Private Collection, United States (acquired circa 1980)
 

“Jacques Lipchitz was twenty-five when he met Juan Gris in 1916, introduced by the dealer Léonce Rosenberg whose contract with Lipchitz that same year gave the sculptor the opportunity to have his clay models realized in stone.  Through Gris, Lipchitz entered a circle of artists, philosophers and poets such as Princet, Reverdy and Apollonaire, Metzinger and Gleizes.  He categorized his discovery of Cubism as ‘a form of emancipation essentially different from artistic movements that had preceded it “ (Jacques Lipchitz and H. H. Arnason, My Life in Sculpture, New York, 1972, p. 40).

In the early 1970’s Lipchitz’s attention turned back to his Cubist works of 1915 to 1920.  He executed a series of eight recorded sculptures in marble which directly relate to his early Cubist works.   These works were carved with the assistance of master carver Gugliemo Antognazzi, from 1970 to 1972 in Northern Italy.  The present work is based on a 1919 stone version in the Barnes Foundation which measures 36 inches high and bears the same title (fig. 1).   Two of the eight marble sculptures carved in the early 1970’s are also in public collections: Baigneuse (The Israel Museum, Jerusalem) and Baigneuse Assise (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

According to Henry Hope, “In the sculpture which followed, Lipchitz began to show his grasp of the Cubist’s analysis and penetration of form.  His figures were represented as if seen from many angles and perspectives, often with a richly broken up surface of deep and shallow facets… yet the subordination of parts to whole, and the over-all effect of agitated movement, conflicting with the sheer, static mass of stone gives these sculptures a quality that is unique in Cubist art.” (Henry Hope, The Sculpture of Jacques Lipchitz, New York, 1954, p. 11)