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.