Jacques Lipchitz (1891–1973)

Jacques Lipchitz was born Chaim Jacob Lipschitz to a Jewish family in Druskininkai, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire. His father, a building contractor, sent him to Vilnius (Vilna) to study engineering for three years. In 1909, supported by his mother, he moved to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian. There he became a member of the avant-garde artistic communities of Montmartre and Montparnasse that were shaking up the art world at the time, including his friends Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris. He took the name Jacques and was among the first to create Cubist three-dimensional sculptures, becoming a pioneer of non-representational sculpture. In 1912, he exhibited at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and the Salon d'Automne, with his first solo show held at Léonce Rosenberg's Galerie L'Effort Moderne in 1920.

In 1924-1925, he became a French citizen and married Berthe Kitrosser, a Russian poet. In the 1930s, he abandoned Cubism and became interested in more fluid, arabesque forms. He often took inspiration from his Jewish background as well as allegory and myth. By the time of the German invasion of France in World War II, he had an international reputation. In 1941, Lipchitz and his wife were able to flee France with the assistance of American journalist Varian Fry in Marseille, and travel to the USA. After the war, they returned to France, where Berthe remained when he went again to the USA. He settled in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York and became an American citizen. He remarried to Yulla Halberstadt and had a daughter. In 1954, a Lipchitz retrospective show was mounted that traveled from The Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and The Cleveland Museum of Art. Beginning in 1963, he returned to Europe for several months of each year and worked in Pietrasanta, Italy. He developed a close friendship with fellow sculptor, Fiore de Henriquez. In 1972, he published his autobiography, My Life in Sculpture, co-authored with art historian H. Harvard Arnason.