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拍品专文
In 1919-1920, at the height of his mastery of the Cubist idiom, Jacques Lipchitz undertook an important series of sculptures that depict street musicians, Pierrots and Harlequins, with their instruments: guitars, mandolins, accordions, and clarinets. Although this choice of subject matter developed in part from Lipchitz's interest in Jean-Antoine Watteau and other 18th-century French painters, it also reflects the popularity that the world of the commedia dell'arte enjoyed at this time among the Parisian avant-garde. Both during and after the First World War, artists such as Jean Metzinger, André Derain, Gino Severini, and Lipchitz's close friend Juan Gris exploited the theme for its patriotic associations with Latin (versus Germanic) culture. In the hands of Pablo Picasso, characters from the commedia could embody either the alienated melancholy of the 1915 Arlequin or the artistic camaraderie of the 1921 Trois musiciens, both seminal works of Synthetic Cubism (Zervos, vol. 2, no. 555, and vol. 4, no. 331; both in The Museum of Modern Art, New York).
The sequence of musicians also provided Lipchitz with a valuable opportunity to test new formal ideas. He would later recall in his memoirs, "This was a transitional period in which I was playing variations on a number of familiar themes, more or less conscious that I needed to find a new direction, a new stimulus... The musical instruments that I used...were part of my basic vocabulary. Like the cubist painters, I collected musical instruments and decorated my studio with them. We used these objects, which were familiar parts of our everyday lives, as a kind of reaction against the noble and exalted subjects of the academicians. They were, in effect, truly neutral subjects that we could control and in terms of which we could study abstract relations" (My Life in Sculpture, New York, 1972, pp. 54-58).
Although Lipchitz had been recognized as a leading proponent of Cubism since 1916, he enjoyed a conspicuous boost in his reputation when he signed a contract with Léonce Rosenberg. In early 1920, his inaugural one-man show at Rosenberg's Galerie de l'Effort Moderne attracted the attention of the influential writer Maurice Raynal, who published the first monograph on Lipchitz's work shortly thereafter. Lipchitz had also begun to frequent the homes of the leading beau-monde figures of the day, including Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau and Coco Chanel, all of whom commissioned portrait busts from him around this time.
Since the war’s end, there had also been much talk about a return to nature, to the classic, to Ingres. Lipchitz continued in a cubist idiom, but now with a much freer use of curved lines and less emphasis upon angles and flat places. In Homme à la guitare the shape of the mandolin is interchangeable with the form of the standing figure. The sculpture, essentially solid, opens at its base, creating a hollow space behind the legs of the figure which emphasizes its three-dimensionality. The curvilinear volumes in the body reflect a new direction in Lipchitz’s work, while the geometric shapes of the nose, the head, and the guitar handle are reminders of the intersecting planes of his earlier Cubist sculptures. There is an impression of more vigorous movement around the figure as powerfully articulated sections of light and shade keep our gaze rotating through its forms. It also has a new sense of being firmly rooted through its central axis, this and the sheer bulk of its parts giving it a formidably totemic quality.
The sequence of musicians also provided Lipchitz with a valuable opportunity to test new formal ideas. He would later recall in his memoirs, "This was a transitional period in which I was playing variations on a number of familiar themes, more or less conscious that I needed to find a new direction, a new stimulus... The musical instruments that I used...were part of my basic vocabulary. Like the cubist painters, I collected musical instruments and decorated my studio with them. We used these objects, which were familiar parts of our everyday lives, as a kind of reaction against the noble and exalted subjects of the academicians. They were, in effect, truly neutral subjects that we could control and in terms of which we could study abstract relations" (My Life in Sculpture, New York, 1972, pp. 54-58).
Although Lipchitz had been recognized as a leading proponent of Cubism since 1916, he enjoyed a conspicuous boost in his reputation when he signed a contract with Léonce Rosenberg. In early 1920, his inaugural one-man show at Rosenberg's Galerie de l'Effort Moderne attracted the attention of the influential writer Maurice Raynal, who published the first monograph on Lipchitz's work shortly thereafter. Lipchitz had also begun to frequent the homes of the leading beau-monde figures of the day, including Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau and Coco Chanel, all of whom commissioned portrait busts from him around this time.
Since the war’s end, there had also been much talk about a return to nature, to the classic, to Ingres. Lipchitz continued in a cubist idiom, but now with a much freer use of curved lines and less emphasis upon angles and flat places. In Homme à la guitare the shape of the mandolin is interchangeable with the form of the standing figure. The sculpture, essentially solid, opens at its base, creating a hollow space behind the legs of the figure which emphasizes its three-dimensionality. The curvilinear volumes in the body reflect a new direction in Lipchitz’s work, while the geometric shapes of the nose, the head, and the guitar handle are reminders of the intersecting planes of his earlier Cubist sculptures. There is an impression of more vigorous movement around the figure as powerfully articulated sections of light and shade keep our gaze rotating through its forms. It also has a new sense of being firmly rooted through its central axis, this and the sheer bulk of its parts giving it a formidably totemic quality.