Clement Greenberg offers here an assessment of the work of a great modern sculptor who has aspired “to continue the great stream of European sculpture from Michelangelo and Bernini to Rodin.” 

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Through earlier and more securely placed as a contemporary master, Jacques Lipchitz has not yet enjoyed a boom as concentrated as those which, since the war, have swelled and somewhat inflated the reputations of Henry Moore and Alberto Giacometti. Nor has he usually received praise as unreserved as that which he now gets from Henry R. Hope in the catalogue¹ for the large retrospective exhibition of his art that is traveling this fall and winter to Minneapolis and Cleveland from a summer showing at the Museum of Modern Art. Yet this show makes very clear the reasons why that praise should be qualified.

Lipchitz is a very great sculptor. Moore hardly deserves to be mentioned in the same breath, and the later, if not earlier, Giacometti comes off badly in any serious comparison. But still—the exhibition states the ambience of greatness, while offering relatively few great individual works; relatively little of the greatness gets precipitated as the unity and completeness of single works. A hundred-odd items, including drawings, etchings, and paintings, were shown at the Museum of Modern Art; and almost everything, from the earliest sculpture—under Bourdelle’s influence, or that of Russian-style Art Nouveau—to the impossibly bathetic “Virgins” done in connection with a recent commission for a baptismal font for a French church, spoke of an enormous capacity. And by capacity I mean much more than promise—were it only that, Lipchitz would be but one among thousands of artists who have failed to develop gifts genuinely theirs, I mean potentiality: the possession of developed gifts as manifested in actual works. Yet these gifts are so seldom realized conclusively that the disproportion between potentiality and realization is too large to be taken as part of the “usual waste” attending ambitious effort in art.

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Like Chagall and the late Soutine, Lipchitz came to Paris and joined the avant-garde in the halcyon years just before 1914. But Paris also meant for him, as it did for the other two artists from Jewish East Europe, a first real look at the museum art of the West, and none of the three ever got over it. Soutine, coming to Paris last, tried from the beginning to reconcile modern with pre-Impressionist painting, but Lipchitz had to wait until the 1920’s before the spell of Cubism wore off enough to let him dare think of a similar reconciliation in sculpture.

The mood of the 20’s in Paris favored such changes of course generally, and at that time Picasso, Matisse, Léger, and Derain likewise retreated towards tradition. But they had been born into tradition, and could take it more or less for granted, whereas the three Jewish artists seemed to feel they had to prove their title to it by an express effort.

Not only has Lipchitz aspired to continue—as Mr. Hope reports him as saying—”the great stream of European sculpture from Michelangelo and Bernini to Rodin,” but he has tried to cast his artistic personality in that “titanic” mold which the past century conceived for culture heroes like Michelangelo, Beethoven, and Rembrandt. More precisely, he has since 1930 sought a contemporary version of the grand, epic style. His conception of it remains somewhat old-fashioned, however, and the attempt itself to achieve it is often made too mechanically, by dint of the exaggeration and distortion of received forms. It is further evidence of Lipchitz’s real greatness that his art has stood up as well as it has under such pedantic ambition.

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The Cubist sculptures and bas-reliefs of Lipchitz’s first period of maturity, from 1914 to 1925, show but few of the faults of his recent work. They seldom fail of unity, even if it is at the price of a kind of constriction due to adherence to a narrow repertory of forms literally translated from the painted Cubism of Picasso and Gris. Particularly successful are the bronze “Bather” and wooden “Dancer” of the year 1915, both pointing towards a new, non-monolithic kind of sculpture that Lipchitz was not to explore further for another ten years; and in a slightly less adventurous direction, the “Standing Personage” and “Standing Half-Length Figure” in stone of 1916, and the “Man with Mandolin” of 1917, also in stone. Lipchitz’s most consistently original and powerful sculpture came, however, between 1925 and 1930, when having abandoned the literal vocabulary of Cubism but still subscribing to its aims and understanding these more profoundly, he was able, paradoxically, to make its “syntax” more intrinsically sculptural by making it more pictorial. Instead of transposing the angled planes of Cubist painting into solid polygonal volumes, he now began to feel them in terms exclusively of surface and line.

The best pieces of this period are small quasi-abstract bronzes, none more than 20 inches high, whose thin, perforated planes and calligraphic straps and ropes of metal spell out the new draughtsman’s language of modernist sculpture even more effectively, perhaps, than do Picasso’s earlier Cubist constructions. Several of these bronzes stand forth among the most rightly felt, completely realized, and original works of our day. Yet they offer very cogent evidence, at the same time, of that arrogant badness of taste or judgment which was to dog Lipchitz from then on. For they cry out for monumental enlargement, and the proof of it is the huge, splendid “Figure” of 1926-30, which is the only large sculpture done in a manner like theirs, and happens to be Lipchitz’s supreme masterpiece. Despite their calligraphic “transparency,” these bronzes are modeled with a certain heaviness that does not quite accord with their scale; their power and intricacy seem cramped, even a little clumsy, and sometimes they begin to look uncomfortably like objets d’art. Such superb pieces as “Chimène” and “Melancholy” (both of 1930) are therefore perhaps best appreciated in photographs, as these give the eye a chance to imagine them as much larger than they are. (Since 1930 Lipchitz has occasionally turned out further “transparent” bronzes; and these, though not quite as inspired as the earlier ones, remain generally superior to his monumental sculpture over the same years.)

