The works of Jacques Lipchitz have been analysed on an international level by major art scholars. They are present in almost all the museums of the world, from the Metropolitan in New York to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Tate in London and the Museum of Rotterdam, and in public spaces in major cities such as Philadelphia, Rome and Paris. Lipchitz is an essential figure of the Cubist movement and 20th century avant-garde. This great artist, who had to emigrate from Lithuania to France and from there to the United States, always carried his ideas and his talent with him. His oeuvre speaks not only of exile, but also of life’s misfortunes (in the mid-1950s his New York studio was destroyed by fire) and of man’s ability to pick himself up and respond, with references to both Greek mythology and the Old Testament.
Along with Amedeo Modigliani and Juan Gris, Lipchitz was one of the key figures in the birth and development of the new artistic language of Paris of the first two decades of the twentieth century. Sharing concerns and plans with Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, he was, along with Henri Laurens, amongst those who formulated the basis of Cubist vocabulary in sculpture. Cubism was a door that introduced him not so much to a style, but more completely to a philosophy: looking at space, to then be able to shape it in one’s own way.
His artistic production then moved towards a representation that mixed biblical and mythological themes with a social message, at the same time developing a very personal vocabulary of interaction of forms, which constitutes his style. A representation which is not immediate, but is understood by admiring the works while moving around them: it is not as direct as it seems at first glance, but reveals itself slowly through looking, creating a formal movement with the sculpted bodies. The feeling of movement produced by the interpenetration of shapes and sizes, the lines of lightness and of weight and the types of schematic narration and monumental scale, both in sculptures and in drawings, speak to us of the strength of human action and of the fight for a better, more sincere world.