Art: Cubist Sculptor

“In France they either buy or they don’t buy; they don’t pay you compliments. But in America they even say you are the best living sculptor, but they don’t buy anything.”

Baffled little Jacques Lipchitz was famed in pre-war Paris as the world’s greatest cubist sculptor. He fled to the U.S. from Unoccupied France last summer with four of his ponderous bronze statues, no money. This week Manhattan’s Buchholz Gallery presented his first U.S. show in six years. Cast in weird, glowering embryonic gobs whose lumpy lines suggested the random patterns of molten slag, Lipchitz’s bronzes showed writhing subhuman and sub-animal figures. One, called Mother and Child, was a legless, stump-armed female torso, held by the neck in the ponderous grip of a bulgy, anthropoid infant. Each is signed with the thumbprint of Sculptor Lipchitz.

Though many a well-known art collector has paid high prices for his lava-like statues, Sculptor Lipchitz is living from hand to mouth in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, worried because poverty and U.S. war priorities have deprived him of his favorite material: bronze. Lacking bronze, he will try wood for portrait heads and terra cotta for garden sculpture which he wistfully hopes the U.S. will want.