Lipchitz and the Avant-Garde: From Paris to New York

Utilizing works from museums across North America, Lipchitz and the Avant-Garde traces the path of the pioneering sculptor Jacques Lipchitz from his birthplace in Lithuania to his early work in Paris before World War I, where he was associated with the Parisian avant-garde and applied cubist principles to three-dimensional artwork. By breaking the volume and using different planes, Lipchitz created works that were a new force in the history of sculpture. His innovation of the transparents style in sculpture during the late 1920s was groundbreaking and was copied by many, including Picasso. At the outbreak of World War II the Jewish artist fled to New York, where he worked on increasingly monumental sculptures until his death in 1973. This substantive catalog contains new essays by internationally renowned scholars and translated articles by contemporaries Ramón Gómez de la Serna and Joaquin Torres-García that have not appeared in English before.