As one of the first artists to explore the painterly achievements of Cubism in three-dimensional works, Jacques Lipchitz is one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century. Born Chaim Jacob Lipschitz in Lithuania in 1891, he moved to Paris in 1909 after studying engineering to devote himself to art at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the Académie Julian and Académie Colarossi. In the 1910s, Lipchitz lived in Montparnasse in the neighbourhood of Constantin Brâncu?i and, through Diego Rivera, met Picasso and other Cubist painters who had a significant influence on his work. He was also friends with artists such as Chaim Soutine and Amedeo Modigliani. In this avant-garde circle, Lipchitz created his first cubist sculptures in 1913/1914 (initially in frontal view), which he refined technically in the following years and brought to mastery. From 1925 onwards, Lipchitz further developed his formal language in his so-called 'transparent' sculptures and freed himself from his cubist formal vocabulary: he detached himself from the solid blocks and created more airy and organic-looking sculptures using the lost wax technique.
In 1937, Lipchitz received the gold medal for his "Prometheus" at the Paris World Exhibition. Due to the occupation of the French capital by the German National Socialists, Lipchitz fled first to Toulouse and in 1941 to the USA, where he settled in New York and finally in Hastings-on-Hudson. After participating in the Third Sculpture International Exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1949), his work was honoured in retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland (1954). A major travelling exhibition followed in 1958 including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, the Tate Gallery, London, and other renowned institutions. Participations in the Venice Biennale (1952) and the documenta in Kassel (1959 and 1964), as well as major public commissions and numerous other exhibitions, such as a major show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1972), New York, emphasise the significance of the French-American sculptor.
