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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."