Except for the “Figure” finished in 1930, the large works Lipchitz executed between 1925 and that date were done in massive forms that have little affinity with those of the small bronzes. It was as if he reasoned that monumental statuary called for unambiguously monumental forms. Yet his own “Figure” was there to tell him how much more convincingly he, for one, could achieve monumental effects with unmonumental means, and how much righter this seeming disparity between means and end was for him than the kind of literal equality he otherwise observed. As it is, the large sculptures of 1925-30, aside from the “Figure,” are uniformly inferior to the small ones, and in pieces like the “Joie de Vivre” of 1927, the “Mother and Child” of 1929-30, and the “Return of the Prodigal Son” of 1931 (all in bronze), there appear for the first time those bloated volumes, coarse contours, and arbitrary surface textures that have marred most of the successes and confirmed almost all the failures of Lipchitz’s large-scale sculpture ever since.

Cubism had sent Lipchitz towards construction—linear, open sculpture. Now he let his great native talent for modeling take him in other directions, towards the mirage of the grand style. Great modeler though he was and is, Lipchitz now began to model excessively, self-indulgently.

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As Soutine tried to combine the dark and light design of the old masters with the saturated, ungraded color of the post-Impressionists, so Lipchitz has tried in his larger works since 1927 to marry the compact monolith of traditional sculpture, and its chiaroscuro, to the open, linear forms of Cubist and post-Cubist construction. Neither artist would have attempted his synthesis of past and present had he possessed that elementary sophistication which has made other artists, greater as well as lesser ones, automatically recognize that certain things cannot be achieved without sacrificing others. This lack of sophistication explains much of Lipchitz’s bad judgment—his over-consciously grandiose aims, his bombast, his inability at times to get out of the way of his own talent (a diagnosis indicated by the general superiority of his “sketches” in plaster or terra cotta to their overworked, muscle-bound final versions).

How well, on the other hand, he could still do what he addressed himself to straightforwardly is shown by the example of two small bronzes, “Flight” and “Arrival,” executed in 1940 and 1941 respectively. Intended to express the feelings of a Jewish refugee from Hitler, they are largely Rodin in approach, even as to the nervous fingering of their surfaces, yet by their intense clarity and unforced, compact strength, and by the infinite tightness of their silhouetting, they transcend every note of influence, so that we feel them in the end as altogether original. And the same, more or less, can be said of the equally Rodinesque “Bull and Condor” of 1932 and the “Rape of Europa III” of 1938; while in the great “Jacob Wrestling with the Angel” (1932), as in the “Embrace” (1934), Rodin is accepted merely as a premise from which to draw a sinuous bulkiness that is radically and triumphantly different from the flickering forms of the older master. Actually, influences as influences make themselves more obtrusive in Lipchitz’s more deliberately self-assertive works. Some of Picasso’s conceptions and even mannerisms can be recognized in the swollen sausage forms and telescoped anatomy of the “Benediction I” of 1942, and in the bulbous topknots and horsetails of the subject’s hair in both “Hagar” (1948) and the “Mother and Child” (1949)—though these two are among the most successful of his recent larger sculptures.

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Every artist depends on influences, and those who do so least are not always the better ones. It is not the extent of Lipchitz’s dependence on influences, but their range that betrays the difficulties of his art over the last twenty-five years. He has looked for stylistic inspiration, in turn and simultaneously, to Michelangelo, Bernini, and 19th-century neo-Baroque, to African wood-carving, to Pergamum and Chaldea, to Rodin, and to Picasso. For an artist with a firm sense of his own aims it would not be impossible to fuse influences even more diverse, but Lipchitz seems to have been deprived of such a sense since parting from Cubism. His recent course has been haphazard, with no one direction leading into the next; and he has been unable to develop a style, a principle of inner consistency and control. This does not mean that everything he has done since 1930 has failed—far from it: there are the works already mentioned, and there is a masterpiece like the “Song of Songs” of the 1940’s—but it has meant the inability to refine, clarify, and purify his conceptions in going from one work to the next, and the frequent inability to feel or know where he is going within the given work.

One wonders how an artist so uncertain of his felt aims can make such a great impression of strength, in failure as well as success. The impression is not false, though one would suspect it to be the advertising of something not really there—all the more because the strength so often verges on brutality. What the strength—the insistence on demonstrating it—does conceal, I believe, is Lipchitz’s failure to orient himself independently in Western and modern art. He has the superlative, and inalienable, power to knead clay into massive, simple, and energetic form; unlike Picasso, he has never lost his touch. But he has lacked, since Cubism, a sure instinct for the combination and elaboration of forms—and a sense, above all, of what art can and cannot do within the limitations given it by his own temperament and the time in which he lives.

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¹ The Sculpture of Jacques Lipchitz. By Henry R. Hope. Distributed by Simon and Schuster, 95 pp. 100 plates. $3.00.

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