Exhibition to Focus on Cubist Sculptor Hailed as Pioneer

U Ideas of General Interest -- September 2001University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Contact: Melissa Mitchell, Arts Editor (217) 333-5491; [email protected]

ARTExhibition to focus on cubist sculptor hailed as pioneer

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Jacques Lipchitz may not be as widely known beyond the borders of the art world as his contemporary, Pablo Picasso, but artists, historians, critics and others always have placed the cubist sculptor on a pedestal of his own.

Now the University of Illinois' Krannert Art Museum is raising his visibility even higher with a new retrospective exhibition, "Lipchitz and the Avant-Garde: From Paris to New York." On view Sept. 21 through Jan. 6, 2002, the show will feature 45 sculptures and 40 drawings and paintings by Lipchitz and his artistic circle of friends, which included Picasso, Juan Gris, Amedeo Modigliani and Diego Rivera. Accompanying the show is a substantive catalog (University of Washington Press) that includes new research by UI art historians Jonathan Fineberg, Jordana Mendelson, David O'Brien and graduate-student contributors who participated in a seminar taught by Mendelson.

The exhibition is built around several significant donations made to the UI museum over the past year by New York's Jacques and Yulla Lipchitz Foundation.

"We now have one of the significant Lipchitz collections in the world," said Krannert director Josef Helfenstein. "We have an important, big drawing from the '20s; 15 sculptures or models for sculptures, among them the first cubist pieces that we have ever had in our collection; and a set of 17 prints." Helfenstein said the show also includes "major loans from major museums" throughout North America.

Lipchitz was born in Lithuania in 1891 and moved to Paris at age 18 to study sculpture. During the period just before the outbreak of World War I, he became involved with the Parisian avant-garde and was among the first to apply cubist principles to the creation of three-dimensional forms. In 1940, the Jewish artist was forced to flee Paris as Hitler's troops moved in to occupy the city. In 1946, he set up permanent residence in the United States, establishing a studio in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. While his European work is distinguished by its focus on subjects ranging from acrobats, harlequins and nudes to still-life objects, Lipchitz turned his attention to mythic and Biblical themes after his arrival in the United States, and the scale of his works became increasingly monumental. He died in 1973.

Helfenstein said it is not an overstatement to refer to Lipchitz as a pioneer. He hailed the artist's invention of the transparents as a new sculptural technique that is "maybe the most important innovation in the history of sculpture." The transparents style, which was copied later by Picasso and others, relies on "breaking the volume and using different planes," Helfenstein said. "The sculpture gets a lyrical quality and a lightness that was unusual and new at the time."

The Krannert exhibition will incorporate an innovative feature of its own. An interactive computer-video program, which draws on 300 hours of film recorded by documentary filmmaker Bruce Bassett, will allow visitors to pose questions that will, in effect, appear to be answered by Lipchitz himself.

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