JACOB LIPCHITZ (CHAIM JACOB LIPCHITZ)
Druskieniki (Lithuania), 1891 – Capri,(Italy) 1973   

In 1911 he made small pieces in a classical style in Paris, where he had arrived from Lithuania in 1909 without any artistic training. After discovering the work of Picasso and the Futurists, he made proto-Cubist sculptures along geometrical lines. In 1915 he embarked on a highly creative period that continued until the late twenties. That year he made his first Cubist pieces (Organic Cubism), characterised by a frontal quality and the absence of figuration, which he complemented with figures that he himself described as “demountable”, in line with the constructive experiments of Picasso and Laurens. 
Also dating from 1915 are his Sculptures, small pieces with a monolithic appearance that represent the most abstract segment of his work. In 1918 he worked closely with Juan Gris. He experimented with colour for the first and only time, and simultaneously he invented the concept of negative space in sculpture. In 1920 the Galerie de l’Effort Moderne organised his first solo exhibition, at a point when a tendency towards monumentality was beginning to appear. A progressive integration of the curve and a reduction of constructive density indicated the exhaustion of Cubist formulas, which appeared in the transparentes (transparents) that he began to make in 1925, in which the solutions provided for the contrasts between solid and hollow or light and shade anticipated the solutions provided some years later by Picasso and Julio González.
In 1930 there was a major retrospective of his work at the Galerie de la Renaissance in Paris, which preceded a long period of creative activity with a powerful emotional element, reflected in contents that moved towards themes and motifs of a religious or mythological nature, echoes of the political situation in Europe, which in 1941 led him to emigrate to the United States, where he had become known as a result of the exhibition of his work at the Grumer Gallery in New York in 1935. In America, volume became the central focus of his sculpture, accompanied by a powerful religious feeling, a response to his own personal development. Apart from a few brief periods of experimentation, concentrated at the end of the fifties and connected with the interplay of forms facilitated by modelling, his interest gradually shifted towards public monuments. This was particularly true in the sixties, when his prestige had become firmly consolidated by his participation in the XXVI Biennale di Venezia, where he represented France, having obtained French nationality in 1924, the major exhibition at the MoMA in New York in 1954, repeated in 1972, shortly before his death, and the wide-ranging retrospective that travelled all round Europe in 1958, the year that he obtained American nationality.