Jacques Lipchitz built sculpture the way a good layout is built: from a small set of flat units, stacked, interlocked and turned until they read as a whole. In his Cubist works of the 1910s a seated figure becomes a column of slabs and wedges; in the “transparents” of the mid-1920s the slabs open into ribbons with air running through them; and in the later bronzes the forms swell into knotted, writhing masses. For designers, the value is in watching one artist push the same vocabulary of plane, edge and gap in three very different directions.
His works date from the 1910s to 1973, and the Met, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art do not flag any of them as public domain or CC0. This guide therefore describes them in text only; treat his sculpture, drawings and prints as protected and license any reproduction. For historic artworks that are cleared for reuse, browse the MGD museum inspiration collection.
Who was Jacques Lipchitz?
Britannica gives his birth as 22 August 1891 (10 August, Old Style) in Druskininkai, then part of the Russian Empire, and the Met’s collection records give his life as Druskininkai 1891 – Capri 1973. He went to Paris in 1909, the year given by both Sotheby’s artist biography and the École de Paris reference site, and his first Cubist sculptures date from around 1913–15.
After the German invasion of France in 1940 he and his wife fled south to Toulouse, and in 1941 they reached New York, according to Encyclopedia.com and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s records. He stayed in the United States, later working at Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, and died on Capri in 1973. Several biographies, including EBSCO’s, record that he was buried in Jerusalem.
A dated career outline
- 1912, Bowl of Fruit. A charcoal-and-graphite still life on paper, 31.1 × 47.6 cm, in the Met: an early record of him thinking in flat, faceted shapes.
- 1915, Detachable Figure (Dancer). An ebony and oak figure 98.1 cm tall in the Cleveland Museum of Art, one of a series of jointed wood pieces that look as if their parts could be taken apart and rearranged.
- 1917, Seated Figure. A carved limestone figure 87 cm tall in the Art Institute of Chicago. The Met’s marble Seated Bather, carved in 1970–72 from a plaster of 1917, shows how long he kept returning to these designs.
- 1919, Pierrot with Clarinet and The Reader. The first is a painted, shellac-coated plaster and the second a bronze, both in Chicago.
- 1922–23, Barnes Foundation reliefs. Albert C. Barnes commissioned relief sculptures for the façade of his building in Merion, Pennsylvania. Marlborough’s Lipchitz catalogue and Crystal Bridges date the commission to 1922; the Philadelphia Museum of Art refers to it as 1923.
- 1925–26, Seated Man (Meditation) and Study for Ploumanach. Two small bronzes in the Met, from the years he began the open works he called transparents.
- 1926–30, Figure. A bronze 216.6 cm tall, cast in 1937, in the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Norton Simon Museum dates its own cast to 1926–30 as well.
- 1929–30, Mother and Child. A bronze group about 130 cm high in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Chicago also holds a plaster Andirons of 1929, a reminder that he designed functional objects too.
- 1937, Prometheus. A monumental plaster of Prometheus strangling the vulture was shown at the 1937 Paris International Exposition, as Tate’s archive and Crystal Bridges both record. The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s later bronze is dated “begun 1943, cast 1952–1953” in the museum’s own record.
- 1943–47, prints. Theseus and the Minotaur (1943–44, Met), Road of Exile (1944) and Dancer and Rooster (1947), both etching and aquatint in Cleveland.
- 1971, Tree of Life lithographs. A colour lithograph series printed at Il Bisonte in Florence, in the Art Institute of Chicago.
- 1966–77, Bellerophon Taming Pegasus. Columbia Law School says the bronze was commissioned in 1966 and dedicated on 28 November 1977, four years after his death, above the entrance of what is now Jerome Greene Hall.
What to look at in a Jacques Lipchitz sculpture
Stacked planes. In the Cubist pieces of 1915–19 the figure is built from flat slabs set at angles. Cleveland describes the detachable wood figures as made from solid blocks that simulate the geometry of his painter friends’ canvases. Look at how few distinct shapes there are, and how each one repeats with small variations: a wedge for a shoulder returns as a wedge for a knee.
