Jacques Lipchitz, who was born in 1891 in Lithuania as Chaim Jacob Lipchitz and lived in Paris after 1909, is one of the most important abstract sculptors of the 20th century. Especially his cubist perspective on the human figure, which he approached in a multitude of ways, bears witness to an inimitable understanding of line, area and volume.
Lipchitz was quickly integrated into the Montmartre artist community and was friends with Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Diego Rivera, Amedeo Modigliani and others. He began his first cubist works in 1913 under the influence of Picasso and the sculptor colleague Alexander Archipenko.
Lipchitz travelled with Rivera to Mallorca in 1914. Inspired by the radically new artistic views of Picasso and the stringent geometry of the Spanish landscape, Lipchitz decisively abandoned classically inspired sculpture and naturalist forms of representation and developed a new abstracting and cubist vocabulary for his artistic work. Following his return to Paris in 1915, Lipchitz began to realise these abstract visions, composed of hard-edged, geometrical areas, and to transfer these to his sculptural works. Already in 1916, the barely 25-year-old Lipchitz had found the fully mature, highly cubist language that is reflected in his sculptures by an inimitable equilibrium of figuration and abstraction.
Henry R. Hope wrote about his early achievements on the occasion of the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1954:
"Lipchitz began to show his grasp of the cubists’ 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 the whole, and the overall effect of agitated movement, conflicting with the sheer, static mass of stone gives these sculptures a quality that is unique in cubist art”
Lipchitz conceived of "La Liseuse II" in 1919, and it joins a canon of figurative representations consisting of bathers, harlequins, musicians and readers, like here. In the case of the “reader”, the physicality is articulated in the spiral-shaped accumulation of angled and curved areas, which meet, overlap and separate once more – geometry is transformed into animated, highly complex physicality in three dimensions.
