Léonce Rosenberg, Lipchitz now drew his inspiration from a wider range of sources. He 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" (ibid., p. 49).
(fig. 1) Jacques Lipchitz, Baigneuse assise, 1917. Sold, Christie's, New York, 9 May 2001, lot 28. BARCODE 23662025
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 in this group are seated, such as Baigneuse assise (Wilkinson, no. 59); these have a powerful and static aspect which Lipchitz associated with Egyptian art. In the subsequent standing figures, such as the present sculpture, Lipchitz introduced a sense of dynamism and movement. He later recounted:
In the next three pieces, two bathers [W. 61 and the present sculpture] and a singer with guitar [W. 66], all made in 1917, I am consolidating some of the ideas involved in this new phase. In all three there is the sense of twisting movement, of the figure spiraling around an axis. There is the massive monumentality I was now seeking... All three are intricate works, highly complex in the manner in which the figures are built up of many different are built up of many different interacting elements, but all still maintaining the rigid control of the block of stone. I was seeking effects that were both rich in their complexity and controlled in their simplicity. Once again I believe that these evoke the living human figure into which the forms were translated, while maintaining the purity of those forms.
(in My Life in Sculpture, New York, 1972, pp. 46 and 49).
In addition to drawing on a formal vocabulary pioneered by the cubist painters Picasso, Braque, and Léger, with whom he maintained in contact through Léonce Rosenberg, Lipchitz now drew his inspiration from a wider range of sources. He 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" (ibid., p. 49).
(fig. 1) Jacques Lipchitz, Baigneuse assise, 1917. Sold, Christie's, New York, 9 May 2001, lot 28. BARCODE 23662025