A strong vertical spine. Almost every early figure is organised around a central axis, with planes stepping out to either side. That spine keeps a busy composition readable, in the same way a strong baseline or column grid keeps a dense page in order.
Void as shape. In the transparents, the gaps become the drawing. Sotheby’s and Marlborough both describe these bronzes as cast from small, fragile constructions of cardboard and wax, and the result keeps that quality of bent strips enclosing air. MoMA’s towering Figure carries the idea to full scale: a stack of loops and a hollow, staring face, more outline than mass.
Rhythm over anatomy. From the late 1920s his figures swell into curving, interlocked masses, as in Cleveland’s Mother and Child and Chicago’s Rape of Europa II (1938). The anatomy is loose, but the rhythm of convex forms pressing against each other is tightly controlled.
Technique: carving, modelling and casting
Lipchitz worked across materials. The early Seated Figure in Chicago is carved stone; the detachable figures are joined hardwoods; much of his later work began as modelled plaster or wax before being cast in bronze. Chicago’s group of plasters, given by the Jacques and Yulla Lipchitz Foundation, includes pieces painted and coated with shellac, which shows the plaster stage could be treated as a finished object in its own right.
The transparents depended on lost-wax casting: a delicate wax-and-cardboard model was turned into metal, preserving its thin, open forms. One gallery source notes that he cast these works rather than leaving them as cardboard-and-wire constructions. Late in life, works such as the Met’s 1970–72 marble Seated Bather were made from earlier plasters, so museum labels often give two dates, one for the design and one for the object.
He was also a printmaker. The etchings of the 1940s, such as Theseus in Chicago and Road of Exile in Cleveland, translate the swirling bronzes into tangled line and aquatint tone. The late Tree of Life lithographs show him working in colour on paper.
Jacques Lipchitz among the Paris modernists
Lipchitz arrived in Paris at the moment Cubism was forming, and his early sculpture sits close to the paintings of Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris. Amedeo Modigliani painted him with his wife Berthe in 1916, a double portrait now in the Art Institute of Chicago. Compare his work with that of Alexander Archipenko, who also opened holes in the figure, and with the welded iron of Julio González, who drew in space with metal rods. Lipchitz’s voids are cast and rounded; González’s are linear and jointed.
How designers can borrow from Jacques Lipchitz
- Limit your units. Build an illustration, icon set or pattern from three or four basic shapes, then vary their angle and scale. Lipchitz’s Cubist figures show how much variety a tiny vocabulary can produce.
- Find the spine first. Before adding detail, fix the main axis of a composition. Hang every element off it, as his seated figures hang their planes off a central column.
- Draw the counters. In logos and lettering, treat the enclosed spaces as deliberately as the strokes. The transparents prove that a form can be mostly air and still feel solid.
- Prototype in cheap materials. His cardboard-and-wax models were quick, disposable studies for permanent bronzes. Paper mock-ups and rough wireframes play the same role in packaging and product work.
Where to see his work
The Met, the Museum of Modern Art and Columbia University in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Barnes Foundation, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Norton Simon Museum, Tate in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris all hold or display his work. See at least one piece in person and walk around it.
Frequently asked questions
Who was Jacques Lipchitz?
Jacques Lipchitz (1891–1973) was a sculptor born in Druskininkai, in present-day Lithuania. He worked in Paris from 1909, became one of the sculptors associated with Cubism, and moved to the United States in 1941, where he worked until his death on Capri in 1973.
What are Lipchitz’s transparents?
They are small, open bronzes he began around 1925, cast from fragile models of cardboard and wax. Their thin ribbons and large openings make empty space part of the sculpture.
Is Jacques Lipchitz’s work public domain?
The Met, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art do not flag any of his works as public domain or CC0. Treat his sculpture, drawings and prints as protected and license them for reproduction.
What can designers learn from Jacques Lipchitz?
How to build a complex form from a few repeated shapes, how to organise a composition around a strong axis, and how to make negative space work as hard as the solid parts.
