Art: Pathfinder Sculptor

Standing isolated in the bleak industrial flats of Long Island City, across Bowery Bay from La Guardia Airport, is the Modern Art Foundry. Inside, the walls glow as roaring furnaces melt ingots of bronze, and the air is scented with the churchlike smell of resin and wax dripping from the handmade kilns. There last week stood the man whom many U.S. and European critics rank as one of the top two or three sculptors in the world: stocky, blue-eyed Jacques Lipchitz, 67.

For Sculptor Lipchitz, the dust, bedlam and smoke of a foundry are the breath of life—coming after the long, arduous hours of clay modeling in his studio a few miles away on the Hudson. “How I love it,” he exclaims. “A foundry is out of time, out of space; it is 7,000 years ago and now.” To the foundry workers, Lipchitz is a hard taskmaster. “What interests me now is to find new paths,” he says, and hands them yet another casting problem. But it is just this drive that leads Britain’s Sir Herbert Read (who ranks Lipchitz with such sculptors as Henry Moore, Jean Arp, Brancusi and Giacometti) to say: “From the early days of cubism to the present, Lipchitz has been in the forefront. He has extended the whole conception and technique of bronze casting.”

Just how daring Lipchitz is in breaking new trails, European gallerygoers are now excitedly discovering. On tour is Lipchitz’ biggest retrospective show, 116 sculptures covering nearly half a century’s work. “One has to go back to Rodin and beyond that to Michelangelo to be able to match this experience,” raved one Rotterdam critic. Dutch Sculptor Leo Braat said, “This work is anything but a play of forms; it is an act of faith, a revelation.”. In Basel, Switzerland, where the exhibition opened last month, critics greeted Lipchitz as “the greatest cubist among sculptors.” Ahead for the show lie Munich, Dortmund, Brussels, Rome, Paris, London.

Kid Cubist. When, at 18, Lipchitz first arrived in Paris from his birthplace in Lithuania, his taste was for the classic Greeks. His early works won the praise of the aging Rodin. Then Mexican Painter Diego Rivera took him to Montmartre to meet Picasso. Soon Lipchitz was the kid cubist, friend of Painter Juan Gris and Patron Gertrude Stein, and flat broke.

Down and out in Paris, Lipchitz worked hard at producing the sculptures that are now his most widely esteemed work. Salvation came one day when the rent was nine months’ overdue. Merion, Pa. Modern Art Collector Dr. Albert Barnes (inventor of Argyrol) arrived at Lipchitz’ studio, bought eight stone carvings, and commissioned five more.

Back from the Crystal. Lipchitz soon found he could no more stay in pure cubism than could Picasso. His earlier experiment with simplifying forms to pure abstractions had turned into a dead end, a kind of slow death by crystallization. Lipchitz decided to reverse the process, “from a crystal build a man, a woman, a child.” Lipchitz’ sculpture began to take strange new and powerful forms. His first attempts to find a new abstract plastic language culminated in Figure (see opposite page). Then he went back to Greek mythology and Old Testament themes for inspiration, gave them a monumental treatment. The result of this trend was his largest work, a 33-ft.-tall Prometheus Strangling the Vulture, made for the Paris International Exhibition of 1937.

With the fall of France, Lipchitz abandoned his Le Corbusier-designed studio in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-sur-Seine, set up his first studio on Manhattan’s Washington Square. To embody his anguish over the European blood bath, he created his most grotesque and powerful sculpture, Mother and Child, showing a legless woman, arms raised, with a child clutching her neck. A trip back to Paris after the war convinced Lipchitz that he had become more American than French, but he returned with one of his most important commissions.

“But I Am a Jew.” France’s famed modern art patron, Father Marie-Alain Couturier, asked Lipchitz to make a Virgin for the church at Assy (TIME, June 20, 1949). Lipchitz’ first reaction: “But don’t you know I am a Jew?” Answered Father Couturier, a Dominican monk: “If it doesn’t disturb you, it doesn’t disturb me.” When he had finished the work,* Lipchitz signed it with his name and fingerprint, then added his dedication using his given name: “Jacob Lipchitz, Jew, faithful to the religion of his ancestors, has made this Virgin for the better understanding of men on earth so that the spirit may prevail.”

With major commissions and a new Paul Welier life beginning, Lipchitz received a body blow that would have stopped lesser men. On the night of Jan. 5, 1952, his studio with most of his master casts, his own collection of modern French paintings and primitive sculpture, went up in flames. “Part of my life is gone,” he said. “I shall simply have to start all over again.” He began building up his statues from memory, ordered a brand-new studio in Hastings-on-Hudson, overlooking the Palisades.

Now happily settled down with his second wife, Yulla, and nine-year-old daughter Lolya Rachael, Lipchitz spends long hours creating sculptures that, judging from past experience, will not win widespread praise until a decade from now.

Sample, for Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park: a monumental (12 ft. tall, 8 tons) sculpture of “a farseeing pioneer guided by an eagle,” called Spirit of Enterprise. Lipchitz guesses that it will be greeted as rough, powerful, original—but not pretty.

“Everyone knows that I know what is beautiful and what is harmonious,” he explains. “But I have come to an age where I don’t care about it. I haven’t time to perfect things I’m finding. I’m making sacrifices in order to enlarge the horizon which is sculpture.”

-A second casting is now on its way to the Scottish Abbey on Iona; a third will go to a shrine in New Harmony, Ind., designed by Architect Philip Johnson.