Baigneuse

Conceived in 1917, Baigneuse is a key example of Jacques Lipchitz’s visionary adaptation of the cubist aesthetic into three dimensions. A pivotal meeting with Pablo Picasso four years prior had inspired Lipchitz to move away from the mode of stylized naturalism he had been working in up to that point, and instead embrace the bold, forward-looking vocabulary of Cubism. In a great rush of enthusiasm, he created an important sequence of sculptures that explored the pictorial forms of the radical art movement, deconstructing and analyzing objects, space and volume through multi-faceted planes and plastic volumes. While his early experiments pared the figure back to a minimalist play of architectonic forms, pushing almost into abstraction, by 1916 Lipchitz felt he had gone too far and sought to reconnect with reality, returning to the human figure once again as his primary subject. At the same time, he signed an exclusive contract with the dealer Léonce Rosenberg, which covered his working expenses and ensured the sculptor a monthly income. This agreement not only granted Lipchitz a new degree of financial security, allowing him to expand his vision and work increasingly in marble and bronze, but also brought a heightened sense of confidence and ambition into his work.
Buoyed by these developments, Lipchitz embarked on a series of bathers, including the present Baigneuse, which looked to the art of the past for inspiration. “The bathers, observed from different angles, are… reminiscent of traditional portraits of bathers as seen in the history of sculpture from ancient times through the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries,” he explained (op. cit., 1972, p. 49). Fusing the dynamic visual language of Cubism with traditional principles and themes, the bathers marked an important shift in Lipchitz’s appreciation of the internal tension of the body. “There is the sense of twisting movement, of the figure spiraling around its axis,” the artist has written. “There is the massive monumentality I was now seeking… They represent some of my first findings in this direction, the moment at which I began to sense the possibilities of sculpture as a truly monumental form of expression… I was seeking effects that were both rich in their complexity and controlled in their simplicity. Once again I believe that these figures evoke the living human figure into which the forms were translated, while maintaining the purity of those forms” (ibid., pp. 46-49).
In this Baigneuse, Lipchitz focuses on the familiar image of a figure “stepping down to a pool or a river, holding her drapery as her head turns back over her shoulder” (ibid., p. 49). Recalling ancient depictions of the bathing Venus, as well as the art of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Antoine Watteau and Etienne Falconet, the work is imbued with a powerful sense of vitality. In a succession of interlocking, geometric planes that meet, overlap and emerge from each other, Lipchitz conveys the curves and contours of the female form. The distribution of her weight evokes a contrapposto stance, conjuring a sinuous line that runs right through her body, leading the eye from her head, through her torso, all the way to her feet. The fragmented surface of deep and shallow facets, meanwhile, enhances the over-all effect of volume and presence within the sculpture. Cast in bronze by the late 1950s, following the artist’s relocation to New York during the Second World War, the present cast was acquired by Nanette and Herbert Rothschild in 1959.